Daria - Choreographic tools of body capturing

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Choreographing Proximity

Daria Iuriichuk

Imagine coming across a girl in your Instagram feed: her face very close to the camera, she’s maintaining eye contact, and smiling kindly, so that you can notice her cute cheek dimples and feel hypnotized. She creates a sense of presence that is almost uncomfortably intimate, leveraging the illusion of physical proximity to connect with thousands of followers. On platforms like Instagram or OnlyFans, these techniques of approximation become a conspicuous tool for creating intimacy, often blurring boundaries between public performance and private connection. However, there is still a distance.

In response to Olga Goriunova’s political call to confront the erasure of distance between digital subjects and “the humans, entities, and processes they are connected to,” which are “constructed not only to sell products but also to imprison, medically treat, or discriminate against individuals”[1], I propose focusing on the ways proximity can be (de)constructed. To explore this, I suggest using choreographic approaches as a conceptual framework for engaging with the critical and creative potentialities of algorithmic thinking. Platforms and algorithms, much like choreographic systems, structure interactions by managing attention, (de)constructing affect and production of body taxonomies. Emerged as a Louis’ XIV court practice of political control "to regulate — and even synchronize — the bodies and behaviours of his courtiers"[2], choreography, a tool of writing down movement, could be observed as a ‘technique designed to capture actions’ [3], a medium that abstracts movement into data, enabling further technical or creative processes. By abstracting bodily movement into data, choreography transforms it into systems of control and knowledge production, shaping behaviour by training bodies to perform socially acceptable identities. Similarly, digital data aggregated today to mobilize bodies within a fluid logic of surveillance capitalism, where movement itself is harnessed for commodification. In this sense, choreography and algorithms both function as technologies of subject formation, conditioning our behaviours and interactions in increasingly automated and commodified ways.

Within contemporary dance, various strategies have emerged to critically reframe the score, construct affect, and make techniques of approximation visible and manipulable. In dealing with choreography, dance brings the body into play, challenging the disembodied narratives of digital intimacy. In Candela Capitán’s dance piece SOLAS [4]approximation techniques are explored from a detached, bird's-eye perspective. On stage, five webcam performers in pink tight suits perform their own erotic solos in front of their laptops, simultaneously broadcasting live with an audience via the Chaturbate platform. Capitán reveals the gap between the digital subject and the labour that sustains it, making this distance strikingly palpable. By exposing the fractured connections and isolating conditions of digital performance, SOLAS lays bare the mechanisms through which intimacy is manufactured, commodified, and consumed in virtual spaces. Candela’s critical gesture is achieved by revealing living bodies behind digital subjects. By foregrounding the performers’ corporeal presence, it insists on the presence of the body as essential for critique in the age of algorithmic mediation.

  1. ↑ Goriunova, Olga. “The Digital Subject: People as Data as Persons.” Theory, Culture and Society 36 (6), 2019, pp. 125–145.
  2. ↑ Mcclary, Susan. “Unruly Passions and Courtly Dances: Technologies of the Body in Baroque Music,” From the royal to the Republican body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France, edited by Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg, University of California Press, 2023, pp. 85–112.
  3. ↑ Lepecki, André. “Choreography and Pornography.” Post-dance, edited by Danjel Andersson, Mette Edvardsen, Mårten Spångberg, MDT, 2017, pp. 67–82.
  4. ↑ Capitán, Candela. "SOLAS." YouTube, uploaded by CANDELA CAPITÁN, 25 April 2024 , https://youtu.be/TQlQXZGt70k?si=K-97EdxqpBvOuNui.
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