χορεία

Choreography comes from Greek χορεία (khoreia), meaning 'choral dance,' from χορός (khoros, 'a dance, a chorus of dancers and singers'), and γραφία (graphia, 'writing, recording'), from γράφειν (graphein, 'to write'). The khoros was not merely a group of singers but a group that moved — the Greek theatrical chorus sang and danced simultaneously in the orchestra (the circular dancing-floor) before the skene (the stage building). Choreia named this unified activity of music and movement as one thing, not two. Choreography was, in its earliest English usage (seventeenth century), literally the notation of dance — the written record of steps and figures, as distinct from the dance itself. The word shifted to name the creation of dance rather than its recording during the late nineteenth and especially the twentieth century, as choreographers claimed authorial credit for the dances they invented rather than merely transcribed.

The notation of dance — the attempt to record movement in writing so that a dance could be reconstructed from the written record — is one of the most technically challenging problems in the history of the performing arts. Unlike music, which developed a highly efficient notation system by the sixteenth century that could capture pitch, duration, and to some degree dynamics, dance involves the entire body moving in three-dimensional space in real time, and the parameters to be recorded multiply rapidly: which body part, which direction, what relationship to the floor, what relationship to other dancers, at what tempo. Raoul Auger Feuillet's Chorégraphie (1700) was the first widely used dance notation system in Europe — a bird's-eye view representation of the dancing space with abstract symbols indicating foot positions — and it made the transmission of court dances across Europe possible in ways that oral transmission alone could not achieve.

The emergence of choreography as a creative art form with identifiable authors — as opposed to a craft passed from teacher to student or from court to court through living transmission — is generally associated with the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when ballet d'action (narrative ballet with expressive content, as opposed to divertissement) demanded that someone take responsibility for the coherence of the whole. Jean-Georges Noverre's Lettres sur la danse (1760) argued that the ballet master who designed the dances was an artist comparable to the poet or the painter, not merely a technician who set steps to music. This claim to authorship was radical at the time — dancers, like musicians in the same era, were typically classed as skilled craftsmen rather than creators. The elevation of the choreographer to authorial status took another century and a half to achieve full cultural recognition.

The twentieth century made choreography one of the most diverse and contested creative fields in the performing arts. Martha Graham's codification of a modern dance technique and her choreographic vocabulary — contraction and release, the spiral, the fall and recovery — constituted a total aesthetic system as distinctive as any classical style. Merce Cunningham separated choreography from music and narrative, using chance procedures to determine the sequence of movements and asking each art form in the performance to proceed independently. Pina Bausch's Tanztheater incorporated spoken text, autobiographical material, and theatrical imagery into dance, dissolving the boundary between choreography and theater. Each of these figures represented choreography as the act of constituting a world through organized movement — a definition that Noverre had glimpsed but the twentieth century required to be fully argued.