How Social Choreographies Re-Figure the Urban Space

Abstract

Urban spaces are choreographed orders. This is evident not only in the architecture and infrastructure but also in the organisation of people’s movements. The article explores the question of how public spaces are re-figured through choreographic orders and movement practices. To this end, the concept of social choreography in urban space is outlined. Social choreography describes the relationship between macro- and microstructure, order and practice. On the one hand, it shows social spaces as choreographed spaces. Choreography is understood here as normative and representative. Its order regulates the flow of movement and thus also controls the patterns of social perception and experience. On the other hand, social choreography addresses an emergent order, which develops in social situations. This perspective focuses on the movements and physical interactions that conventionalise or undermine and disrupt the established order. The relationship between macro- and microstructure is illustrated using the example of artistic interventions and choreographed protest cultures.

In 1966, the Italian architect and designer Aldo Rossi (1966/1982) described the city as a work of art. The city, it could be added, is a dynamic work of art, a mobile and rhizome-like formation that has developed specific structures in its materiality and rules, in its laws and habits. While these structures change with history, they also give cities a ‘logic of their own’ (Berking & Löw, 2008). Another view of the city is experience-based and that of the city dwellers. For them, the city is a lived world and perceptible in and through movement. In urban research, the city is generally viewed from these two perspectives: from the perspective of space and urban planning as materiality, architecture, built environment and spatial infrastructure on the one hand, and as a living and perceptual space of residents, passers-by, migrants or tourists on the other hand. Martina Löw (2022) has attempted to bring these two perspectives together by introducing the body as the central mediator for a sociology of space.

However, these views of the city do not take a third perspective into account: the order of movement in cities. The choreographic order (i.e., the organisation of the movement flow) designates the urban space as a place of movement practice, as a space in which people live and organise their lives. This article is dedicated to this choreographic perspective. I argue that materialised orders in urban space and urban practices can be read as social choreographies. Movements of bodies not only take place in cities, but also create urban orders through their practices and are therefore also of interest to sociological urban research. This article thus aims to supplement urban theoretical thinking with this choreographic aspect.

In the first section, I develop the idea that choreographies in urban spaces can be described as an interplay of social micro and macro structures, from a choreographic point of view this means of movement order and movement practice. I then introduce the concept of social choreography and outline research approaches to social choreographies in urban spaces. Finally, the ambivalent interplay between movement order and movement practice is illustrated using two examples: political forms of protest and artistic interventions in public space.

Inside/Out. The Movement Order of the City

Urban planning as well as architecture and spatial planning understand the social order of the urban as a spatial structure. They create the materialised environment, the built urban space, and thus also the choreographic order of the city. This is because the spatial design of the city also organises the flow of movement: the flow of people on their everyday journeys between work, leisure, consumption and living; and also the flow of goods, data and capital. Urban and spatial planners traditionally take a bird’s eye view of the city. They see the city as a panoramic city and the urban space as a container on which they impose patterns of organisation. The city appears as a choreographed panopticon of power. It is the panoptic view: the view of the city from the outside, as an image, and as a map.

This panoptic city model competes with a city concept that shows the city from the inside, in participation, in wandering through, in experiencing and living. It is a city as it was already explored in the 1960s by ethnographic methods such as psychogeography and the dérive of the Situationist International (Knabb, 2024) and as described by the French sociologist Michel de Certeau (1974/1984) in a practice-theoretical perspective. From this perspective, the city has a confusing order and an irregular rhythm. It appears unmanageable, branched and ramified. The choreographic order is created situationally and performatively by how people move around the city. This internal view of the city makes it impossible to describe the city solely as a system with a clear, well thought-out spatial structure and a predetermined movement order or to assign it a clear image of movement (e.g., as a labyrinth, as an ornament, or as a network). From this perspective of daily practice and perception, the city can rather be described as a rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977). This rhizome-like structure of the urban is not recognisable from a bird’s eye view: ‘The panoramic city is a “theoretical” (i.e., visual) illusion, i.e. an image that only comes about by forgetting and failing to recognise the practical processes’ (de Certeau, 1974/1984, p. 181). In contrast to the planned and easily legible city of the ‘panopticians’ described by Michel Foucault (2020), de Certeau, like Walter Benjamin (2002), imagines a ‘wandering city’ of flaneurs.

