How to Recognize Choreography as a Medium?

The rather absurd question posed above actually motivates the entire project and its artistic practice. To recognize something involves pre-existing knowledge and conceptualization of that thing, something that has become familiar or normalized. I studied and learned to understand choreography primarily through its Western and more diverse histories and contexts during the MA in Choreography studies (2001–03) and the doctoral process (2013–19) at the Theatre Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki. If choreography is understood, as Leon (2022: 34) suggests, as complex interactions between aesthetic, artistic, educational, practical, institutional, socio-cultural, and political factors, then in this project, I have extended these complex interactions to speculative and interplanetary scales, ones that go beyond my current understanding.

Through this choice, I have continued to re-sketch my grasp on choreography and choreoreading, coupling the process with a primary interest in building an understanding of a choreographic thinking rooted in speculation and imaginary conditions. In other words, the question of how to recognize something in conditions that I do not yet know exists, motivates the artistic research path, the movement of the artistic works, and the movements of my fingers on the keyboard. The aim of this perspective is to discover tools and insights that diversify the understanding of choreographic and choreoreading practices, as well as the concepts of choreography itself. How can one work with choreography in speculative conditions to which one has no direct access? What does this position reveal or ‘ooze out’ from the practice, intention, and imagination of the choreography/ies that I have been developing?

Living with the daily practice of rapid eye movements from hyper-reading, sliding fingers across smooth touch screens, and engaging with algorithmic environments, I recognize a fundamental shift occurring in my choreographic thinking. If choreography is understood as a form of writing practice, then this shift, which emerges from the interplay of analogue and digital, connects choreography to the evolution of writing and reading practices in the digital age. In my understanding choreography is not aimed at producing or serving dance through predetermined organizational structures. More precisely, in this project, choreography is not a practice of construction, understood as an architectural structure for dance, but it functions simultaneously as an artistic practice, a research question, and the outcome of artistic processes without the prefix con-. This perspective is informed by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurélien Barrau’s (2014) notion of ‘struction’, as well as my earlier experiments with the concept of ‘choreostruction’ (Kellokumpu 2020). However, I have chosen to leave a deeper exploration of this term out of this project, and focus instead on the development of the speculative practice at hand. That said, each of these ideas influences the others.

Stemming from a break in the strong historical bond between dance and choreography, the project couples choreography with the phenomenon of movement and the imaginary material circumstances in which the body takes place. Movement in this project is not viewed as material to be choreographed, rather, the reverse is apt: movement phenomena, perception and experience of it, and imaginary material circumstances condition choreographic thinking and practice and the artistic practice aims to couple with and materialize those preconditional relations and intensities. The artworks have explored what kind of choreography this re-positioning produce. In practice, which is based primarily on visual information and its experience, I have sought to move beyond selective visual attention and explore the principles that guide or direct my attention in chosen kinetic and material spheres. Perhaps gravity is one such principle, orbiting the Sun another, and touching the smart screen a third one. With this in mind, I have embraced a tentative artistic-ontological orientation of space-time-movement instead of space-time and movement. In practice, movement is understood to operate ontologically on the same phenomenal level as space and time, rather than as material that crosses or produces change in space and time (though it can do that as well). In other words, movement as a phenomenon in this project is beyond human mastery, and choreography functions as a way to examine and couple the body with the complex relationships of space-time-movement. This practical and artistic thinking aligns with and is nourished by philosopher Thomas Nail’s writings, in which movement is considered a dimension of reality that is not reducible to time and space (Nail 2018b: 51). What kind of choreographic art emerges when this is incorporated into the practice?

All of the artworks share a common non-specific medium orientation as the primary mode of making art. Even though I come from a background in choreography coupled with dance, I have aimed to ‘forget’ or ‘put aside’ choreography as a known and understood term, keeping it as an open inquiry during the process to see if and how the artistic outcomes can be understood as choreographic. Practically, this is similar to what artist-researcher Ellen Røed (2014: 2) describes as being ‘out of sync’ with one’s own intentions. From this viewpoint, and by allowing myself to adopt this out-of-sync orientation, the process of recognizing the choreographic in particular situations and contexts in the projects has partly generated the material for the works. In other words, I have aimed to leave aside ontological and material inherited expectations of what choreography is or should be and keep the experimentation itself experimental. I connect this way of working to the post-1950s historical transition in which artists’ attention to the material object shifted to the action or process of making it (Wood 2018: 37). In this sense, the diversity of ‘choreography’ has functioned simultaneously as an open question and as the context in which, and the Nordic position from which, the practice-in-development has unfolded.

Throughout the research project, choreography has shifted from the act of composing toward a focus on (selective) rapid visual attention, becoming reflective and autonomous rather than being harnessed for composition based on that visual attention. Something changes in the choreographic kinesthetic orientation when my intention is not to compose. Or perhaps the temporal space of composing merely shifts from after the visual perception to during the visual perception? The relationships between these practical realms, composition and attention, or after and during, are evidently blurry. How is it possible to navigate motional spheres without the act of composition? I have sought to find out. I see this impossible attempt as a continuation of the critical stance toward the conventional understanding of composition, which, for example, Monni and Pérez Royo (2015: 91) have addressed. In my project, I recognize similar motifs in ‘teasing out’ the practical premises of this term, as described by Monni and Pérez Royo (2015: 91–92), and I am coupling this line of thought with Monni’s (2024) proposal to seek updated conceptualizations for the premises of choreography within a ‘dynamically actualizing world’ on a spatial scale beyond human understanding.

The practical challenge has been to keep the experimentation with rapid visual attention open and experimental, without falling into the act of composing or an intention of it. This has involved maintaining an extended space for experimenting with the factors that precondition a reflective and autonomous practice of selective attention. Practically, it’s akin to exploring a 360-degree kinesthetic historical and particular space and allowing the movement of this perceptual act to function as the primary sphere in which the body operates. It entails constant questioning: How do I choose where to direct my attention? What are the keywords of my search within this kinesthetic sphere, so to speak? What if ‘the body taking place’ is the keyword? What kind of situated entanglement of ‘conceptual’ and ‘practical’ emerges from that durational position? And how is it choreographic, or is it at all?

These questions engage with Wynne-Jones’ writings (2021: 192) on how any somatic mode of attention is culturally and politically constituted. I interpret this to mean that in this kind of practice, it is crucial to remain critically aware of the components that condition my attention practice and the body that is practicing. This awareness causes constant situated and contextualized movement, shifts, and destabilization in place-taking within my practice. It includes an attempt to destabilize and diversify the architectural infrastructures, material circumstances, and internalized stages that have conditioned my choreographic practice. In this attempt, the body of choreography becomes elusive, fluid, ungraspable, and not-yet-here, queer.

Based on the artistic processes, what happens in the practice can be described as a kind of triadic loop in which 1) sensorial feedback, 2) place-taking as a perceptual problem solving based on the visual information, and 3) decision-making as a kinesthetic response interact and entangle constantly without becoming fixed. Each element affects the others, molding and shaping the outcome simultaneously. The process is complexified by an attempt to diversify the personal memories and knowledges when forming an interpretation of the previously mentioned processual mesh. The thinking that emerges from this bodily state is choreographic in a different way than the kind of thinking where choreography organizes or forms an architectural structure for a linear and repetitive piece, regardless of the material circumstances. In the project, it has been important to situate this practice within speculative cyber and outer space realms to create conditions for meaningful material and practical insights on choreography-to-come to emerge. On a personal level, the process can be described as reworking the existing understanding of choreography and choreoreading practice through the practice that I call ‘metaphysical clownishness’. The artworks presented here serve as materializations of this rethinking and remaking process.