Borrowing from choreographer William Forsythe’s reflections on dance (versus choreography), the spatializing act is predominantly an “art of command” (Franko 2007 in Lepecki 2013) subject to the choreographic instructions—the score. According to dance scholar Mark Franko, it is in the dancer-choreographer relations that dance meets the political. Here, in lieu of uncritical execution of choreographic commands, restructured relations between executor and author of the score may open opportunities for automomy, freedom, agency to be practiced.

Performance and dance studies scholar André Lepecki theorizes this distinction as choreopolicing versus choreopolitics (2013). Choreopolicing is concerned with command and control— systems that identify those out of place, out of synch with the flow, disrupting dance’s presumed mandate of perpetual movement through resistant acts of lingering, loitering, occupying space, succumbing to gravity. Our “not yet know[ing] how to move politically” (citing Arendt 2005, 8; in 2013, 13-14) prompts Lepecki to argue the urgency to develop choreopolitical practices, embodied experiments in moving freely and politically, including the freedom to not move at all.

Learning from the live, embodied, and spatial choreopolitical practices Lepecki discusses, this paper asks how resistant modes of working with architecture’s instruments of command—drawings, models and specifying texts—may become choreo-spatial political practices. Drawing upon my practice-based research, and the not yet knowing that invites further query, it reconsiders the relation between the performer and author of the score and the instruments themselves, how these can afford the emergence of other spatialities and temporalities, ones in which spatial practice meets the political.