The notion of the choreographic landscape reconfigures the traditional subordination of choreography to dance, proposing it instead as an autonomous field of thought and practice. García Sottile argues that choreography today functions less as a codified technique and more as a cartographic system: a mode of mapping relations between bodies, environments, and materialities within shared space (García Sottile, 2016). In this sense, the choreographic intersects with ecological thinking, since both stress mutability, dynamic balance and the non-hierarchical organisation of elements. The concept of disseminated choreography emerges as a key tool in this framework. Here, gesture operates as principle rather than ornament, and installations become laboratories of co-presence. Unlike the theatrical stage, the choreographic installation invites the visitor to activate latent gestures, to complete the work through movement and attention. This shift reveals choreography not simply as composition for dancers but as a relational dispositif for articulating co-habitation among human and non-human bodies. The metaphor of the garden is particularly generative. Like installations, gardens are bounded yet porous spaces, perpetually transformed by movement, growth and decay. They demand entry, positioning, and a heightened perceptual engagement with both environment and others. The choreographic landscape, read as garden, becomes a heterotopic site where art, ecology and politics converge. This is not metaphorical embellishment but an ontological claim: space itself is enacted through relational gestures (García Sottile, 2016). Methodologically, García Sottile adopts a rhizomatic approach (after Deleuze and Guattari), privileging multiplicity, loops and non-linear connections. Such a model allows choreographic installations to be understood not as a stable genre but as a constellation of emergent practices linking performance, visual art and architecture. Examples ranging from Forsythe’s participatory environments to Tomás Saraceno’s spatial ecologies highlight how installations choreograph attention, proprioception and collective presence. Critically, this perspective repositions the spectator: no longer a passive recipient but a co-agent who shares responsibility in the articulation of space. The choreographic installation thus becomes a political experiment, staging an ecology of the body in movement that resists commodification and rehearses modes of coexistence. The strength of García Sottile’s proposal lies in showing how artistic practice can cultivate sensitivity to interdependence at a time of ecological and social precarity.
García Sottile, M. E. (2016) Paisajes coreográficos. Para una ecología de la co-presencia. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona / Università di Bologna.
