APPLIED CHOREOGRAPHY

Through applied choreography, I am able to bring together my two interests: social practice and choreographic practice. I employ choreographic thinking, ethnographic methods and embodied practices to respond to, intervene in, or raise awareness about systems of injustice, power, identity, and collective experience. My process is driven by questions rather than answers. How do we move in a world shaped by systems of power, exclusion, and erasure? How do we reclaim space, agency, and voice through movement? And how can choreography serve as both a method and a metaphor for resistance and collective transformation? This has been foundational to my work, which engages with decolonisation, queerness, and vulnerability.

What attracts me to applied choreography is its potential to moves dance beyond aesthetics into the realm of action, dialogue, and resistance. It allows us to rehearse new ways of being together, to embody collective desire, and to activate the imagination through the body. It re-centres artistic experience to one that is felt and lived, not only seen or heard. Most importantly, it reminds us that movement — of bodies, ideas, people, and power — is never neutral. Through applied choreography, I hope not only to give visibility to the marginalised body, but to activate its capacity to re-route the flow of power — offering interventions that are embodied, relational, and transformative.

✧ Core Principles
For me, applied choreography is not only about crafting movement, but about how we move with others, how we respond to the world, and how we generate meaning through the body. And these principles form the basis of my practice. They guide how I make, how I listen, and how I invite others in. They are not fixed rules, but evolving orientations — ways of attending to bodies, spaces, and relationships in motion. 

• Collaboration over Performance
  

  Collaboration is not passive inclusion — it is dynamic authorship. It allows the audience to choose how and when to engage, trusting that their contribution matters. In doing so, it reclaims agency in a world where many, especially marginalised bodies, are denied it. In this approach, agency is choreographic: it alters rhythm, timing, spatial relations, and meaning. Every action becomes a choice. Every non-action, a valid position. 

  Collaboration also activates co-emergence. The work becomes a live process shaped by collective energy, dialogue, and unpredictability. As the audience respond — sometimes in harmony, sometimes in friction — they compose something no single body could generate alone. This is choreography as mutual becoming. The choreographic space becomes one of shared authorship, where people move, decide, relate, and shape the unfolding of the work together.

• Relational over Representational

  I draw inspiration from dialogical aesthetics, somatics, and social practice art, where the process is not a means to an end but a vital part of the work’s meaning. I find that representation are often too abstract or distance, but applied choreography leans into immediacy, vulnerability, and exchange.

  In my work, I invite audience to enter into direct, embodied relation with me and with one another. The choreography is not about the artist — it is made with the artist. Meaning emerges through shared attention, presence, and encounter. My focus lies not in depicting or symbolising social realities, but in how audience engage — with me, with each other, with the space, and with the conditions of the engagement. It is less about showing and more about being-with. The question I ask is not: What do you see? but How are we here, together? The work becomes a choreography of reciprocity, where gestures are shaped by response, and presence is co-authored in real time.

• Context–Subject over Abstraction

  I see bodies and movements as shaped by histories, identities, and power structures that are both internal and external, visible and invisible. So when creating a work, I look at both the collective situation and the personal histories that shape each body’s presence. Instead of illustrating or explaining a context, I try to evolve with it. I ask: Who is here? What histories move through this space and body? What tensions, stories, conditions or possibilities shape this moment or live in these bodies? Every choreographic decision — of movement, language, rhythm, costume, and structure — emerges from within the lived and local conditions of individual body.

  Space is therefore no longer a neutral container, but part of the score. The body is not neutral — it is shaped by and shaping its situation. It is also not interchangeable — each body carries its unique stories, wounds, resistance, and potential. I want my work to speak from the situated and through the subjective body, instead of a neutral or universalised body.

• Movement as Change
  

  For me, movement is a way of practicing transformation. It is a space for rehearsing not only what we know, but what we are still becoming. Change does not happen after the performance; it is embedded within it. My work attempts to activate social and political muscles necessary to initiate change — our capacities to take space, yield space, respond, support, resist, and reorganise. I see them as real, embodied capacities that are strengthened only through practice.

  Choreography becomes a way for tracing, sensing, and rehearsing these muscles. Every gesture, pause, or redirection from the audience holds the potential to shift meaning and generate new directions. Choreography does not simply reflect change — it becomes a site where transformation is lived and alternate futures are rehearsed. What emerges is not a final product, but an ongoing proposition: What if change begins here, how can we move together?

✧ What I hope to achieve with applied choreography

• Mobilizes bodies as agents of change
  Dance becomes a form of protest, presence, and refusal—offering an embodied response to systems of oppression.
• Centers lived experience
  It values bodily knowledge as political, especially for marginalized groups and bodies whose narratives and lives are often excluded from dominant discourse.
• Disrupts norms
  It can unsettle fixed ideas about who belongs where, what counts as performance, and whose voices are heard.
• Creates temporary communities
  Through collaborative formats, it forms spaces of collective attention, reflection, and co-creation—fostering solidarity and empathy.

Applied choreography, for me, is not just about making performances — it’s about making space. I don’t choreograph toward a polished product — I choreograph toward possibility: space for multiple truths to surface, for bodies to be witnessed in their complexity, and for change to be rehearsed in real time. In a time dominated by quick fixes, spectacle, virtuosity, and the pursuit of perfection, I turn to applied choreography as a slower, relational, and resistance practice — one that asks not just what can we perform, but how do we want to live, together?