These two urban models – the panoptic city and the rhizome-like city – are not contradictory. Rather, they interact with each other in the urban habitat. As this text aims to show, there are two interdependent and complementary ways of the choreographic order of the city. In their interplay, they can develop various relationships: different relations of power, domination, hegemony, marginalisation, exclusion, segregation, resistance, or criticism. This can be seen, for example, when transport infrastructures serve car traffic without taking pedestrians, cyclists, scooters or e-scooters into account, leading to unregulated movement practices and chaos in the choreographic order. Interrelationships between structure and situation, order and practice are also recognisable in the context of digitalisation of the urban. One example is Google Street View, in which the panoptic and rhizome-like city branches out and urban experience is increasingly linked to digital cityscapes. Google Street View shows the view from above and below, from outside and inside, from an observational and participatory perspective. The monopoly position of Google Street View influences and shapes people’s perception of the city.

Google Street View, with its combination of macro and micro perspectives, is a good example of a choreographic view of the city. What are its characteristics?

Social Figuration as Choreography

The term choreography is composed of the Greek chorós, meaning dance floor (i.e., a framed performance space where movement or dance takes place), and the Greek graphós or graphein, meaning writing or scribing (Klein, 2019). Choreography can therefore be understood as spatial writing. The most general definition of choreography is: the organisation of bodies in space and time. From a sociological perspective, this definition opens up several perspectives. On the one hand, it raises the question of how hegemony, inequality, resistance, violence, etc. are embedded in choreographic (urban) orders and, on the other hand, how social structural categories such as gender, class, race and age are represented and lived out. This is where the concept of social choreography comes in.

The term social choreography was first introduced in 2005 by the literary scholar Andrew Hewitt (2005). Analysing literary writings from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, he asks to what extent choreography serves as a metaphor for modernity. In the introduction of his book, he points to the connections between aesthetics and society (Hewitt, 2005, p. 12) – a claim that has previously been made by other authors (Martin, 1998). However, it remains unclear how choreography should be defined and analysed as an aesthetic form of social order.

I have positioned my understanding of social choreography in this gap. It combines a sociological and a dance studies approach: it expands the dance studies concept of choreography to include a sociological dimension and describes this both on the macro level of social structures (e.g., in the case of urban choreographies and the materiality of urban space) and on the micro level of social situations (e.g., created by movement practices). My understanding of choreography is based on the concept of choreography in contemporary dance art. Here, choreography is not (only) understood as a pre-script, as movement order in the sense of a regulation or a set of rules, as is common in the traditional understanding of the term choreography. Rather, social choreography refers to the complex relationship between macro- and microstructures in the choreography itself: the relationships between the social order, which is inscribed as a symbolic structure in the choreographed urban space, and the emergent order, which is generated by people situationally and performatively. This concept of social choreography makes it possible to understand the history of social order as an order of movement (e.g., the transformation of urban transport infrastructure since the 1950s, from wide roads for car traffic to car-free zones) and to examine political concepts of urban order from the perspective of movement aesthetics (e.g., the historicisation of Frankfurt’s city centre).

Choreographic orders are omnipresent as aesthetic patterns of social order in urban space, for example, in the way gardens and parks are designed, in transport infrastructure, in architecture, in the cultivation of nature, in the organisation of cultural performances, at courtly festivals, at mass events (such as military parades, party conventions, pop concerts and football matches), or at the various events in post-industrial and theatricalised (inner) cities. As an aesthetic model of social order, social choreography also focuses on social categories such as gender, class, ethnicity, race and age by concentrating on socially differentiated movement practices. This is because spaces become socially charged when movement practices are inscribed into them, thus transforming them into socially distinguishable spaces. For example, neither marginalised city districts and ‘dangerous places’ (Schmincke, 2009) nor places of power staging and gated communities are solely characterised by in- or exclusive spatial concepts but also by specific modes of movement practices (e.g. security and insecurity) that performatively confirm these spatial concepts.

By combining macro and micro perspectives, my concept of social choreography ties in with the concept of figuration which Norbert Elias introduced and placed at the root of his sociology of figuration to solve the fundamental theoretical problem of sociology: the connection between macro and micro structures (Elias, 1970/1978). Elias describes a figuration by ‘interdependency chains’ of actors. Accordingly, orders do not precede a figuration but are generated through interactions. A figuration can therefore be understood as both a representative and an emergent order. Figurations do not change abruptly but in a processual and structured manner.

