Choreography

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Choreography literally means "dance-writing." The word fuses two Greek roots: "χορεία," a circular dance, and "γραφή," writing. Yet for centuries, the people who made dances were not called choreographers at all. Stage and movie credits leaned on softer phrasings. They might read "ensembles staged by," or "dances staged by," or simply "dances by." The title we now take for granted arrived surprisingly late, and it had to be claimed by a specific name on a specific show. How did a word that once meant the written record of a dance come to mean the act of inventing one? Why does the law treat some sequences of steps as art worth protecting and others as ordinary motion? And what exactly is a choreographer arranging when the raw material is the human body moving through space? The answers run from Renaissance dance masters to a two-second clip inside a video game.

• 2. Space Shape Time Energy

  ›

  Space, shape, time, and energy are the four terms a choreographer works in. The art specifies human movement and form across these dimensions, usually inside an emotional or non-literal context rather than a literal one. A dance is not just steps. It is steps organized with intent. Organic unity, rhythmic or non-rhythmic articulation, theme and variation, and repetition all belong to the choreographer's compositional toolkit. These ideas are why dance choreography is sometimes called dance composition, a phrase that frames the dancemaker as something close to a musician. Movement language can be drawn from many techniques at once. Ballet, contemporary dance, jazz, hip hop dance, folk dance, techno, K-pop, religious dance, and even plain pedestrian movement are all valid sources. A choreographer may pull from one or blend several into a single work. Some choreographers fix that language permanently through dance notation, a written system that lets a design outlive any single performance. Notation is one reason the same word can mean both the act of making a dance and the design that results.

• 3. From Court To Credit

  ›

  Renaissance Italy gave the role its early shape, where dance masters created movements for social dances that were then taught, and staged ballets were built the same way. In 16th century France, French court dances were developed into an artistic pattern. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries pulled social dance and theatrical dance apart from each other. During that separation, the word choreography attached itself to the written record of dances, the practice later known as dance notation. Only afterward did its meaning shift toward what we mean now: the composition of a sequence of movements making up a performance. The ballet master became the arranger of dance as a theatrical art. Jean-Georges Noverre stood as a well-known master of the late eighteenth century, with Gasparo Angiolini, Jean Dauberval, Charles Didelot, and Salvatore Viganò developing techniques for specific kinds of dance. Ballet built its own vocabulary in the nineteenth century, carried forward by romantic choreographers Carlo Blasis, August Bournonville, Jules Perrot, and Marius Petipa. The modern title arrived in print far later. "Choreographer" was first used as a credit for George Balanchine in the Broadway show On Your Toes in 1936, and the word "choreography" itself entered the American English dictionary in the 1950s.

• 4. The Naturalists

  ›

  Michel Fokine, the Russian choreographer who lived from 1880 to 1942, helped usher in a new and more naturalistic style. Isadora Duncan, who lived from 1878 to 1927, pushed the same direction, favoring natural movement and improvisation over rigid form. From that turn onward, styles ranged freely between realistic representation and abstraction. Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, and Sir Frederick Ashton became influential figures in classical or abstract dance. Several of them refused to stay in one mode. Balanchine and Ashton, alongside Martha Graham, Leonide Massine, and Jerome Robbins, also created representational works that told or depicted something concrete. Alvin Ailey carried that range further than almost anyone. An African-American dancer, choreographer, and activist who lived from 1931 to 1989, his work moved across ballet, jazz, modern dance, and theatre rather than settling into a single tradition.

• 5. How Dances Are Built

  ›

  Improvisation and planned choreography are the two fundamental methods, and a dance can use one or both. In the improvisational approach, a choreographer hands dancers a score: generalized directives that guide improvised movement and form. A score might tell one dancer to withdraw from another, who is in turn told to avoid that withdrawal. It might lay out a sequence to be executed in an improvised manner across a musical phrase, as happens in contra dance choreography. These scores leave wide latitude for personal interpretation. Planned choreography reverses that freedom. Here the choreographer dictates motion and form in detail, leaving little or no room for the dancer to interpret. Specific techniques come into play once two or more dancers share the stage. Mirroring has dancers face each other and do the same thing. Retrograde performs a sequence in reverse order. Canon has people perform the same move one after another, while shadowing places one behind the other doing identical moves. Levels set dancers higher and lower, and unison has two or more people moving through a range of moves at the same time. Movements themselves carry dynamics, described as fast, slow, hard, soft, long, and short. Whatever the method, the work must impose order within three dimensions of space, the fourth dimension of time, and the limits of the human body.

• 6. Beyond The Stage

  ›

  Opera and cheerleading both rely on choreography, and so does a long list of fields that have little to do with concert dance. Theatre, marching band, synchronized swimming, and cinematography all use it. So do ice skating, gymnastics, fashion shows, show choir, cardistry, video game production, and animated art. The art of designing movement, in other words, reaches far past the dancer. Competition keeps the field sharp. The International Choreographic Competition Hannover, in Hanover, Germany, is the longest-running choreography competition in the world, having started around 1982 and organized by the Ballett Gesellschaft Hannover e.V. The pandemic forced it online in 2020 and 2021 before it returned to the stage at the Theater am Aegi in 2022. Gregor Zöllig, head choreographer of dance at the Staatstheater Braunschweig, was appointed its artistic director in 2020. Entrants must be under 40 years of age and professionally trained. The competition has run in collaboration with the Tanja Liedtke Foundation since her death in 2008, and from 2021 the foundation added a new production prize to complement five other production awards. Marco Goecke, then director of ballet at the Staatstheater Hannover, presented the 2021 and 2022 awards. Other contests stretch across the map, from the Beijing International Ballet and Choreography Competition to the Copenhagen International Choreography Competition, founded in 2008, to the New Adventures Choreographer Award in London. The International Online Dance Competition arrived in 2020 in response to the pandemic, carrying a Grand Prix of its own.

• 7. The Law Of Steps

  ›

  the 1st of January 1978 is the dividing line in American copyright law. Section 102(a)(4) of the Copyright Act protects "choreographic works" created after that date and fixed in a tangible medium of expression. The statute defines choreography as "the composition and arrangement of a related series of dance movements and patterns organized into a coherent whole." Not everything qualifies. Choreography made of ordinary motor activities, social dances, commonplace movements or gestures, or athletic movements may lack sufficient authorship to earn protection. That line was tested in court by professional dancer and choreographer Kyle Hanagami, who sued the video game developer Epic Games. Hanagami had published a YouTube video in 2017 featuring a dance he choreographed to Charlie Puth's song "How Long." He claimed that Fortnite's "It's Complicated" emote copied a portion of his "How High" choreography, asserting direct and contributory copyright infringement along with unfair competition. Epic Games ultimately won dismissal of the copyright claims. The district court concluded that his two-second, four-beat sequence of dance steps was not protectable under copyright law, leaving the question of where a step ends and a protectable work begins very much alive.