In this essay, I explore the relationship between dance, choreography, violence and torture, particularly in relation to the television show So You Think You Can Dance. I argue that the act of choreography can sometimes be thought of as a violent encroachment on the body, and consider how torture and abjection are concepts useful to unpacking this power dynamic, particularly when dealing with torture as mediatized visual pleasure. I end with a short analysis of torture in Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria.

This paper looks at Formosa (2017), the last full-length dance work by the founder and artistic director of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, Lin Hwai-min. As a former writer and trained journalist, he is a socially aware choreographer who expresses his concern for his society through dance. I first contextualize his oeuvre with his earlier pieces based on the theme of Taiwan such as: Legacy (1978), Portrait of the Families (1997), White Water & Dust (2014 double bill), and Rice (2013), leading up to this full-length multi-media production. I also explain the hybridized Cloud Gate corporeal training from the East (e.g. taiji daoyin, Chinese martial arts) and the West (e.g. ballet, Martha Graham modern dance technique), as I unravel how Lin Hwai-min executes his citizenship through choreography.

The contemporary notion of choreography as a structural system of human movements in diverse contexts becomes radically challenged in the context of digital performance. Digital performance works that do not necessarily have human dancers, but instead present digital images and sounds can hardly be seen as choreographic practices in an orthodox way. In this article, I primarily investigated how the notion of choreography is reframed in the context of digital performance by delving into the entanglement of choreography with a computational system. In creating an human-computer interface, choreographers shed light on how the human subject is perceived, cognized and embodied through the entanglement of its corporeal body and the machine. Then, their choreographic sensibilities substantiated in the interface design process do not constitute embodied knowledge of the human body as a biological organism, but that of the posthuman body as an integrated being of the biological and the mechanical. In this sense, I argue that postchoreography as a mode of choreography for the posthuman necessitates the understanding of how a machine perceives a physical input and acts upon a virtual world.

This study aims to explore the performativity of dramaturgy with in the field of expanded choreography. I look into the concepts of expanded choreography after the 1990s and discuss Jeroen Peeters’s dramaturgy in the respect of performativity. The characteristics of expanded choreography are as follow. First, choreographers are capable of producing knowledge rather than an artifact. The knowledge that can be produced is not rigid but more comprehensive. Second, the choreographers carry out experimental choreography with the paradigm of interdisciplinary and meta-media performing arts. They All the collaborators can be considered as an author which used to be given to only choreographers. Third, many choreographers attempt to explore the relationship between the body and society. They consider the social engaging of dance into the choreography. To examine how dramaturgs elaborate their own performativity in the area of expanded choreography, I have chosen the physical dramaturgy of Jeroen Peeters. I found results as below. First, a theory can be discovered in the choreographic practice. Materials can be chosen not only body gestures and movements but also other media, philosophy, and theories. Second, the dramaturg should approach to the process of choreography with empirical research. The practice of dramaturgy is involved in embodied thinking, in structuring, and performative operation of whole process. Third, the role of dramaturgy is performatively changed in every individual work. In contrast with the classical dramaturgy, the new dramaturgy in contemporary dance not deal with the abstraction of knowledge but practice in the way of performativity.

This study probes how the notions of choreography has formed and changed in relation to dance notation. Two manuscripts, not by accident identically titled, are examined— Chorégraphie by Raoul-Auger Feuillet and Choreographie by Rudolf von Lavan—with regard to their respective understandings of the principles of dance and their socio-political contexts. This study brings Feuillet and Laban into a historical perspective beyond the previous literatures that solely focused on either of them. In Feuillet, choreography was defined as the composition of dance by means of notation. The space for dance was identified as flat and rectangular one, which led to the principles of ballet with the emphasis on geometrical shapes, establishing the two-dimensional plasticity as the aesthetic norm of the time. The act of composing dance by notating movement accompanied the emergence of the choreographer-subject which objectifies bodies of dancers, and thus the invention and development of dance notation was supported by the absolute monarchy out of its interest in the absolutistic body available to be controlled and disciplined. Laban developed the concept of choreography as the notation of forms and qualities of movement in space harmony. Laban theorized scales and rings in crystal space as new principles of movement, founding three-dimensional plasticity with its unceasing mobility as the aesthetic norm of modern dance. Complying with modernist ideal of progress and efficiency, Laban also applied his principles to choreograph movements of industrial bodies. Addressing manuscripts of Feuillet and Laban, and their contribution to the historical formation of the notions of choreography, this study unfolds the concepts of choreography in multilateral contexts, complementing and surpassing the prevalent, literal understanding of its meaning as dance-writing, which will provide the cornerstone for elucidating the historicity of choreography leading up to the present.

This study aims to explore the critical approach toward media in contemporary dance, which avoids conventional understanding of dance and artistic media. After reviewing important contexts and debates concerning contemporary dance, this study discuss the matter of its ambiguous boundaries and expansion through the concept of intermediality.

The idea of performance and dance with its ephemeral nature and media being used to preserve it, has constituted a conventional understanding of its temporality. However in contemporary dance, the archive expresses the request for extended temporality that enables the simultaneous existence of what is remaining, what is captured, and what is progressing in the performance. In addition, these archives expand into living spaces so that performances can lead to theoretical, educational, or political discourses, and function as a mediating space where heterogeneous entities such as art, virtual reality, and real life meet.

Moreover through this study, I wish to illuminate the expanded understanding of media in contemporary choreography as a criticism on previous media conventions, by introducing certain examples of autobiographical performance pieces in which the performer tells his or her own story. These works show the blurred boundaries among verbal languages, documents, and corporeal performance. They also bring participants in communication with performers, who can be understood as a physical archive of memories and experiences, roaming the ambiguous space inbetween reality and arts. Accordingly, an autobiographical performance creates an intermediality that allows the body-archive to experience and construct the virtual identity of the body in a fragmented manner.

This study explores a case of hooded crane dance performance that deals with the ecological environmental characteristics. In addition to choreographing movements and gestures, the subject of hooded crane performance was featured with theatrical dialogues. The data collection included choreography notes, photos, videos, memos, dialogues, and performance pamphlets collected twice in Nantes and Suncheon city between May and August 2019. The qualitative analysis of the data were presented in the following ways.

First, by reinterpreting the story of the wounded hooded crane (Doori) found in Suncheon the performance expressed the ecological life and adversity of the hooded crane from the opposing viewpoints between the ecological environment and humans. Second, the reactions of spectators suggested that the hooded crane dancing performance turned out to make them feel more interested in nature and ecology. Third, due to the real story of Doori, the performance played a role in reminding the meaning of the performance (i.e., ecological sensibility) while the locals appreciated the story in a friendly way. This study indicated the parts to be supplemented in future performances and expandability by attempting performances in the ecological environment of Suncheon Bay (tidal flats, etc.).