The term figuration is helpful for the concept of social choreography as it is relationally determined, deals with the interrelations of actions and defines (bodily) actions as the basis for the social. This distinguishes the term figuration on the one hand from action-theoretical concepts that focus on the actions of individuals or on the intentionality of action and on the other hand from structural-theoretical concepts that refer to prior orders.

In turn, the concept of social choreography expands and modifies the concept of figuration by viewing the organisation of bodies in time and space (i.e., the choreographic order) as an essential component of a social figuration. It understands the interdependency network primarily as an interdependency of human bodies and their movements but also allows consideration of objects, things, architecture and infrastructure. Therefore, social choreography examines how bodies, materials and objects organise themselves and relate to each other interactively and intercorporally (e.g. in road traffic, at public rallies, during protests or at demonstrations). This also makes it compatible with the concept of re-figuration which is being developed in the research cluster at TU Berlin (Christmann et al., 2022; Knoblauch & Löw, 2020, 2024). The concept of re-figuration, which prominently introduces space as a social and theoretical category, is of particular interest for the concept of social choreography. Based on the assumptions that social processes manifest themselves primarily in space and that spaces are the object and place of social conflicts, the concept of re-figuration focusses on the spatial arrangements of social processes. Here, the concept of social choreography can introduce a further perspective by combining the spatial-theoretical view with a perspective of movement and choreography.

Choreography, understood as a prescription, as the inscription of social order, and thus as the implementation of power structures in the urban space, describes a representative order. Choreography, understood as an emergent order that is generated in a social situation through movement practice, is performative concept. The existence of an emergent order does not mean that power relations are not inscribed in the normative order of space. From a sociological perspective, interaction between people – and also with materials and objects – is impossible outside of a predetermined order. Yet, an emergent order creates realities and can confirm or undermine the predetermined order. The latter is the case, for example, when someone crosses the road on a red light because there are no cars in sight. Resistance to a predetermined spatial order is situational and performative. In this respect, the question is how representative and performative choreographic orders interact with each other in urban space. The relationship between macro- and microstructures, between structure and situation in social choreographies can be described as a dynamic relationship that is constantly being rebalanced and which also proves to be ambivalent. On the one hand, it leads to a conventionalisation and standardisation of social norms and rules. On the other hand, it offers potential for disruptions and interventions. This ambivalence will now be illustrated using examples of political protest and artistic interventions in public space.

Choreographed Protest and Artistic Interventions in Public Space

Since the 1990s, different new forms of political protest and artistic intervention in public space have emerged worldwide in the wake of globalisation. These include activists abseiling from buildings, glueing their bodies to the asphalt, or chaining themselves to railway tracks; performances in shopping malls; flash mobs in train stations; crowds gathered on main squares via social networks; and actions by groups and NGOs such as the Berlin-based Centre for Political Beauty and the Fridays for Future movement. Unlike pop cultures, like hip-hop or techno, which have been conquering public space with jams, battles and parades since the 1970s (Klein, 2004; Klein & Friedrich, 2012), these actions aim to disrupt the predetermined order of urban space.

One example of the interplay between political protest, artistic intervention, public assembly and global mass movement is One Billion Rising (Stein-Hinrichsen, 2022). It is a global movement that aims to end violence against women and girls by mobilising one billion women to rise, resist and unite. One Billion Rising is a global campaign founded by playwright and activist Eve Ensler in 2012, as part of the V-Day movement, to end rape and sexual violence against women. The ‘billion’ refers to the UN statistic that one in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime, totalling about one billion women globally. All over the world (2025 in Germany in over 160 cities), women dance a previously rehearsed (video clip) dance to the song Break the Chain in public places and squares on 14 February. For the dancing women and for the spectators, it makes a difference in perception and experience whether this dance takes place in Berlin, Mumbai, Brazil, Moscow or Seoul, for example, as the normative order of the urban space and the social choreography inscribed in the space have their own ‘logics’.

