Playful Choreographies andChoreographies of PlayNew Research in Dance and Play Studies•
Lars Dahl Pedersen

The author explores the relationship of play to choreography. He defineschoreography as the rules that guide body movements from their minutephysicality to their broad social and cultural contours. He conducts a reviewof the literature and accentuates five general topics—learning through creativity; choreography as writing and pedagogy; comparisons of dance andchoreography to play and sport; children’s play and environments as choreographies; and choreography as critical play interventions in public spaces. He
argues that viewing play through a choreographic lens helps us understandhow players physically communicate and create meaning through action invarious play situations. Key words: choreography and play; participatory
sense making

Introduction

In this article, I suggest a broad conception of choreography based on the

dynamics of the spontaneous embodied communication that occurs when wemove physically together in play situations. The “graph” in choreography refers
not just to choreography as a written notation of a sequence of dance steps.
Broadening the perspective, I invite the reader to imagine the spontaneous stepsof a group of people moving together without a script as the writing of an instantchoreography. The term choreography is commonly used to denote highly strategic, thoroughly planned, positioned, and controlled actions. Thoroughness andattention to detail define choreography in a variety of contexts, from dancers’
performance of well-rehearsed steps on a theater stage to meetings of world leaders amid a complex web of security operations and journalistic photo shoots set
against backdrops of spectacular architecture or natural wonders (Mason 2022).
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Contact Lars Dahl Pedersen at ldp@edu.au.dk

Playful Choreographies and Choreographies of Play

By contrast, the term play signals freedom and spontaneity. However, whenchoreographer and scholar Susan Leigh Foster states that choreography sometimes can be described as a “set of principles that guide spontaneous invention” (Foster 2011, 3), the contrast between play and choreography diminishes.
Furthermore, Foster’s statement opens up a seemingly undeveloped potential
for exploring play through a choreographic lens.
A set of movement principles can be regarded as a set of movement rules.
Several play scholars (Winther-Lindqvist 2018; Hughes 1999; Piaget 1976; Tulloch 2014; Sutton-Smith 1997; Huizinga 1950) argue that play and games follow particular rules and that there are different kinds of rules present in playsituations. Similarly, through a choreographic exploration of play, I address
the relationship between the different rules when playing and play’s embodied
nature. This includes the kind of spontaneous choreography that occurs between
the bodies of people who play together.
Throughout this article, I use a broad concept of choreography: the ability
to organize ways in which one can move and participate with one’s own bodyin a given situation and in relation to others. We can see, choreography in theoverall organization of society as a controlling “system of command” (Allsopp
and Lepecki 2008, 2) embedded in the social, political, and cultural environment. But we can also see choreography in the spontaneous movement decisions
between playmates, constituting “a kind of record of action” (Foster 2011, 4).
For my purposes, I wish to understand choreography as the rules governing our
movements in a broad sense “sometimes designating minute aspects of movement, or alternatively, the broad contours of action” (Foster 2011, 2).
I seek to employ a choreographer’s perspective to explore the relationship between play and choreography. I entered academia following a career asa contemporary dancer and choreographer. In my current research, I explore
a choreographic approach to a playful teaching culture in higher education—
more specifically, teaching students in early childhood and social education. In
this article, I want to take a broader look at the relationship between play andchoreography and thereby sketch a landscape of the interplay between these phenomena. This includes a review of the literature that provides the data on which I
base my analysis and my discussion. I seek to develop an area of research specifically focused on playful choreographies and choreographies of play. However,before addressing previously published research, I find it necessary to explore
and present the theoretical foundations for this approach to play and choreography. Therefore, I must deviate from the structure of more traditional articles

