Choreography "from start to finish". A collective, (inter)corporeal, everyday work

I consider the process of choreographic creation - from the improvisation of short sequences to the overall structure of a dance theatrical performance - and focus on the ways in which the artwork changes and continues to change during such a collective and negotiative, situated and emergent, everyday and mundane process. Data comes from my ethnographic research on the world of dance, and include interviews, fieldnotes and video-recordings. The choreographic creative process circularly runs from improvisation to modification through repetition and co-occurrent evaluation. Improvisational moments emerge amid more compositional and reflexive ones, and the other way round. Yet everything happens during performing - that is, in action. The action of knowing bodies. Sequences of movements and bodily-kin(aesth)etic configurations for single dancing bodies are usually created on the basis of improvisation, by the choreographer (alone or with an assistant) and/or by the dancers. Yet, mostly, there is a group of co- dancers, and this allow second level configurations of the bodies: co-dancers are visually, spatially and often bodily in relation with one each other and the surrounding space, and this is prominent among the meaning-making practices of choreographic creation. These dimensions of choreography strongly demand collective work - even simply for the ongoing evaluation of the artwork, not to mention the (pragmatically and/or aesthetically) necessary modifications. During and through rehearsals, indeed, the choreographic artwork progressively takes shape trough practical adjustments, aesthetic choices, problem-solving and so on. I shall analyse in more detail this collective, negotiative process of art creation.