How has choreography diminished the power of our bodies to express themselves through movement?
Dance as we know it today is basically choreographed dance. A person has an idea that they want to express in the form of body movements. They string together a series of movements that they think will express that idea. Along the way they may edit this series of movements. These movements may be based on styles or versions of styles that they have been taught or copied from others. These movements are then memorized by dancers and performed on stages in front of audiences as a product to be consumed.
All of this process( italicized words) from beginning to end is based on the conscious mind of the artist. It is an idea that has given rise to thought-based movement with some sort of intention and audience in mind.
This mental process which is based in the conscious mind has destroyed the power of the body to express itself.
Your body is the most complex living organisms on earth. It is the result of billions of years of evolution beginning with inorganic chemical compounds all the way up to the millions of daily organic chemical reactions that take place in your body today. Your body carries the recorded history of this evolutionary process in the DNA strings that reside in each of its cells.
This is, in a sense, a collective memory of all organisms that have gone before you on earth. What your body senses in the course of your daily life is added to that collective DNA memory. Your body and only your body has experienced and remembers all of the moment by moment encounters it has had with the outside world throughout the coarse of your life.
Your conscious mind has little or no access to this collective memory or to what your body senses and remembers from your inception in the womb to this moment. In fact, your conscious mind does not want to know what your body knows. Your conscious mind does not speak the language of your body’s story. It creates mind stories. It imagines what a body story might look like. It has the shell of a body story but it is empty and sterile inside. It lacks immediacy and truthfulness. That is why dance on stage is a dying art form. It does not connect with real bodies. What we see today is sterile dances created in sterile studios presented on sterile stages to a distant audience.
For decades now we have allowed the limited intelligence of our conscious minds to dictate to our bodies what kind of movement is worthy of being expressed and viewed.