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By drawing attention to the physical character of play, I aim to engage withscholars and practitioners interested in thematizing, understanding, and developing playful ways of being together in a variety of contexts. This also includes
educators outside the context of dance education who consider play and physical movement in their teaching—for instance, in day care centers, schools, andnonformal education. Playful movement and mischievous action are contagious
and might seem disturbing in traditional classrooms. However, understanding
the value of unexpected, disturbing, or sometimes hardly noticeable playful
action can serve as a stepping stone, helping educators facilitate development,
learning, and care. Furthermore, through my critical conversation, I hope toengage with other play and dance scholars and contribute to a new scholarlyintersection where playful accounts explore in detail the choreography of spontaneous movement.
I first explore the relationship of play to choreography through a theoretical
discussion of the function of rules in both phenomena, focusing on movement
and spontaneous bodily play encounters. Then, examining how this relationshiphas been approached in the existing research, I identify five themes from theresearch that I can use for further analysis. These themes represent the use andunderstanding of choreography on a spectrum with productive and liberating
rules at one end and manipulative and coercive rules at the other. Similarly, theuse and understanding of the rules of movement are represented on a spectrum
ranging from explicit to implicit and hidden rules. I hope to use my review
as a way of engaging in a dialogue that produces a new area of research, one
exploring spontaneous play actions as a form of choreography. I argue that theintersection of the fields of research on play and choreography is a fruitful areafor future study because such exploration can reveal new aspects of both these
phenomena. Play can be explored through a choreographic lens and choreography through a playful lens.

Play as Physical Action with Negotiated Rules
To uncover how different rules in play can have different physical consequences
for the participants, I find it useful to explore how people apply and bend therules when playing together. Play theorist Linda Hughes has made a distinction between three kinds of rules used by children when they play (Hughes

Playful Choreographies and Choreographies of Play

1999, 1991): rules for the game; rules for the social context; and rules for therules (Hughes 1991; Winther-Lindqvist 2018). Hughes’s study focuses on how
children play folk games, using variations and adaptations to make sense of theplay actions given the social context in which they are played. Thus, according toHughes, rules are often flexible. I find Hughes’s third category of rules relevant ina choreographic context, in the sense that it can help explain the living, constantcreation and renewal of the relationship between the participants in a specificplay situation. Rules for the rules, therefore, point to a participant’s driven andflexible choreography, one that is not just controlled by external constraints. The
rules for the rules, for instance, concern negotiations between the participants
as they, deal with “when and how the rules of the game ought to be applied,ignored, or modified . . . [and] which of many possible courses of action is to bepreferred over others in particular circumstances” (Hughes 1999, 95).
According to developmental psychologist Ditte Winther-Lindqvist (2018),
rules for the rules are very often announced verbally and explicitly agreed to byparticipants during a game. For instance, Winther-Lindqvist shows in a study
that five-year-old children change the rules when playing football. If one participant starts crying after losing the ball, it is given back to him and he gets
another chance. Hughes and Winther-Lindqvist touch less upon the physicalconsequences when applying the rules. The example of the crying boy reveals
a psychological component rather than showing how participants adjust therules through their embodied experience. Furthermore, it is unclear whether
unspoken and unannounced rules felt in the moment in the heat of the gamealso constitute a kind of rules for the rules. Nevertheless, Hughes does emphasize
the “contradictions between what players say and what they do” (Hughes 1999,
108) to avoid stopping the play or disrupting the game with minor violationsof the rules for the game. Through a choreographic lens, this suggests that theplayers often prioritize the continuation of the physical action and thus theirmutual bodily engagement. Stopping a play or a game to argue and negotiate
disrupts bodily engagement and playful entanglement and thereby affirms thealready established spontaneous communication that takes place through collective sensing and physical movement.
We can also observe the physical consequences of applying the rules intypes of play not traditionally regarded as games with rules. In the contemporary
psychological literature, Whitebread et al. (2012) proposes five types of playother than games with rules: physical play, play with objects, symbolic play, andpretend play. Taking a closer look at one of these, pretend play, Whitebread and

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they are portraying” (23). However, a choreographic lens can shed further lighton the aspect of how the social rules govern a character in pretend play: Whenyou portray a character, this character has a certain style and pattern of movement relating to and interacting with other characters and the space in which
the play takes place.
Let me provide a couple of examples. A child playing a pregnant woman
might pad her stomach with a pillow and move as she imagines a pregnant
woman moves, heavily and slowly touching her back and sighing, pretending
to be in pain, and so on. In addition, a child playing a father might run aroundthe play space with a suitcase in hand, pretending to be catching a train to work.
The children’s imaginations might add new meanings to the characters; thepregnant character might use her pillow to throw herself violently to the flooror deliberately bump into the other children in the play with her soft stomach
because she wants to explore her new physical attributes rather than faithfully
portraying what it feels like to be pregnant. Similarly, the father character mightexperiment with ways of using a suitcase, trying out alternative ways of moving—for instance, opening the suitcase and folding his body in order to fit inside.
Thus, these children become instant choreographers of their own play situations.
Furthermore, they have the power to shift their pretend play situation into otherplay types—namely, playing with objects and physical play. Indeed, if I observe
the play situation as a choreographer, I notice that the characters in the playmove in different patterns in the space dictated partly by the social rules of thecharacters and partly by the spontaneous inventions of the children’s choreography as they bend the rules and create and act out imaginary play situations
that make sense to them and their playmates.

