Choreographic: Having to do with the arts of making of dances, activities, and spaces (from Greek khoreia "dance" + graphein "to write)."
Ecologies: The systems of living things in their environment (from oikos "house, dwelling place, habitation" + -logia "study of").
Choreographic Ecologies: dance-making within and across the complex systems of human and non-human relationships that activates varieties of worldmaking.
Why Dance the City Now?
We have now, unexpectedly, arrived in this new place of “dividing moments”—fractures still forming—as regions across the world grapple with the short-term impact and long-term implications of the Corona Virus. Everything is haloed, rippling.
These fissures had already been being conjured into existence through the persistent habits deeply embedded in the histories of today’s urban contexts. Cityspaces have been built up, torn down or altered with great speed; histories have been covered over, and, at times, obliterated; the glittering architectural monumentality of steel and glass skyscrapers and polished shopping malls has too often come to stand in for the ‘new’ face of the cities. In this mirage, the people disappear.
Climate change in all of its manifestations has put in motion a dramaturgy of natural disasters pushing us further and further into collective scenarios of precarity. As a result, these patterns have already been profoundly disrupting people’s lives, rendering their material histories obsolete, and inundating further many dimensions of the histories of cities.
Corona and climate-change are creating enormous loss and trauma as well as evanescent half-spaces for reconfigurations. There are fleeting encounters with ghosts on a pier in Victoria Harbor or in the windows of a high-rise in Sha Tin. The half-spaces appear in memories that become artefacts in need of memory, stories hidden in the dusty attics of old antique shops, and incommensurate apparitional histories that continue to swarm below the city’s visible horizon.
Dance—as a method of touching space and corporeal world-making—calls to us to meet these unpredictable encounters through the enactment of new performative archaeologies, methods of co-creation, and more nuanced networks of exchange across live and digital platforms. As we move in partnership across communities, we create new modes of storytelling, new forms of being together.
Choreographic Ecologies seeks to explore more sophisticated varieties of concepts for dance across communities and institutions—as-is, as-if, and to-come—as metaphor and method for activating transversal affiliations in the context of sharing, learning and imagining new forms of our urban futures. We must dance the city with different movements and movements of difference, with a new twist and turn.
