Bojana Cvejic: The Social Choreography of Proceduralism

Social choreography offers a perspective of aesthetic continuum between everyday movement and dance. And, according to Andrew Hewitt (Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement, Duke, 2005) it redefines ideology’s mode of operation as “aesthetic” and “performative,” shifting focus from the mechanism of hailing subjects by way of power apparatuses to self-perpetuated embodiment, aesthetically produced and choreographically rehearsed social order. We might ask ourselves what is the social choreography that regulates the social life of individuals beyond the division of the public/private spheres today.
The lecture draws from the first phase of research, having resulted in the book Public Sphere by Performance (co-written with Ana Vujanović). It focuses on “proceduralism” as a characteristic form of social choreography in liberal democratic societies that operates in video-games, political management and artistic methodology. The main question is: What does the choreography of procedures reveal about the public and the eclipse of its political function today? How does it pave the way for an aesthetic brand of individualism, and contemporary techniques of the self?

Bojana Cvejić (Belgrade/Brussels) is a performance theorist and performance maker, a co-founding member of TkH editorial collective. Cvejić studied musicology and philosophy (PhD at Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, London). She is (co-)author or collaborator in many dance and theater performances since 1996 with J. Ritsema, X. Le Roy, E. Salamon, M. Ingvartsen, E. Hrvatin. Her latest books are Public Sphere by Performance, co-written with A. Vujanović (b_books, Berlin, 2012), Parallel Slalom: Lexicon of Nonaligned Poetics, co-edited with G. S. Pristaš (TkH/CDU, Belgrade/Zagreb, 2013), En Atendant & Cesena: A Choreographer’s Score, co-written with A.T.De Keersmaeker (Mercator, Brussels, 2013) and Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance (Palgrave, upcoming). Cvejić teaches at various performance programs in Europe Her latest works are exhibition Danse Guerre at CCN Rennes (2013) and Spatial Confessions at Tate Modern (2014). Her current research interests are social choreography and the critique of liberal individualism in contemporary art.