EDITORIAL 2.2
by jeffrey gormly
This is just a quick refresh, folks. For general welcome notes and orientation see editorials 2.1 and 2.2. For now, in introducing Milton Aylor’s lead assay on theology of dance, I take the opportunity to elaborate on this expanded notion of choreography that we explore here. This might help explain why a radical experimental theologian is writing about dance, community and meaning making ie liturgy for a website about modern choreography.
Choreograph (v.): to arrange relations between bodies in time and space
Choreography (v.): act of framing relations between bodies; ‘a way of seeing the world’
Choreography (n.): result of any of these actions
Choreography (n.): a dynamic constellation of any kind, consciously created or not, self-organising or super-imposed.
Choreography (n.): order observed…, exchange of forces; a process that has an observable or observed embodied order
Choreograph (v.): to recognize such an order
Choreography (v.): act of interfering with or negotiating such an order
This is a sense of choreography as a new metaphor, an open metaphor. Because everyone has their own idea of what choreography is, and how it can be done, it is the ideal metaphor for a new kind of artform, one that seeks to understand all systems, human, artistic, social, natural, systems of knowledge, production, creation or automation. Understanding these systems in terms of forces, patterns, emergence, recurrence, recursivity and perception. Accepting that how we perceive the systems, and which mental/conceptual tools we use to organize our sense perceptions, actually determines what we see of the system, and by extension how we interact with, participate in, use, abuse, destroy or perpetuate them. Taking our lead equally from the world of modern dance and the new model of artist as negotiator, we are trying to create the art of the science of cybernetics and systems theory: an aesthetics of change.
published 22 February 08