Writing about the Act of Choreography

One of my favorite choreographers has just published a book entitled "A Choreographer's Handbook". And it really is that, a choreographer's handbook rather than a handbook for choreographers in the sense that it is not a manual for how to make a dance.

While creating and performing his own work, Jonathan Burrows has been leading workshops internationally for a wide range of dance artists. Placing its focus on the later, the books' content is a collection of observations and questions that emerged in these workshops over the past five years.


In the introduction it says: "In dance, we now work with a multiplicity of techniques: physical, improvisational, compositional and performative. The number of approaches to us is unprecedented in the history of the art form. These questions, which have motivated me, are responses to having found myself sometimes overwhelmed. How do we make this field of choice a friend and not an overwhelming burden? How do we come back also sometimes to a position of passionate ignorance, enough to chose something rather than knowing everything?"

It is a generous and encouraging book that treasures the thoughts of a multitude of  individual artists and describes experiences and discoveries that are shared by many. Yet the careful selection of quotes from Jonathan Burrows' original notebooks create a thread through the myriad of details and reveal more about the author himself than at first expected.