Founded in 2020, the Laboratory for Social Choreography focuses on transforming social structures through aesthetics. It explores the fundamental role of embodiment in ethics, relations, and governance. As an interdisciplinary hub, the Lab researches and develops experimental ways to learn, move, and organize in response to the pressing issues of our time—from climate change to immigration to systemic racism to unfettered capitalism. It choreographs situations that connect artists, citizens, and intellectuals in an extraordinary climate of sensibility, empathy, and vigorous imagination.
We endeavour
- To emancipate embodied knowledge to amend excessive rational, thought-processes in Western society.
- To expand the social imagination through embodied, relational experiences.
- To envision sustainable social structures upon an expanded awareness of human and non-human relations.
- To design courses, interventions, and formats in response to academic and institutional stagnation.
- To glean new visions of communion and their modes of governance.
“Social Choreography permeates the tightly knit fabric of socialization, for other potential realities to be sensed and experienced, and for new relational fields amongst human and non-human to be forged. The practice of Social Choreography deals with the uncovering of underlying social relations and patterns — the choreography of the social — through embodied practices, and always, engages these dynamics for new social choreographies to emerge simultaneously.”
— Michael Kliën
PROGRAMS
The LSC generates experiential strategies to overcome entrenched patterns of perception, ideas, assumptions and positions. The laboratory conducts experiments in the emerging field of Social Choreography, organizes events, designs interdisciplinary courses and publishes its outcomes in various media (print, online, performance, exhibitions, etc.).
PARLIAMENT
Parliament is a pioneering work of situational choreography that has been situated around the world. It offers participants a critically needed withdrawal from normal modes of social action. A diverse cohort of citizen-performers, working in silence, comes together to hold council amidst the elemental phenomena and fundamental concerns of collectively lived experience.
- Parliament, September 18, 2023, 6:00-9:00pm, Rubenstein Arts Center, von der Heyden Studio Theater
THE ART OF ASSEMBLY
The Art of Assembly is a nomadic series of talks and conversations exploring the potential of assembly in activism, art, and politics. This 25th edition of The Art of Assembly takes place in the context of Michael Kliën’s “Parliament,” a social choreography in which citizen-performers work in silence to hold council amidst the elemental phenomena and fundamental concerns of collectively-lived experience.
- Interwoven Bodies: The Art of Assembly XXV, September 19, 2023, 5:00-7:00pm, Rubenstein Arts Center, von der Heyden Studio Theater
11th Organ I
In this uninterrupted, six-hour experimental and performative symposium from choreographer Michael Kliën, audiences come-and-go as 15 invited guests speak together, drawing from disparate fields of knowledge and free associations to create a matrix of collective thought.
- 11th Organ I, December 5, 2023, 4:00-10:00pm, Rubenstein Arts Center, von der Heyden Studio Theater
11th Organ II
Performed in the round, the second part of the 11th Organ will be an immersive social choreographic situation centered around a group of performers, who temporarily envision themselves inhabiting a shared imaginary space.
- 11th Organ II, April 11, 2024, 7:30pm, Rubenstein Arts Center, von der Heyden Studio Theater
- 11th Organ II, April 12, 2024, 8:00pm, Rubenstein Arts Center, von der Heyden Studio Theater
THE NEXT INSTITUTION
In 2022, the LSC is launching an interdisciplinary research project to design the blueprint of a new cultural institution. The proposed institution will engage citizens in exploring, creating and performing potential futures. Specifically conceived for the context of European social democracies and emanating from the arts, the institution will seek to envision comprehensive, cultural solutions to the complex challenges of our times. This envisioning will be achieved by connecting artists, citizens, and intellectuals in an extraordinary climate of heightened sensibility, empathy, play, and vigorous imagination. The new institution will expand the historically specific (and therefore limited) objectives of theatres, museums, opera houses, concert halls, and community centers to chart new pathways for social expression and organization.
— Social Dreaming facilitation sessions in partnership with the Centre for Social Dreaming in London; free and open to Duke graduate students and faculty. Sessions will be conducted virtually on Zoom.
— Parliament/Amendment facilitation workshops for Duke and international graduate students. All sessions will be held in person at Duke East Campus.
— Seeding the first comprehensive Wikipedia page on Social Choreography drawing from various national and international contributors.
— All core-events will be professionally documented and published on the LSC’s website.
— Publications of a small book on the work Parliament, commissioned by the Segal Theater Center at CUNY
— Kenan Institute of Ethics awards a second-year Fellowship to one MFA student whose proposed social choreographic work aligns with, and extends, the mission of Kenan Institute of Ethics and the LSC.
