Choreographing Publishing: Editorial Projects and Experiments in Contemporary European Choreographic Practices

The intersection of choreography and publishing lies at the heart of this essay, which reflects on the shift in hermeneutic-methodological orientation prompted by contemporary editorial projects. Publications are analysed as a privileged vantage point for the redefinition of the concept of choreography, as promoted over the past two decades by the observed artists – ranging from protocols aimed at producing dance compositions to strategies detached from corporeal expression, from writing or movement composition to forms of knowledge mediated by action. Beyond the discursive regime that frames these two practices through polarised dichotomies – disappearance and persistence, ephemerality and permanence, body and book, live performance and archive – publications emerge as alternative, horizontal forms of existence. Through expressive modes distinct from the body, they channel, disseminate, and extend the poetics of artists, compelling us to acknowledge new paradigms of the choreographic as a long chain of successive trans medial transformations that transcend media and place.