Unworking Choreography: The Notion of the Work in Dance

There is no archive or museum of human movement, no place where choreographies can be collected and conserved in pristine form. The central consequence of this is the incapacity of philosophy and aesthetics to think of dance as a positive and empirical art. In the eyes of philosophers, dance refers to a space other than art, considered both more frivolous and more fundamental than the artwork without ever quite attaining the status of a work. Unworking Choreography develops this idea and postulates an unworking as evidenced by a conspicuous absence of references to actual choreographic works within philosophical accounts of dance; the late development and partial dominance of the notion of the work in dance in contrast to other art forms such as painting, music, and theatre; the difficulties in identifying dance works given a lack of scores and an apparent resistance within the art form to the possibility of notation; and the questioning of ends of dance in contemporary practice and the relativisation of the very idea that dance artistic or choreographic processes aim at work production.

Frédéric Pouillaude is Lecturer in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. This book was originally published in French as Le Désoeuvrement Chorégraphique. Étude sur la Notion d'Oeuvre en Danse (Vrin, 2009).