Researchers and Collaborators
![Simone Barros creates films, plays, soundscapes and installations which breach the boundaries of solipsism to embark upon a symbiosis between the self and the other, between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious to shatter these superficial binaries. In her filmmaking practice, distance and time become the material in the passing of temporal moments and traversal of spatial movements.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Simone-Barros/2817448418.jpeg)
![In fall 2020, David Malone began his 37th year as Professor of the Practice of Education and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Program in Education at Duke University. Professor Malone is active in the life of the School of Arts and Sciences at Duke University. For many years, he chaired the Arts and Sciences Curriculum Committee, the Assessment Committee, and has served in numerous faculty governance positions. In the late 1980s, in close collaboration with faculty colleagues, teachers in the Durham Public Schools, and local neighborhood community leaders, Professor Malone developed a service-learning program that annually matches approximately five-hundred Duke students as mentors to children and youth. This program has evolved over time into a University-wide service-learning program that supports more than 80 community-based academic courses across 30 academic departments. Professor Malone currently serves as the Faculty Director of the Duke Service Learning Program. His scholarly interests focus on holistic student development both at the PK-12 level and within higher education. He is particularly interested in the transformative learning that often results from non-traditional experiential pedagogies. Professor Malone is currently working with colleagues across the Duke campus to re-imagine undergraduate education in ways that give greater focus to the development of desired student learning outcomes such as creativity, empathy, humility, perspective-taking, social equity, racial justice, personal meaning, civic responsibility, and the discovery of moral purpose.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/David-Malone/2332051354.png)
![Steve Valk is a contemporary dance dramaturge, visual artist and designer, lecturer and leading figure in the emerging field of Social Choreography. Influenced by his experiences as Personal Assistant of theatre director Robert Wilson (1988—90) he joined Ballett Frankfurt as Head Dramaturge and creative collaborator for William Forsythe (1992—2004). From 1998 to 2004, this dramaturgical practice and a subsequent focus on trans-disciplinary networking strategies lead to the development of a new participatory/situational epistemology for the institution of contemporary dance. From 2004 to 2011, Steve Valk became Dramaturge and artistic collaborator of Ireland’s Daghdha Dance Company. In 2007 founder of the international dramaturgical and social choreographic design agency r.i.c.e. He has been the Director of the Institute of Social Choreography in Frankfurt, where he currently lives.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/SteveValk-square/3174826777.jpg)
![Jeffrey Gormly has been engaged with social choreographic praxis since he led the Framemakers project in 2005 with collaborators Michael Klien and Steve Valk. He co-authored the Book of Recommendations, edited Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change, and was editor of choreograph.net from 2006-2012. He collaborates with Michael Klien on many of his seminal Social Choreographic works, as well as working with or being commissioned by the Irish National Theatre (The Abbey), National Folk Theatre, Irish Chamber Orchestra, IMMA, Dance Ireland and many more. He was Creative Director of award-winning social enterprise Buddy Bench. Jeffrey is currently working in practice with expansions of creative processes in organisations, and in theory with new metaphors for social organism and states of dance.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Jeffrey-Gormly/2692644589.png)
![Purnima Shah is an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Duke Dance Program and a performer in the Kathak and Bharatanatyam dances of India. Under her directorship, the Master of Fine Arts in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis was proposed, approved and established in Fall 2019 at Duke University. She has produced, directed and scripted a dance documentary, Dancing with the Goddess. A new book project focusing on Garba Dancing: from Ritual to Disco is in progress. She has published scholarly articles in peer reviewed journals besides chapters in anthologies. She acquired her Ph.D. in Performance Studies and Ethnography (with a focus on Asian Performance) from the Department of Theatre and Drama, University of Wisconsin-Madison.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Purnima-Shah/2156963407.png)
![Zhixuan Zhu (Miki) was born in China in 1999. She lived in China for the first two decades and is currently studying in the United States. Miki is an artist, movement explorer, spiritual researcher, and Buddhist devotee. She was born in a traditional Buddhist family, which made her fascinated by the occult from an early age. Her dance work is also associated with it. One of her dance pieces, "Simulated summoning," presented the process of permitting an Evil Serpent God to enter her body. Despite the potential pitfalls of these creations, she was still drawn to dark, borderline spiritual dance. In 2021, she graduated from Beijing Normal University with a BFA in Dance (minor: Literature). Currently, she is a second-year student in the Master of Fine Arts in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis at Duke University. Because she found that dance practice has largely subdued the essential aspects of spirituality in embodied performance practice, this has led to her research interest in repairing the natural connection between dance and spirituality. She also hopes that dance can be an effective and direct way for people to heal from the trauma inside. Ultimately, her wish is for world peace and for people to love dance forever. Zhixuan Zhu (Miki)](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Photo_Zhu-Zhixuan-e1667225178145/4153488837.jpeg)
