What is Choreography today ?

What is Choreography today ?

Mar 16

Written By Lia Haraki

The image is by Pavlos Vrionides from my piece ‘ Humping’

What is Choreography today?

What isn’t choreography today?

Isn’t choreography always anyway?

So what is it really?

Choreography is cooking and serving dances to be swallowed and digested.

It’s a sport, as you are trying to win a challenge you have set on your own, trying to compete with a better version of yourself each time.

It’s activism as nothing is more revolutionary than bodies embodying the change they want to experience in the world.

It’s art, but many times, it is art camouflaged as poetry, theatre, dance, movement, sculpture, film, music, song, performance live or online, camouflaged as an application, a video game, a dream, an awakening, a conversation, an illusion, a masturbation.

When I was teaching the choreography course at university, during the first class, I usually began with three words: concept, intention, form. And I would say that one can begin making work from any of these words and in no specific order. I always gave the example of a building. How a building used to be a concept in someone’s head, and it was meant to house people and that determined its form. Choreography can begin from anywhere, like having the desire to share an idea, an ambition, a dream, it can begin as a need to please or as a hidden wish to be admired, a curiosity about a certain way of moving, it can begin as an escape from reality, or as a strong need to explore the body as a treasure box of tools and toys to play with for endless hours.

Choreography today can be conceptual, movement based, object based, silent, soundy, vocal, recorded, written, painted, narrated, performed, designed, imagined.

Choreography is nothing more than what moves people today.

Hug huge

Lia

Lia Haraki

Lia Haraki is an interdisciplinary performer, maker and practitioner working across performance, devised theatre, choreography, song, spoken word and what she calls repetitive poetry. As a creator, she is occupied with issues related to identity, community and value and she beleives in the power of art as a medium that can trigger shifts in perception towards a fairer world.

Lia usually works with the moving and sounding qualities of the human body, in order to speak about its sociopolitical position, by challenging notions of normality associated to it. Beginning from self-sarcasm and working with satire, she enjoys finding performative ways to crack socially constructed narratives and reveal the illusion we have of them as ‘real’. In her pieces vulnerability and empathy are celebrated as human super powers and act as threads that connect the performer with the audience.

Her work in general takes the shape of staged works, site-specific pieces, one on one experiences, sound installations, standup shows, music bands and performances in shops.

At the same time she is proud to have developed several practices through the collaborative artistic research of the past twenty years in the forms of workshops, coaching and artists’ mentoring. In general she considers inspiring others and triggering creativity awakenings especially in younger artists is her most sacred of services !