Operational Choreography

Abstract

The paper adresses dance in regard to logistical capitalism and its operational politics. Operational politics denotes the control of processes from their inside, regulated and modulated by their very own logic. Instead of subsuming processes to external regulators such as pregiven scripts, goals or acting and moving subjects, operational politics is based on the logic of process itself and its regulation via immanent techniques. In regard to movement, operational politics started to gain hold in the field of logistics in the 1960s. Over the last decades, these operational choreographies proliferated into all realms of society, creating a logistical regime that comprises modes of thinking as much as modes of existence and action. It governs the movements of economic production as much as the way we perceive, live and move. Dance – seen as a practice in which new modes of thinking, moving and acting as well as new forms of subjectivity are explored in a physical manner – became an integral part of this logistical regime: In dance, the logic of operations is exercised beyond the realm of business organization. The study of operational choreography in dance as it is proposed in the paper is therefore twofold: On the one hand, it offers an analysis of the modes of logistical power at work in performances. On the other hand, it reveals how performances investigate the logistical regime itself and its operational politics on a bodily level.