![Nicole Schwartz is an undergraduate student at Duke studying Dance, on the pathways of social activism and being and healing, and literature. She is particularly interested in theory and poetry as a lens through which she can see dance and movement as a revolutionary practice. Deleuze and Guattari, Robin Kelley, along with Black feminist writers such as Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman are various writers moving and influencing her at the present moment.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Nicole-Schwartz/3712241258.png)
![I'm working in biophysics, but am deeply attracted to dance. I question myself about the gap between the self and the apparent self; about the bridge between the-me-and-you; on the force fields that mold us individually and together. What do our bodies say about that? Probably everything. I arrived at contemporary dance in my adulthood. It was a transformative experience. I consider dance as a unique tool to research the human condition.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Renata-Garces/4098358149.png)
![Lightsey Darst is a poet and recovering dance critic. Her fourth book of poetry, The Heiress/Ghost Acres(Coffee House Press, 2023) struggles towards an ethical vision of mothering in America against political strife, pandemic, and the underlying injustices of racism and sexism. Her previous poetic work was published by Coffee House Press and praised by The New York Times and The Paris Review. She also writes arts and culture journalism, having published hundreds of pieces with the INDY Week, the Minneapolis City Pages, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and other publications; currently, you can find her writing at her own newsletter, Now*ing. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, one for poetry and one for dance criticism. With three friends, she started and ran the dance service organization Durham Independent Dance Artists (DIDA; 2014-2020), the most recent of many nonprofit arts projects. She is a student in the Graduate Liberal Studies program and works for Duke as part of the Trinity College development team.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Lightsey-Darst/1203403943.jpeg)
![Michael Kliën is an internationally recognized choreographer and artist. His work has been presented by leading art-institutions around the world. Kliën is concerned with a socio- political praxis of choreography and dance, often referred to as “Social Choreography.” His practice encompasses interdisciplinary thinking, writing, moving, teaching, curation, and centrally, choreographic works equally at home in performing and visual arts. He is Professor of the Practice in Dance, Director of the MFA in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis, and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute of Ethics at Duke University. www.michaelklien.com](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Good-Pursuits-Michael-Kliën-headshot-sq/421532179.jpg)
![Barbara Dickinson, Professor Emerita of the Practice of Dance at Duke University, served as Dance Program Director for eighteen years, overseeing faculty growth, guiding the focus of a greatly expanded curriculum and establishing a major. She has created many full-length collaborative works including Walking Miracles, based on the stories of survivors of child sexual abuse. Artistic Director of the Ways and Means Dance Company (1986-2002), and of Three For All (1981-87), she has performed, taught and choreographed in schools, colleges, private studios and dance festivals throughout the United States. She continues to search for new ways to move and create.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Barbara-Dickinson/20394971.png)
![Ludovica is a postdoc in Nicolas Brunel's group, where she investigates the neural underpinnings of movement. Her research combines theoretical and computational techniques to study the interplay between motor planning and motor execution and to address the question of learning in the motor system. She obtained a MSc in Physics from the University of Milan and a PhD in Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin, with a thesis at the interface between statistical physics and machine learning.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Ludovica-Bachschmid-Romano/2800927977.png)
![Michael Grigoni is a multi-instrumentalist who specializes in dobro, lap steel guitar, and pedal steel guitar. He has released several instrumental albums on Other Songs, and more recently, two albums on 12k, Mount Carmel and Slow Machines (with Stephen Vitiello). His latest album, Earth Awhile, is a collaboration with Chihei Hatakeyama and Stephen Vitiello on White Paddy Mountain.He provides musical accompaniment for Lab for Social Choreography events such as Meshroom.He holds a PhD in religion from Duke University and serves as Assistant Professor of Religion and Politics at Wake Forest University.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Grigoni-guitar/2738891612.jpg)
![David Landes is Assistant Professor of the Practice in Duke’s Thompson Writing Program. His multidisciplinary scholarship in communication draws upon the fields of rhetoric, media, cultural studies, performance studies, and musicology.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/DavidLandes/4205072861.jpeg)
