If I need to resume everything I’ve learned about choreography in the first 15 years I’ve been practicing it, it will be the flowing:

There are two ways to approach choreography, one is inventing, the other is uncovering.

One can either pre plan, pre decide, come up with a finite concept, idea, story, content and so on, and then use the choreographic process in order to manifest that thing, which was pre planned.

Or, one can use the choreographic process in order to discover, or uncover existing logics, systems, mechanisms etc, as a way to tap into what already exists. To try and figure out what already IS.

If I try to summarize what I learned during the next 15 years of working with choreography, it would be something along these lines:

The first approach to choreography, the one who tries to invent an art work, is dependent on the presence of a centralized system/creative process.

The second, can only happen in an environment based on modalities of decentralization, where everyone involved has both a say and a stake in the process and resulting work.

Choreography, the way I see it, is a process of figuring out the best strategies for allowing the creation of a system, which enhances collaborative behavior through sets of incentives and emergent consensus. For this to happen, the impact the decisions of each separate, self governing, sovereign, free player has over the whole, must be significant, and the model under which the choreographer is working, must imply a well defined type of authority and leadership, one which is able to see the work through the eyes of the dancers and is restricted mainly to that which is absolutely imperative to keeping a decentralized system functional. The choreographer aught to be the assistant and the foundation of the choreographic thing, nothing more, nothing less.