Chorégraphie d'État de Tania El Khoury

Chorégraphie d'État deconstructs the movements of police forces and border patrols to reveal the dramaturgy of state violence. This multimedia installation-performance exposes the militarisation of police training, shaped by racialised surveillance, spatial exclusion and the neutralisation of resistance.

Women choreographers from a wide range of practices around the world are invited to create choreographic notations as evidence of these structures of power.

Drawing on protest movements, the installation presents videos of choreographic scores of resistance, designed to be activated by performers and embodied by the audience, in a celebration of self-defence.

With Chorégraphie d'État (State Choreography), Tania El Khoury approaches choreography as a form of analysis, allowing her to expose a pattern: what is perceived as a set of isolated, accidental cases of state violence is in fact conceptualised and repeated according to a calculated dramaturgy.

To do this, the artist brings together the various forms in which choreography is notated and archived – descriptive or poetic texts, schematic drawings, movement-analysis systems, video – and uses them to annotate incidents of state violence.

Within the installation space, the presentation and broadcast of these elements coexist with live performance, placing the audience in the position of witness, in a state of vigilance.

This project is the latest chapter in a body of work that, for more than ten years, has engaged audience interactivity to make visible the abuses of power that shape our daily and political lives.

Tania El Khoury has previously addressed gender-based violence in Maybe If You Choreograph Me, You Will Feel Better (2011), and the political instrumentalisation of Lebanon's electricity grid in The Search for Power (2018).

For Chorégraphie d'État, she draws in particular on protest movements in public spaces and self-defence tactics.

As it is activated in different cities and countries, the project is adapted — in collaboration with dancers — to build a collective memory of state violence and its resistance, through the language of movement. Vincent Théval. Running time: 1h. Category: Cr