Choreography as Playful Participatory Sense Making
When we interact with people we meet, we enact different kinds of sense-making
choreographies through the coordination of our bodily movements. To further
describe how playful choreography takes place among playmates, I take a closer
look at some of the concepts from the enactive approach to cognitive science. In
short, the enactive approach states that “cognition depends upon the kinds ofexperience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities,
and . . . these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded inPlayful Choreographies and Choreographies of Playa more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context” (Varela,
Thompson, and Rosch 1991, 173).
The implications of this claim are, first of all, that we exist (and move) in
the world with other individuals through our bodies. Cognition does not only
take place inside our heads. Through our bodily interactions, we are participating
in sense-making activities. The philosophers Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel A.
Di Paulo (2007) argue, using their concept of participatory sense making, that
“interaction is not reducible to individual actions or intentions” (494). An everyday example of how we individually cannot control meaningful actions occurs
when two people meet in a narrow corridor and suddenly and unintentionallyperform a little dance as they try to get past each other.
By contrast, such small dances are what we often look for and try to encourage in a joyful play situation. In an article written with Marieke Rohde, Di Paolo
and De Jaegher (Di Paolo, Rohde, and De Jaegher 2010) examine play practices
and argue that “the player is the lawgiver and the rule-follower, the question
maker and the responder” (39). Choreographically, we can perhaps say that inplay we deliberately attempt to create pleasurable and unpredictable corridor
dances and we try to make them last by playfully challenging each other throughour movements.
In a play situation, the corridor dance does not become awkward, as it
often does when we meet a stranger in a public space and just want to escapeas quickly as possible. Rather, in the “play corridor” we signal the fun we feelin losing ourselves in the situation by letting go of our attempts to control fully
our individual physical movements. A choreographic project in relation to playmight describe and understand the specific movement patterns in playful situations. Thus, a choreographic analysis might help explain how we coordinate
meaningful actions, for instance “by studying body movements of the participants in relation to each other” (De Jaegher, Peräkylä, and Stevanovic 2016, 8).

The Hidden, Secret, and Silent Choreographies of PlayNot all playful choreographies are easy to depict—or are even meant to be seen.
Depending on how dancers cope with set phrases of movement and how rigidly
the rules of movements are defined, a choreography understood as a scripted
performance differs from the playful process of developing a choreography.
If I go to the theatre to watch a ballet performance, I can usually see clearly

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the choreography on the stage through the sequence of steps and movements
performed by the dancers. The ballet dancers are very explicit about showing
their movements, which are not spontaneous but part of the choreography. By
watching the choreography, I can imagine the studio rehearsals prior to theperformance in which a choreographer, in a more or less specific way, has taughta dance to—or led a creative process with—the dancers. If the dancers work
more democratically in a choreographic collective, I can imagine the process ofexperimentation that leads to creating and refining the movement interactions
that become the final choreographic product. These kinds of set choreographies
can often be performed playfully and characterized as a kind of play. However,
how are the less obvious choreographies in play situations disclosed?
In relation to social sense making, De Jaegher, Peräkylä, and Stevanovic(2016) ask the reader to consider the “‘invisible excess of sense,’ a presence ofhidden, ineffable or even secret meanings, which is best left to play its role
as precisely silent” (7). Some of the players that we observe through our choreographic gaze might not understand their play interactions as choreographies. The meaning-making processes and body movements that compose thechoreography are perhaps only possible and playful if they are not articulated
and deliberately choreographed. Indeed, when the philosopher Hans-Georg
Gadamer (2004) writes that “the structure of play absorbs the player into itself,
and thus frees him from the burden of taking the initiative” (105), he contributes
to the idea that there are tacit and unintentional aspects of bodily movement inplay situations. Here the players set aside individual agency and let their bodily
movements and movement interactions be ruled by the play itself.
Hidden choreographies can also be understood in another sense. Players
might not always want people outside the play to know about their specific choreography. Rather, they might prefer to keep their play world a secret. Therefore,
what might appear a silent and invisible choreography to outsiders might be an
obvious and expressive practice inside the play world. These hidden aspects ofplay are sometimes connected to forbidden activities. The sociologist William
A. Corsaro (2003) shows through ethnographic research that breaking the rules
made by adults behind their back is highly valued among children. Similarly,
play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith distinguishes between the public and privatetranscript of adults and the public and private transcript of children. According
to Sutton-Smith (1997), children’s “private or hidden transcript is their play life,in which they can express both their special identity and their resentment atbeing a captive population” (123). The rules that children make up in their secretPlayful Choreographies and Choreographies of Playplay worlds must generate a different kind of quality in the bodily movement of
the participants, as well as different kinds of movement patterns and rhythms.
Playing in the way your parents would like you to play differs from playing inthe secret and forbidden ways you do with your best playmates.
To sum up, a landscape of the different choreographies in play should
include but not be limited to spontaneous bodily inventions, physical consequences from the application of different kinds of rules, silent and secret playful
dances, and descriptions of expressive movement patterns and interactions inrebellious play encounters.

