choreografia

Choreografia, or choreography, is the art of designing sequences of movement for performance. It involves conceiving, arranging, and communicating movement to dancers, coordinating with music, space, lighting, and costume, and shaping how movement expresses ideas, emotion, or narrative for an audience.

The term derives from Greek choreia ("dance") and khorein ("to run, to lead"), with the modern sense emerging in dance and theatre to distinguish the act of creating movement from its execution.

Historically, choreographers composed dances for ritual, court entertainment, and theatre. In ballet, codified steps and formations defined classical technique, while modern and contemporary choreographers expanded movement vocabularies toward abstraction, improvisation, and collaboration with composers, designers, and performers. In many traditions, choreography also appears in non-dance contexts, including film and site-specific performances.

The choreographic process typically includes idea generation, motif development, structure and form, spatial design, timing, and rehearsal. Collaboration with dancers, music, and design elements shapes interpretation. Some works are built around motifs that recur or transform, while others follow linear or cyclical narratives.

Documentation and analysis use notation systems such as Labanotation, Benesh Movement Notation, and Cunningham notation, or rely on video and written scores. Choreographers may also improvise during rehearsal and later fix the sequence for performance.

Choreography appears across dance genres and media, from classical ballet to contemporary dance, musical theatre, and film. Notable choreographers include Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, Pina Bausch, and William Forsythe, whose work demonstrates the range of creative approaches to designing movement.