”From Model to Module - a move towards generative choreography”

How can we, today, think about the relation between dance technique and choreography and how do we navigate between process and product in choreographic production?

Those questions are at the base for the practice based PhD artistic research project ”From Model to Module”. The practical work has resulted in a series of presentations called MODUL. The knowledge gained from these laboratory works has led me to an understanding of choreography that here is given the title Generative Choreography. The modular approach proposes a flex stable definition of the choreographical against that of improvisational. Two terms often misinterpreted as each other’s opposite. A modular work deals with a finite number of units as input and reconfigures them into an infinite number of outcomes. This understanding could be applied to different contexts be it a finite number of body parts, elements of performance (set, music, costume etc) or in a larger sense the different political aspect a certain venue has due to its program, locality or history. The modular understanding of choreography has movement analysis at its heart. It understands a system by identifying its units through movement, and engages with that system by reconfiguring these units’ relations to each other.

A generative choreography is not seen as a model that thrives for a corresponding representation each time performed, but a set of modular intensive parameters that enables an event to take place. It is not seen for what it is, in a one-to-one representation, but in what it produces as meaning through a fracture.