45th international symposium

Social Choreography

In cooperation with Maska Institute and Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana

Organiser: Slovenian Society of Aesthetics

Location: Moderna galerija, Cankarjeva 15, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Date: 10 November 2017

Programme: Slovenian Society of Aesthetics

The work by Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement (Duke University Press, 2005), intervened in and transformed the field of performance and dance studies with a unique blend of materialist theory of ideology and a fresh perspective on the key chapters in the history of dance. Hewitt insists that we should not let go of the specific difference between dance as aesthetic practice and non-artistic, everyday rituals and practices of movement. 

However, the central point of his work can nevertheless be summed up as the idea that the term choreography—especially if taken to mean the exercise of the body, as the articulation and arrangement of bodies—, can certainly be used to describe the demands of the industrial modes of production for an effective and intricate composition of movements of human bodies: the choreography of the assembly line. 

Furthermore, Hewitt’s work challenges the contemporary overuse and abuse of the terminological nest surrounding performativity, not by abandoning or replacing it, but by, firstly, returning to the meaning this term had for Judith Butler in her now classic text Gender Trouble (Routledge, 1990), and secondly, as indicated already with the subtitle of the book, by coupling it to the study of ideology such as can be find in the works of Slavoj Žižek. 

After more than a decade of fruitful and productive usage of the idea of social choreography in a wide range of fields, from cultural studies to performance studies, to political studies and social philosophy, it is time to critically re-evaluate it and map its relations to other approaches. 

And what better place to do this than in Ljubljana, the home ground of the critique of ideology in its specific psychoanalytical turn representative already for Althusserian theory of ideology.

Organizers:
Gregor Moder (Maska, Ljubljana)
Polona Tratnik (Slovenian Society of Aesthetics, Ljubljana)
Adela Železnik (Moderna galerija)

Advisory Board:
Janez Janša (Maska, Ljubljana)
Lev Kreft (Slovenian Society for Aesthetics, Ljubljana)
Bojana Kunst (University of Giessen)
Svebor Sečak (Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb)