Notes on Documentary Choreography
"Notes on Documentary Choreography - Encounter #2 Attending to Bodies" was the second in a series of symposiums organised choreographer Arkadi Zaides, taking place across venues in Brussels form 28 to 30 April 2025. The event brought together scholars, activists, artists, dance and performance practitioners to explore the multifaceted meanings of “documentary choreography” and to assess its potential engagement with sociopolitical issues as well as medium-specific concerns.
The symposium focussed on the intersection of documentary materials and corporealities, revealing how bodies can disrupt dominant narratives, amplify silenced stories, and confront pressing crises such as warfare, migration, inequality, and ecological breakdown. How can choreography, by centering on bodies, navigate these crises and uncover new ways of engaging with the world? Through this perspective, the symposium aims to demonstrate how choreography and related arts, when intertwined with documentary practices, can address urgent contemporary issues while critically examining the processes, ethics, and sustainability of artistic practices.
Arkadi Zaides - Notes on Documentary Choreography
In his presentation, Arkadi Zaides spoke of some of his projects at the intersection of embodied and documentary practices, such as Archive (2014). Engaging with texts referring to his work by several scholars—specifically Pouillaude (2016), Stalpaert (2022), and Rogoff (2024)—Zaides proposed a number of key principles that define what he means by “documentary choreography”.
- Documentary choreography operates in the gap between the archived event and the embodied present.
- Documentary choreography begins with a document. Each document -be it visual, textual, sonic, or otherwise— demands its own choreographic approach. The practice emerges from the specificity of the document's materiality, the socio-political context it conveys, and the questions it provokes.
- Documentary Choreography situates the body as a critical medium through which documents are encountered, re-inscribed, and transformed. Each document—be it visual, textual, sonic, or otherwise—demands its own choreographic approach. The practice emerges from the specificity of the document's materiality, the socio-political context it conveys, and the questions it provokes.
- Documentary choreography integrates source material as an active agent within performance. Rather than serving as background or inspiration, documents are structurally and conceptually embedded, shaping the choreographic process and outcome.
- Documentary Choreography is an intermedial form. It incorporates diverse media not as auxiliary elements but as integral components of the performative space. These media offer the audience access to the documentary sources being examined and are deliberately exposed and staged.
- [I missed this point]
- [I missed this point]
- In the absence of formal or reliable archives, documentary choreography treats the body as a site of testimony. Choreographic procedures engage the body's experience to trace what has been obscured or rendered unspeakable. In some cases, this process may prompt the emergence of another form of document that transposes the experience into a different medium.
- Documentary choreography is not solely about embodying existing documents through dancing bodies; it seeks to expand the range of possibilities beyond the confines of dance. In doing so, it has the possibility to align with concepts such as non-dance or post-dance, which decenter the body from its hierarchical position within the field of contemporary dance and put it on equal footing with other media in both the creative process and the artistic output.
- Documentary choreography necessarily grapples with new technologies and new media. Choreography, grounded in the physical body, enters into critical dialogue with these technologies, offering a site where disembodied data can be re-materialised and interrogated through embodied practice.
- Documentary choreography continuously engages with human rights issues. This engagement often involves working with the documents produced by NGOs, human rights institutions, and legal bodies- not as static representations, but as dynamic producers of knowledge.
- Documentary choreography continuously engages with human rights issues. This engagement often involves working with the documents produced by NGOs, human rights institutions, and legal bodies-not as static representations, but as dynamic producers of knowledge.
Irit Rogoff on epistemic invention
In her presentation, spoke about “Epistemic invention” as one of the terms she is trying to develop in order to think about the new parameters of practice-based research. In part, she is positioning it as a force in the denial of ‘frontality’ as stance and address in facing our woeful conditions. If ‘frontality’ is dealing with war, armed conflict, civil destabilization, and human suffering, it operates largely through binaries of perpetrators and victims, allocation of responsibility, tracing the mechanisms and technologies of violence, territorial gains and losses, and the creation of conditions of possibility for colossal mishaps that are social, environmental, and governmental. In contrast, “epistemic invention” refuses a steady place for us to be anchored as observers, whether we are complicit or judging. It is propositional, fictionalising, mismatching knowledge platforms, inventing archives, envoicing, embodying, and setting in motion. It is both anchored in knowledge and permitting a degree of invention in order to ask how knowledge affects.
She gave the example of Donald Rodney’s work producing future affects. (There was no place for conversations in the conjunction of race and medicalisation to land in the 70s and 80s.)
Bojana Cvejić on self-immolation
How can life be weaponised as a transindividual form of dissent when self-destruction also ends the person’s despair and suffering? How are we to attend to irreparable acts of self-annihilation that stand in stark contrast to contemporary practices of self-care, vitalist intensity, and self-enhancement?