With the concept of social choreography, we can view these forms of intervention and resistance from the perspective of moving bodies, further develop body-sociological approaches from the perspective of movement, choreography and performance, and also expand the concept of re-figuration. This also brings interdisciplinary research questions for urban sociology into focus, like those about the theatricality and performativity of current protest cultures and artistic interventions (i.e., the practices of embodiment, staging and rituals), about the relationship between theatricality and reality, and about the relation between the aesthetic form and the political content (Benford & Hunt, 1992; Kershaw, 1997).

The perspective on social choreography addresses an interdisciplinary network of physical-aesthetic, scenic-theatrical and choreographic practices in urban space. The methodological approach brings together questions of social theory, political theory, urban theory, performance theory and choreography theory. It combines the corresponding methodological procedures of social and movement research, including empirical social research (e.g., ethnographies, interview procedures) and movement analysis, media analysis, choreography and performance analysis, and a praxeology (Hirschauer & Amann, 1997; Klein, 2024; Schindler, 2011; Schmidt, 2012). This use of mixed methods also allows for a sharpening of the perspective on the different logics of the political and the artistic (Bourdieu, 1995; 2011), thus bringing the boundaries and connections between politics and the political, and between the social fields of politics and art into focus.

Aestheticisation of the Political: Activist Performances

With the digitalisation of communication, a new culture of participation has emerged across the globe, especially in urban metropolises. Enabled by digital communication networks and above all social media, new forms, practices and venues for a culture of protest in public space have emerged at the turn of the 21st century which negotiate issues of coexistence beyond institutionalised politics and officially legitimised political stages. Feminist activities are particularly striking; they are the prototypes of what can be described as ‘activist performance’. Pia Wiegmink (2011) defines it as follows:

Activist performance is a form of political action which is located outside the political consensual realm of party politics as it is not institutionally affiliated with parties, unions or other organisations. Activist performance comes into existence as a physical act of dissent of engaged citizens, and because it takes place outside the institutionalised realm of politics, activist performance uses alternative aesthetics to articulate, or rather, to stage its political agenda. In this sense, [. . .] activist performance can be conceived as the (temporary) formation of a counterpublic which both aesthetically as well as ideologically defies prevailing, dominant political discourses. (p. 79)

These ‘activist performances’ tie in with the feminist performances of the 1960s (e.g., Yoko Ono and Valie Export) and combine feminist theory and protest with the artistic format of performance. In contrast to the feminist activities of female artists in the 1960s, which were also closely linked to the feminist movements of the time, today it is not individual artists but collectives that conquer public space, sometimes anonymously. And they often express their protest in and through dance. They all have the same goal: to make violence against women public and to identify it globally as a structural element of a heteronormative society.

Examples of these ‘feminist activist performances’ include ‘La una mas’, a protest movement that emerged in Mexico in 2001, ‘La una menos’, a movement that emerged in Argentina in 2015, ‘One Billion Rising’, a movement launched in 2012, the ‘me too’ movement that emerged in 2017 in the wake of the so-called ‘Weinstein’ scandal, ‘LasTesis’, a Chilean collective that first called for resistance in 2018. All of these initiatives quickly spread to other cities and countries and have become global ‘mass movements’.

With their interventions in the public space, these performative protest cultures draw on models from the artistic field that stand for an expanded concept of art. Precursors are artistic movements of the 1920s such as the Dadaists, the Futurists, the Bauhaus theatre and the Surrealists, as well as the Situationist International of the 1960s, Sponti movements triggered by Commune I, the Autonomia movement in Italy, and the fun guerrilla actions of the 1980s. Simultaneously, these activist performance cultures tie in with a street culture that has been established in European cities since the 19th century which translates and politicises everyday situations and cultural traditions into public space: carnival-like parades; street theatre; performances and (tractor) parades; and the occupation of houses, crossroads, building sites and railway tracks (Kaschuba, 1991). In these protest cultures, the word movement is not only meant metaphorically but also literally in reference to physical, scenic and choreographic actions, a fact that has not yet been taken into account in theories of social movement. From the perspective of social choreography, the protest body is not only a medium insofar as it serves as a carrier of signs and symbols or a representation of social categories or, in the case of risky actions, is put at risk. Rather, the perspective of social choreography shows that the social figuration is based on the choreographic organisation of bodies and that this is what creates the protest in the first place. Bodies do something; they do not merely represent protest.

