ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the tension between the concepts of "choreopolitical" and the concept of "choreopolicing." Choreopolitics is predicated on a gathering and activation of that urgently necessary capacity to make plans for alternative collective modes of existence, away from conformity, sad affects, tamed bodies, prescribed routes, which define choreopolicing. The chapter deals with the question of choreography, or rather, with the question of choreography as commanding force. The paradoxical possibility for choreopolitical critiques of choreography through choreography complexifies the field of the political in dance—since the question of agency in choreography can no longer be understood as simply affirming or enacting the ever-present potential for the dancer to deviate from, or disobey, the choreographic imperative. The aesthetic specificity of dance and choreography includes: corporality, the ongoing tension between presence and absence, the display of dance's workers as laborers serving the work of dance, and the activation of historicity thanks to dance's deep relation to transtemporal and trans-spatial transmissibility.
