Social Choreography and Social Drama

"If the body I dance with and the body I work and walk with are one and the same, I must necessarily entertain the suspicion that all of my body’s movements are, to a greater or lesser extent, choreographed". This would be a concise statement of the social choreography thesis, as Andrew Hewitt develops it in Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement (2005). Social drama, as developed in social anthropology by Victor Turner‒with significant contributions by Arnold van Gennep, Richard Schechner, Roberto Esposito, etc.,‒serves as a rhetorical counterpart to social choreography. Social choreography and social drama then become interpretative tools for exploring the performances in the public and social spheres on the basis of their claim that social order isn't just reflected but is enacted and rehearsed as an aesthetic order. The two interpretative models focalize bodily gestures and movements, organization of bodies in time and space, mise-en-scène, and dramaturgy of public gatherings and mass social events and thus discuss the functions of "liminality" and "communitas" in shaping social community between the public and the private spheres.

In this phase of the research "Performance and The Public", Ana Vujanović, Bojana Cvejić and Marta Popivoda examine state performances as well as performances of the public and its citizens informed by two different contexts, socialist Yugoslavia and contemporary Western neoliberal capitalism. On January 7th 2012, they organize an Open Day featuring heterogeneous artifacts of the studied: movements, images, laws, habits, writings in various formats, e.g. "sharp thoughts" or "running commentary" debate that include a few artists and scholars as guests and collaborators in this research phase


Youth Day celebration, 1974, SFRY (video frames)

Program:

4pm7pm/8pm‒10pm: introductory lecture by Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić, Yugoslavia: How Ideas Moved Our Collective Body by Marta Popivoda (selection from video archives, screening with discussion), interview with Dana Yahalomi from Public Movement, "sharp throughts" debate, running commentary on Raw Footage by Aernout Mik.

7 pm ‒ 8 pm: dinner break

Participants: Bojana Cvejić, Julie Heintz, Franck Leibovici, Marta Popivoda, Vanessa Theodoropoulou, Ana Vujanović, Dana Yahalomi (Public Movement)


Free entrance on reservation at reservation@leslaboratoires.org and at +33 153 561 590