Social choreographies of protest can be understood as a rule-based and structured improvisation. The emergent order created by protest movements is a collaborative process organised by the participants. In this sense, the choreographer William Forsythe said that ‘choreography is about organizing bodies in space, or organizing bodies with other bodies, or a body with other bodies in an environment that is organized’ (Forsythe, 2011). From the perspective of contemporary choreography, the choreographed protest can therefore be understood as a real-time composition (Klein, 2019), as a rule-based improvisation that is created performatively as a choreographic order at the moment of performance. This can be observed paradigmatically in flash mobs when actors simultaneously follow a previously agreed code of conduct (i.e., a score) in response to an agreed signal. Due to the unpredictability inherent to the choreography of protest, which develops in real time, the situational decisions of the actors and their ability to act creatively in a politically explosive situation under time pressure, while perceiving and interacting with the others, are of fundamental importance. This highlights the aesthetic ambivalence, as creative practices in protest movements can be interpreted not only as resistance to prevailing norms, but also as part of the post-Fordist regime of creativity (McRobbie, 2015; Reckwitz, 2012).

Against this backdrop, new forms of a democratic public sphere cannot only be read as ‘anti-movements’ without prospects as is often assumed in public debates. In the 1970s, for example, Peter Handke denounced street theatre as apolitical ‘theatre’, while critical theorists condemned the aestheticisation process of subcultures as ‘anaesthetisation’. Contrary to these positions, questions arise as to whether the processes of aestheticisation themselves reveal another form of politics, an ‘art of freedom’ (Rebentisch, 2012), and whether the aestheticisation of protest can be understood as a search for new guidelines for democratic politics and new forms of urban coexistence.

Politicisation of the Aesthetic: Performance Art in Public Space

Searches for new perspectives on politics or for fields of social experimentation also manifest themselves in performance art projects in public spaces. Their historical origins are well known and have been discussed many times. Whether influenced by Happenings (Kaprow), Noveau Réalistes (Tinguely), Fluxus (Paik, Beuys), Viennese Actionism (Brus, Mühl, Nitsch) or the early performance artists (Horn, Naumann, Export, Ono, Abramović), in the 1960s and 1970s, performance art in particular was increasingly concerned with public life. Contemporary performance art has been building on these artistic works since the 1990s, but its work is situated in a different social context, which is interpreted in performance research as post-Fordist (Hardt & Negri, 2001, 2004; Virno, 2004). With the post-Fordist and neoliberal concept of labour, artistic work itself has taken on a different social meaning. Creativity, originality, improvisation, spontaneity, innovativeness and the connection between work and life (i.e., what was once considered a genuine characteristic of the art avant-garde) have now become the required characteristics of work in post-Fordist and neoliberal societies, where creativity has become the leading dispositive (Reckwitz, 2012). Artists were the pioneers in this development (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999/2007). But the social status of art has also changed. While art in the critical, modernist theory of Theodor W. Adorno receives its social legitimisation through its autonomy and critical distance, the role of artists is changing in such a way that art is increasingly defined by its public function as part of mediation work within the social fields of education, culture and applied science.

Dance and performance projects also operate within this new tension between critical avant-garde, innovative artistic participation projects and commissioned works by various clients (e.g., cities, municipalities, schools, authorities, churches, educational and cultural institutions, and associations). ‘Reclaim the streets’, a protest movement for the reclamation of public space; the Israeli performance collective ‘Public Movement’; the group ‘Pink and Silver’; and the creative street protest or ‘Volxtheaterkarawane’, an Austrian art project against racism, are examples of projects that test forms of experimental social practice through the interplay of artistic-creative and participatory modes of action. Even established theatres are looking to take to the streets. An example is the Hamburg Schauspielhaus which has been transforming Veddel, a district characterised by poverty, unemployment and migration, into a stage since 2014 with its New Hamburg project, thereby also contributing to its gentrification.

