Expanded Choreography’s Infinite Extension: Contemporary Performance Vocabulary and Art History Context

Expanded choreography: a concept that originated in the visual arts

With the development and integration of the visual and performing arts, the definition of choreography has extended infinitely from point to line to plane. In her work On Stage, artist Maria Hassabi guides the exploration of a concept that has been frequently applied in European and North American art circles in recent years: expanded choreography.

During his lecture, River Lin explained that while this term is associated with choreography, it did not originate in dance circles but, rather, in the visual arts community to describe a type of practice that crosses the boundaries between dance and contemporary art. It emphasizes the generation of viewing experiences through movement and action in non-traditional theater settings, reflecting trends in the integration of the visual and performing arts over the recent two decades.

From Trisha Brown to Bruce Nauman: The body is a tool that every artist possesses

The starting point for Lin’s lecture was 1960s New York. Trisha Brown was part of the Judson Church movement, which questioned the essence of dance. Experimental creators began to liberate dance from theaters and bring it into everyday spaces and onto the streets and even the walls. For example, in 1970, Trisha Brown collaborated with artists to film Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, which featured a person suspended on a building exterior, redefining the relationship between space and movement based on action. Another notable work in this series by Trisha Brown was Walking on the Wall, which was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971.

The idea of pushing dance to its limits was not only revolutionary in dance circles, but also complemented the innovations taking place in the visual arts circles at that time. For example, video art pioneer Bruce Nauman conducted video experiments in his studio in which he pitted his body against the walls and floors, which can be considered movement-based spatial research. Using the walls and floors as fundamental spatial coordinates, he created gravity-defying and unusual movements, such as posing upside-down. These interdisciplinary works demonstrated that, “It’s not just dancers who think about choreography. Visual artists can also explore the possibilities for movement and space through the body.”

“Performance is a product of postwar cross-disciplinary art. It didn’t emerge due to the advent of new media, technology, or dance. In an art history context, artists used the body to conduct experiments in different spaces. Because the body is a tool that every artist possesses, performance became a form of cross-disciplinary expression.”

The definition and viewpoint of expanded choreography: Observations of MOMA

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York defines expanded choreography as the breaching of the increasingly porous border between dance and visual arts that started in the 1960s, birthing new forms of exhibition and performance. Dancers’ bodies entered fine arts museums and art galleries and appeared on the streets, bringing all-new ways of perceiving the body, spaces, and viewing. Lin emphasized that expanded choreography is not as simple as transplanting dance into exhibition spaces. Rather, the body in motion is at the core of viewing, initiating a new understanding of movements, spaces, objects, and even viewer placements.

French artist Xavier Le Roy created Retrospective for the 2016 Taipei Biennial at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. This artist essentially reflected on recurring questions. He observed the body from the perspective of landscape, then mimicked landscapes through changes in physical movement.

Maria Hassabi: The body as a living sculpture that crafts images

Hassabi was one of the featured artists in this lecture. Since the 2010s, she has presented a series of performances centered around slow motion in fine arts museums around the world. Using extremely slow movements, the body appears to be between a “still image” and a “moving image.” This is especially evident on a staircase, as dancers seem to be falling, but so slowly that you barely notice their movements.

Hassabi emphasizes that it is not performances that she creates but images. She uses an almost dramatic exhibition strategy that encourages viewers to observe her work for long periods and become aware of the conditions and methods of viewing.

Lin cited her representative works Plastic (commissioned by MoMA) and I’ll Be Your Mirror, which was shown at Tai Kwun Contemporary in 2024, and analyzed how she deploys bodies, sounds, and mirror reflections within an exhibition space to create living sculpture viewing experiences. Her body appeared to be an object “installed” in the space. Due to the extremely slow movements and constantly generated viewing rhythms and image meanings, the mirrored environment resembled the surface of water on which the dancer’s movements were amplified and refracted. Overlapping images reflected on the ceiling via a golden mirror dazzled the audience. Although this was a museum exhibition, it evoked the illusion of a theater space.

Hassabi emphasizes that it is not performances that she creates but images. She uses an almost dramatic exhibition strategy that encourages viewers to observe her work for long periods and become aware of the conditions and methods of viewing.

Return to the proscenium stage: The creative strategy for On Stage

Hassabi’s 2017 Stage series featured pink carpeted sets and the body as the medium for performance. In 2024, after more than two decades of experimenting with exhibitions and performances in fine arts museums, she created On Stage. For the first time she brought “generative image choreography” to black box theaters. Lin noted that she specifically chose a proscenium stage as her creative setting to reawaken the audience’s awareness of watching a theatrical work.

Visual art vs. theater: A cross-examination of the viewing experience

At the core of this work is a simple set of movements - from standing to squatting and back to standing - which is broken down into a 60-minute performance. This process was not improvisational. Rather, it was meticulously choreographed and rehearsed, with every inch of muscle use and speed planned in detail. This extreme stretching of time and control of movement made the body itself the point of generation for images, observations, and even spaces.

She especially chose to present this work on a proscenium stage, inviting audience members to regain awareness of their theater surroundings. This is an example of the induced viewing pathways or clues associated with her works.

Lin concluded by emphasizing that Hassabi’s creative vocabulary belongs to the visual arts but embodies a high-level of dramatic logic. No matter the choice of space, lighting, body placement, or how images appear to viewers, her core proposition revolves around questions of what is viewing and how the body becomes an image. These are dramatic concepts that have long been explored.

Her work is considered refreshing in visual arts circles and marks a reversal and an examination of theater audience viewing methods. Through this creative practice, we see that expanded choreography is not just a style, but also a set of questions: How does movement become art? How does viewing become part of the created work?