This series presents advanced yet accessible studies of a rich field of new choreographic work which is embedded in the global, transnational and intermedial context. It introduces artists, companies and scholars who contribute to the conceptual and technological rethinking of what constitutes movement, blurring old boundaries between dance, theatre and performance. The series considers new aesthetics and new contexts of production and presentation, and discusses the multi-sensory, collaborative and transformative potential of these new world choreographies.

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In his analysis of the recent European crisis, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2012) looks beyond its economic causes and implications and theorises the role played by poetry and the emotional body in rediscovering the relationship between language and desire and reopening the possibility of social solidarity. Drawing on Félix Guattari’s (1995) reflections on the correlation between singular refrain and universal chaos in the reinvention of subjectivity, Berardi conceptualises rhythm as a poetic feature which can contribute to restoring our ability to conjoin with other singularities and with our social and cosmic environment. This article considers how a close engagement with rhythmical, repetitive and cyclical performative practices in examples of recent European choreography may offer ways of responding to today’s crisis of social cohesion, reimagining channels of intensive communication. In particular, the article looks at works by the Italian artist Alessandro Sciarroni (Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow?, 2012 and Chroma_don’t be frightened of turning the page, 2017) and by the London-based duo Igor and Moreno (Idiot-Syncrasy, 2013) and discusses how, in revisiting elements of folk traditions, they mobilise their potential as formal, semantic and affective modalities that can sustain a reconfiguration of social freedom.

Introduction: Choreography and Im/possibilities in the PresentOver the last decade, governmental instability and widespread financial crises both in Britain and in continental Europe have been the background of bewildering events through which problematic political and ethical conjunctures have become day-to-day realities: the refugee crisis, exacerbated by the Syrian civil war and by the measures and legislation implemented in a number of countries to control the flow of migrants; the 2016 British referendum and the civic turmoil and protest marches provoked by the vote to leave the European Union vis-à-vis the xenophobic sentiment it unleashed; London's Grenfell Tower fire on 24 June 2017, which killed over seventy people and injured an equal number among the occupants of this working-class housing complex, leading to public outrage and to demands for independent investigations into building regulations and fire safety. These are but few of the most emblematic events that have brought the question of borders and the issue of difference and discrimination to the forefront of political discourse in the United Kingdom; events that speak of the dangerous unpredictability of contemporary politics and of its increasingly uneasy relationship to ethics. I propose to consider these events as im/possible realities1insofar as they materialize as situations that are ethically and politically precariouswhich demand positioning, and ultimately also action. This article aims to address the question of what choreographic forms such positioning and such action might take, beyond and/or alongside direct political engagement.September 2019 version, before final copyediting 2 How might choreography attend to the ongoing differentiation and increasing complexity of today's socio-political environment in ways that escape the dominant logic of fear and envision new spaces of commonality? How might dance practices intervene in how causality and agency are conceived of, mobilizing a response as well as a sense of responsibility to the specific configurations that are produced in each spatio-temporal conjuncture? How might choreodramaturgical processes engage with the paradoxical tensions between doing and undoing inscribed in the world's becoming, and grapple with the entanglement of the possible with the impossible? This article approaches the choreographic as a mode of relationality that acknowledges the shifting nature of boundaries and the exclusions implied in any particular encounter, in any specific configuration; it interrogates dance as a site for reorienting horizons of possibility and materializing the workings of the world's ongoing historicity. I propose to think of the precariousness and ambiguity of the events that I sketched above from the perspective of new materialist thought, and specifically through the lens of Karen Barad's notions of indeterminacy and intra-action, which, in dialogue with Donna Haraway's (2004) concept of diffraction, compose an onto-epistemology that is inextricably linked to ethical discourse...

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