Systems permeate our lives, influencing our surroundings, social dynamics, relationships, and even our thought patterns. Yet, their effects often operate below our conscious perception, remaining invisible, like hidden algorithms, unseen data flows, or insidious social norms that promote certain reconstructions of reality. Embodying System: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Choreography confronts this invisibility by transforming systemic ideas into lived, tangible experiences through choreographic practices exploring the question: How systems theory reimagines and redefines choreographic practices, structures, and experiences—and vice versa?
This practice-led artistic research foregrounds the idea that choreography and system theory are already structurally and conceptually embedded within one another. Rather than using system theory to interpret choreography or choreography to illustrate systems, the research frames both as already interwoven epistemologies. Part of this ongoing practice-led inquiry involved developing a practice-based methodology rooted in system principles — such as feedback, emergence, and self-organization — proposing an alternative choreographic logic grounded in complexity, decentralized authorship, distributed agency, and operating at the edge of uncertainty without collapsing.
Ultimately, the broader purpose of this research challenges the question of where power and resistance are located in complex assemblages. It calls for a deep reevaluation and enhancement of a sensitive politics of practice that is flexible and capable of recognizing the intrinsic heterogeneity and uncertainty of existence today.