In dance and performance research, there is a consensus that participatory art projects create alternative ways of seeing and perceiving urban life and develop tools in their working methods to explore forms of public participation (Burri et al., 2014; Klein, 2005, 2017; Schütz, 2013a, 2013b; van Eikels, 2013). To this end, they leave the conventional spaces of the theatre and move into the public space or other urban locations (e.g., schools, hospitals and homeless shelters). At the same time, they declare the theatre itself to be a place of social participation and a forum for assembly, thus questioning the traditional theatre framework. According to performance theory (van Eikels, 2013), they redefine the political task and public relevance of performance art by penetrating the public space and addressing everyday politics as incorporated power politics. Contemporary European performance art in particular has developed concepts that aesthetically process cultural and political life in public space and experiment with participation in public life (e.g., the works of Gob Squad, Lab of Insurrectional Imagination, La Pocha Nostra, LIGNA, SheShePop, Turbo Pascal, Rimini Protokoll, Femen, Pussy Riot, Toyshop Collective and Space Hijackers). They illustrate that every public assembly, even if it is closely linked to digital media, presupposes a co-presence of the actors (Fischer-Lichte, 2008). In addition, according to my argument, public assemblies and interventions declare the co-presence of the actors to be the goal. Performance art proves to be a suitable field for testing whether and how communication is possible in public spaces with people from different cultures and milieus with different lifestyles and attitudes.

The approach of social choreography expands the theatre-theoretical perspective because it not only asks for the potential of a reflection on the foundations of one’s own art form but also focuses on practices of embodiment concerning both the choreographic order of the space and the choreography of the actors: What choreographic order characterises the respective urban space? How can the relationship between the choreographed space and the actors movement practice be described? Which gestures are legitimate gestures in public space? How are spatial and temporal orders embodied in the movement practices of the actors? Which figurations are affirmative of the choreographed urban space and which undermine it? By extension, the following questions, organised along three different levels of investigation, become relevant:

1. On the physical level: How do art projects based on body and movement practices test practices of self-empowerment? How are bodies used in such processes?

2. On the theatrical level: Where does the intervention take place (e.g., street, square, or semi-public spaces)? What theatrical materials and strategies are used (e.g., costumes, masks, writing, chanting and roles)? What patterns of action and interaction are recognisable in the respective aesthetic practices and figurations?

3. On the choreographic level: How does the formation of a collective body take place in the choreographic organisation of the bodies? How is the relationship between the social figuration of the scenic actions and the choreographed space organised? How does this become visible in synchronisation, rhythm, dynamics, movement flow and quality?

Social Choreographies of the Urban. An Outlook

Choreographed protest cultures and artistic interventions have emerged at a time when European cities are undergoing radical transformation processes. Theatricalisation, musealisation, eventisation and touristic treatment of (inner) cities with simultaneous peripheralisation, segregation, marginalisation of peripheral areas and pauperisation of poorer sections of the population are keywords in the upheaval from the industrialised city of modernity to the post-industrial city.

The aestheticisation of city centres is changing the social choreographies, the movement flow of people and the choreographed space of the city as manifested in architecture, infrastructure and spatial planning. Pedestrian zones, bicycle paths, plazas, 30 km/hr zones, the conversion of old industrial sites into cultural and art venues, the glazed, so-called ‘transparent’ architecture of modern office buildings for translucent people, the dissolution of the separation of work, living and life, and the new relationship between the city centre and the periphery are all, for example, characteristics of a new choreographic order which is changing the concept of the European city. It is an urban concept that directs the movement flow in a different way than was characteristic of the functionalised city of modernity. This addresses a further macro-sociological aspect of social choreography which exists in the materiality of the social order and is reflected in infrastructure, urban planning and architecture: How does the transformation of the city change the relationship between body, movement and space? How do new space-time relationships emerge in the transport infrastructure of urban space? How is social inclusion and exclusion, centralisation and peripheralisation, organised in and through the choreographed order of the city? What effects do these strategies have on the ‘intrinsic logic’ of cities which is generated by the social and discursive practices of city dwellers and (also in the course of globalisation processes) give cities their own ‘habitus’’ (Berking & Löw, 2008; Löw, 2022)?

These questions show that the relationship between macro- and microstructures, order and situation, external and internal perspectives, is always addressed in the investigation of social choreographies. It remains to be discussed whether and how specific situational disruptions and interventions of the normative choreographic order re-figure public space in the long term, whether and how they can change normative orders, whether and how they leave traces in daily practices, or whether they primarily target situational perception and experience, questioning social patterns and deriving their quality precisely from their situationality.