Social choreography

Social choreography describes how people move, interact, and relate to one another in social space. It is a term used across performance studies, dance theory, sociology, and artistic practice to better understand how movement, bodily relations, spatial organization, and collective behavior structure and transform social life.

The term has evolved across several overlapping but distinct lineages. These include theoretical work written by Andrew Hewitt, who examined choreography as a means through which ideology and social order are embodied in everyday movement. In parallel, a practice-based approach has been developed by choreographer Michael Kliën, dramaturg Steve Valk, writer Jeffrey Gormly, and collaborators. Other scholars and theorists, including Bojana Cvejić, Ana Vujanović, Gabriele Klein, Randy Martin have used the term in relation to public space, protest, collective embodiment, and political participation.

Although these approaches share concerns, they differ substantially in emphasis and method. From a practitioner perspective, the term spans a range of dance-adjacent, community-engaged, and participatory practices, each of which retain distinct theoretical orientations.

Definitions and uses

In practice-based contexts, social choreography refers to choreographic approaches that organize conditions for collective interaction beyond conventional dance performance. Drawing on Gregory Bateson's systems theory and cybernetic epistemology, Michael Kliën describes choreography as "the workings and governance of patterns, dynamics, and ecologies," and the practice of "setting relations or the conditions for relations to emerge." Bateson's cybernetic and ecological thought, including his arguments in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979) describes the mind as distributed across relational systems rather than located in individuals, showing how the observer is always entangled with the system under inquiry.