Daria - Choreographic tools of body capturing

In this essay, I aim to explore choreographic approaches to distance and proximity 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. Building on André Lepecki’s notion of choreography as a ‘technique designed to capture actions’ (Lepecki, 2017), I examine it as a medium that abstracts movement into data, enabling further technical or creative processes. This perspective allows us to observe the history of body-capturing systems as a whole to examine how they redefine the epistemological status of the body as a pattern and movement as a score. By borrowing from choreography's capacity to render the dynamics of distance and proximity as visible and manipulable, we gain tools to critique how platforms mediate our attention, behaviours, and data. Choreography’s historical engagement with questions of power, movement, and embodied agency provides a lens to expose and subvert these mechanisms.

By abstracting bodily movement into data, choreography transforms it into systems of control and knowledge production, shaping behavior by training bodies to perform socially acceptable identities. In Orchésographie (1589), one of the earliest dance manuals by Thoinot Arbeau, choreography emerges as a written form of knowledge transmission. ‘In Orchesographie, a young lawyer returns from Paris to Langres to visit his old master of “computation (...) Capriol asks for dance lessons to attain what Erving Goffman called a socially acceptable “performance of the self” – a performance that would give the young lawyer admission into social theatrics, into society’s normative heterosexual dancing’ (Lepecki, 2006: 25). During the Baroque era, choreography evolved further, functioning as a tool of propaganda (Maravall, 1986). By codifying steps, postures, and sequences, dance emphasized precision, symmetry, and control, aligning the disciplined body with a higher spiritual or intellectual order. As Susan McClary and Robert Isherwood stressed, Louis XIV used dance as a source of political control ‘to regulate — and even synchronize — the bodies and behaviours of his courtiers’ (McClary, 2023). 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 behaviors and interactions in increasingly automated and commodified ways.

Responding to Olga Goriunova’s political appeal to confront the erasure of the distance between ‘digital subjects and the humans, entities, and processes they are connected to’ (Goriunova, 2019), I want to focus on the ways of (de)constructing proximity and distance suggested by dance history. From Isadora Duncan’s embrace of free movement to postmodernism’s celebration of improvisation, 20th-century dance sought to liberate movement from the constraints of choreography. Within this history, a range of strategies emerged to critically reframe the score and construct affect. This choreopolitical approach (Lepecki) enables us to engage critically and creatively with this spatiality of how platforms choreograph our behaviours, distances, and proximities, offering tools not just to analyze but to subvert and reimagine these dynamics in late-capitalist contexts. To what extent can these strategies be applied to undermining the affective economy of platform cultures?

In her book Choreographing Problems (2015), Bojana Cvejić traces the evolution of how dance has engaged with affect, from the modernist focus on self-expression to the anti-expressive and anti-representationalist strategies of American postmodern dance. Cvejić identifies a contemporary synthesis of these opposing approaches in the work of choreographer Mette Ingvartsen. In her performance 50/50, Ingvartsen’s naked body becomes a surface onto which various cultural constructions of affect are projected, functioning like a screen. This surface serves as an interface engaging affect not as a representation of artist’s emotions but as a object oscillating between distance and approximation. The viewer experiences the affect, but then sees it created. Such post-dance strategies employ affect to subvert traditional notions of expression, using it instead as a means of deconstructing and reconfiguring relational dynamics. On platforms like Instagram or OnlyFans, choreography of affect becomes a central tool for creating intimacy, often blurring boundaries between public performance and private connection. Some of OF bloggers cultivates a sense of closeness with their audience, by positioning themselves near the camera, constructing the experience, for instance, of lying next to the viewer in the early morning. The choreography is very distinct here: coming very close to the camera, smiling kindly, so that we can notice cute cheeks dimples, and maintaining unbroken eye contact. This technique of approximation creates a sense of presence that is almost uncomfortably intimate, leveraging the illusion of physical proximity to connect with thousands of followers. Though its still a distance. Similarly, technologies like Descript's Eye Contact Feature or NVIDIA’s Eye Contact created to correct gaze in video calls, are designed to construct the sense of connection that transcends physical absence. That brings us back to Orchesographie. As Lepecki noticed, choreography as a practice of writing down the dance creates a chance to dance with someone who is no longer present, ‘telecommunicational capacity to call the spectral’ (Lepecki, 2006: 27).

In Candela Capitán’s dance piece SOLAS, approximation techniques are examined from a sobering bird's-eye view. On stage, five webcam performers simultaneously execute their own erotic solos in front of their laptops, connecting with an audience via the Chaturbate platform while performing on stage. Capitán reveals the gap between the digital subject and the labor 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. As Irit Rogoff noticed, the contemporary dance’s statement is in insisting on corporeal presence (Rogoff, 2023). But does bringing the body into play necessary for critique? By foregrounding the corporeal presence of the performers, Capitán challenges the disembodied narratives of digital intimacy, raising critical questions about whether reclaiming the body is essential for meaningful critique in the age of algorithmic mediation.

1. Cvejić, B. (2015). Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance by London: Palgrave Macmillan.
2. Goriunova, O. (2019). The digital subject: people as data as persons. Theory Culture & Society, 36(6), 125–145.
3. Lepecki, A. (2017). In Post-dance. Eds. Danjel Andersson, Mette Edvardsen, Mårten Spångberg. MDT.
4. Lepecki, A. (2006). Exhausting dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. Routledge.
5. Maravall, J. (1986) Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure , trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
6. Mcclary, S. (2023). In From the royal to the Republican body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France. Eds. Melzer, S. E., & Norberg, K. Univ of California Press.
7. Rogoff, I. (2023) Without Prescription: André Lepecki and Irit Rogoff in conversation. https://youtu.be/440ZsBkb_0Q?si=XEjsk8cSz-_m2hR2