![Brooks Emanuel, an Atlanta native, is in the MFA program in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis and the 2022-2023 Graduate Arts Fellow in Social Choreography & Performance. After dancing and choreographing for a decade in New York and Atlanta, he shifted to progressive policy work, including serving as Director of Legislative Services for the Georgia House Democratic Caucus under Leader Stacey Abrams. He then attended NYU School of Law, where he interned with NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, ACLU Capital Punishment Project, and NYCLU. Upon obtaining his J.D., he worked at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, representing people on death row, people sentenced to life without parole, and those suffering horrific prison conditions. His MFA research focuses on combining dance and racial justice work. Brooks Emanuel](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Photo_Emanuel-Brooks-e1666968395723/3036828662.jpeg)
![Marika Niko is a choreographer, thinker, and crocheter originally from Japan. After being a nomad for most of her life ‒ Thailand, UK, the Netherlands, UAE, Japan ‒ Marika is currently based in the US. After graduating from New York University Abu Dhabi with a BA in Theater, she is currently pursuing her MFA in Dance at Duke University. She researches alternative modes of social organization by drawing upon two movement disciplines: butoh and social choreography. As part of her thesis, she curates Meshroom, a performance environment, along with collaborator, Leo Ryan. Marika Niko](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Photo_Niko-Marika-e1666968382718/51806655.jpeg)
![Alexander Strecker is pursuing a PhD in Art, Art History and Visual Studies. His research focuses on contemporary cultural production in Athens, Greece. How do the visual arts register the contradictions inherent in capitalism and modernity as well as the crises brought on by enduring coloniality? His work explores how these tensions have been felt acutely in Greece since 2008, but resonate worldwide. Drawing on his Greek heritage, his methodology applies practices of care and community-building in order to enact, after Sedgwick, a “reparative” approach to art history. At Duke, he is part of S-1 Lab (Speculative Sensation) and the Laboratory for Social Choreography. He has presented his research at the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA), transmediale, and the École normale supérieure in Paris. He has collaborated with various arts organizations across Europe: the Onassis Foundation, ARTWORKS, Athens Photo Festival, VOID, Kunst Haus Wien, Paris Photo, Art Basel, as well as Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach Project.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Alexander-Strecker/2356690799.png)
![Courtney Crumpler is a movement artist, organizer, researcher, and translator working between Brazil and the United States. She investigates the roles of embodied knowledge and experience in political protest, organizing, and education. A graduate of the inaugural cohort of Duke’s MFA in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis, Courtney teaches in the Program in Dance and is pursuing a PhD in Romance Studies (Portuguese and Spanish track). She is a co-coordinator of the Black Lives Matter Brazil-USA exhibit project, a member leader with Durham for All, a founding member of the Gigantes Na Luta feminist performance collective and has performed, on stilts, in five Rio de Janeiro carnivals. Courtney Crumpler](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Photo_Cumpler-Courtney-e1667225149499/3550743971.jpeg)
![Vitoria Kotsalou is a psychologist, and a self-trained dancer, performer, and choreographer based in Athens. Her eclectic training, not bound by one tradition, and constant research from many different fields of discipline and philosophy carve out new fields of engagement for dance. As choreographer and artist she is interested in creating, contextualising and forming new frameworks for a wider understanding and application of dance. Her artistic practice integrates interdisciplinary thinking and application, the cultivation of a social dimension of choreography, while establishing her own personal practice of dance and presence. Vitoria approaches dance as a phenomena of life, that has the potential to touch all socio-political aspects of society. Vitoria is one of the founding members of the non-profit organisation R.I.C.E. on the island of Hydra. Since 2006, her work has been presented by the Onassis Foundation, Athens Festival, and elsewhere across Greece.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Vitoria-Kotsalu/359772059.png)
![Cory Tamler: Cory Tamler (www.corytamler.com) is a writer, translator, and interdisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in theatre, performance as research, and community organizing. A core artist with Open Waters in Wabanaki/Maine, she currently co-facilitates/creates work with the Penobscot River watershed and In Kinship Fellowship. She is a PhD candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where her dissertation is concerned with the ways arts and sciences emerge from, and dynamically impact on, the same material conditions that shape the thoughts that human beings are capable of thinking. Her research draws together histories and philosophies of modern physics and concurrent theatrical and performance movements in Germany and the USA from the twentieth century to our own times.](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/CoryTamler-square/1023772993.jpg)
Affiliates
![Susan Webb, MD | Graduate Student](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Susan-Webb/4231283052.png)
![Adrienne Duke](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2022/09/Untitled-copy-14/2318422286.png)
![Leo Ryan | Graduate Student Leo Ryan](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2022/10/Photo_Ryan-Leo/1638260599.jpeg)
![Glenna Batson | Faculty](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Glenna-Batson/3697846688.png)
![Alyah Baker | Kenan Fellow in Social Choreography](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Alyah-Baker/3099882688.png)
![Ife Presswood | Graduate Student Ife Presswood](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Photo_Presswood-Ife-e1667225112518/1199626923.jpg)
![Negar Mottahedeh | Faculty](https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/cache/2020/11/Negar-Mottahedeh/1297415966.png)