All the art forms that produce objects, artifacts, scores, texts, recordings etc, all of which remain available beyond their time of creation, sometimes literally for millennia and more, do so with the clear intention to transcend time, which in many art forms is a core drive for artists. The choreographic form on the other hand, is an art of its time. It refuses to be replicated in a meaningful way outside of its creator’s lifetime. All attempts to treat choreography like classical music for example, by holding on to scores of sort, mapping choreographic content as a series of movements and compositions in order to reconstruct a choreographic piece, result in nothing more than pale, artificial, awkward, lifeless and unoriginal replicas.

Choreography is an art from bound to its ephemerality as a performative art, but more than that, it is bound even stronger to its inevitable mortality as all living things are. It is unique in that sense that it is probably the one art form, which represents the cycle of life in the most profound manner. A choreographer’s ’touch’, is as singular and imperative to the art work, as that of a painter. It can’t be replicated by anyone who’s not the actual maker in a way that produces an original art work. In the same way a copy of a Picasso isn’t a real Picasso and is considered a fake, all choreographic works that were replicated in the absence of their original creator, are all forms of fake art works.

One simple analogy to illustrate the problematic nature of choreographic repertoire, would be to try and imagine how it would look if the cinema industry behaved in the same manner.

Imagine a world, where the majority of cinema productions today, would be re-production of old masterpieces of the genre. Imagine most of the current cinema world, being about reconstructing old films, as close as possible to the original thing, just with a new cast of actors. Same script, exact same camera shots, same locations and same art, same costumes, same type of acting, same dialogues, same editing, same soundtrack, same type of equipment at the time of the original production in order to produce the exact same visuals, same lighting, same everything. Literally, the same movie, just recreated with new actors and a new technical and production team. Imagine the main goal of all this, being the production of an identical film to the one copied, with the same title of course. How odd would that be?

well, that is exactly what is happening with most of the dance productions being created and presented.

Obviously, that realty has a major impact on the ability of an art form to evolve. Continuously recreating replicas of past art works, changes entirely the way new works are being created. If the cinema industry would invest most of its ressources in recreating the filmography of Hitchcock, Fellini or Godard, again and again in many parallel productions all focusing only on this, eventually, there wouldn’t be any possibility for new cinema artists to emerge, innovate and take the art form to new places. There would probably be no Tarantino in that imaginary world.

The difference between why this happens in dance but not in cinema, is obvious of course. Cinema produces recordings, filmed objects (which is the essence of the medium itself), and therefore, if one wishes to watch an old movie, they can do so easily. There’s no need to reproduce the thing as there is access to the original.  In dance, there’s no real possibility for that. And so for reasons that are all unrelated to the nature of the art form, the majority of the dance world has gradually shifted towards the production of replicas.

But the logic of the analogy, relates primeraly to the nature of these two art forms and therefore, it holds.

What happens on a movie set, the way a script is translated into images, the way a film is edited, all of which is orchestrated through the physical presence of the movie director, is the exact same thing which happens in choreography. It is the sum of the decisions a choreographer takes, and the time spent in the same space interacting with the dancers, that makes a choreographic work what it is. It cannot be summed up in any score. It’s the thing all living interactions and organismes are made of, and like all living organismes, it is alive only till it ceases to be. Once dead, no living organism can be brought back to life and new life takes the place of that which has died. Keeping alive that which has died, is an inherent impossibility. Things which are alive, are alive through the singularity of their specific aliveness, only for a limited duration of time.

The choreographic art form, doesn’t need the obsessive remounting of the works of Petipa, Balanchine, Cunningham or Bausch (all probably rolling in their graves). Their art would anyway be transmitted through the generations in the same way people transfer their DNA to their offsprings. Nothing would have been lost on the way. On the contrary, that is what allows for evolution through natural selection. What stays, stays for a reason. What is lost, is lost for good reasons too.

The insistance to keep directing most of the attention and ressources of the field towards preserving these dead works of dead artists in an artificial manner, ossify what needs to be a dynamic and ever evolving process of evolution. It is a literal weight holding back what would have otherwise, be a natural process of continuous and organic evolution.

But even worse that this, what the growing presence of dance repertoire has done is, it has pushed most makers to create works that are in tune with this logic. Choreographers, consciously or not, are creating works which can be recreated in their absence. It’s as if the notion that a choreographic work must be summed up in a score which will enable its reproduction in the future, regardless of the presence of its maker, became inherent to what a choreographic work is thought to be. Something like - If most of the work being produced and presented is by dead choreographers, I better make my work in a way that aligns with that logic.

The choreographic art form in the west, developed in the same artistic and cultural circles as those of the already well codified music world, which is probably the reason for the adoptions of certain logics regarding repertoire, scores, notation and the overall attitude regarding the preservation of an oeuvre over time by the choreographic world. The problem though, is that although music and choreography share many aspects related to the manner in which they think about and structure their respective artistic materials, they are completely on opposite sides in relation to the ability to summarize the essence of the work in the form of a fixed score. This relates to the fact that music, being the highest form of artistic abstraction, lends itself naturally to the logic of notation systems. It is very much detached from the time in which it was made and the people who made it, while choreography, probably the most concrete of all art forms as it’s made with, by, and through people’s bodies and consciousness, rejects all attempts to be fixed, notated, and reduced to any type of score. But also, it is extremely limited in its capacity to preserve its core essence when it is being kept alive beyond a certain amount of time and disconnected from its creator’s singular ‘touch’.

All things abstract, travel lightly through time, while that which is concrete, does not. That’s why we can converse with and relate to ideas from thousands of years before our time, but as much as we would have liked to, we cannot meet the actual person who developed them for coffee and a chat.

Trying to maintain alive a repertoire of choreographic works, is to misunderstand and limit choreography. It is like insisting on physically meeting a person who has died.

A choreographic art work, is tied to the inevitability of its own mortality like no other art work in other domains is. To resist this reality, is to harm, slow down, divert and block its evolution. Letting go, as a practice but also a deep philosophical idea, is the first and last thing to understand when it comes to choreography as art.