Literature Review as Discussion Partner
I started by exploring a specific relationship between play and choreography
involving rules of movement and spontaneous bodily play encounters. Guided
by this theoretical discussion, I now identify and evaluate existing research on
the topic.
The concept of creativity turns up in the intersection of the fields of research
about play and about choreography. The researchers on creativity in education,
Kerry Chappell and Charlotte Hathaway (2019), address play and improvisation in relation to dance and creativity but do not explore in depth the relation
between play and choreography. Nevertheless, they point toward new understandings of creativity influenced by new understandings of choreography:“There are exciting possible next steps ahead . . . . Creativity will be interwoven
within multiple understandings of choreography (e.g. Bannon 2017; Midgelow2019) which consider choreographic craft, improvisation and new understandings of embodiment and the body itself as text” (37).
This does not directly focus on the interrelationship between play and choreography. Chappell and Hathaway mostly refer to studies that consider choreography a craft to be taught rather than as spontaneous movement interactions.
In contrast, I explore choreography’s relation to play by looking at the creative aspects of choreography. And in my understanding of the phenomenon ofplay, I include playful as well as creative activities. I do so to incorporate playful
and creative approaches to learning in education (Nørgård, Toft-Nielsen, andWhitton 2017; Hammershøj 2014) and consider “the capacity to use play outside
the context of play” (Sicart 2014, 21).
In a Nordic research context, the word “play” is more commonly used and

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2021). This is not always the case in other international research traditions.
Thus, I will also explore play through such search terms as “creative learning”
or “creativity in education.” In terms of a broader understanding of play, SuttonSmith (1997) has likewise emphasized that “variability is the key to play” (229)
in several contrasting theories and understandings of play. For instance, variability is explored by Hughes in her concept of rules for the rules, in which she
looks at the different ways the same game can be played by different players in
different social contexts.
Following the leitmotif of unfolding the idea of a fruitful relationshipbetween play and choreography, the purpose of my review is twofold: how does
the existing research address this leitmotif and why is it interesting to look at playthrough a choreographic lens? The literature supports an analysis that sketches
the interplay of the two phenomena. I study the interrelationship between
choreography and play in the literature using Randolph’s (2009) five-stage model:
problem formulation; data collection; data evaluation; analysis and interpretation; and communication.
The first step in the data collection involved a search for English-language,peer-reviewed articles in relevant search engines (ProQuest and Scopus). I thenconducted a search for relevant Nordic articles in databases for Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The main search terms I used were play and choreography insearches strung together with game, improvisation, movement, dance, and creativity. To broaden the search, I used a truncation technique to include various
word endings—for instance in the search string: Choreograph* AND Creativ*.
The search was restricted to publication dated from 2000 to 2021.
I selected or rejected studies based on a number of inclusion and exclusion
criteria. For instance, I excluded studies that addressed play in the sense of atplay, a theater play, etc., and I excluded studies dealing with choreography at a
microscopic cell level. In my initial search I found 315 articles; after applying theinclusion and exclusion criteria, I selected 26 articles. Because these included
articles different in their approach from the interrelation between play and choreography, I found it useful to divide them into thematic categories as a way topresent and discuss my findings.
In practical terms, each article was represented by a Post-it note, which I
moved around, grouping them in different categories on a large table (McLaughlin Library 2021). This helped me formulate different themes for each group ofarticles, and for a while I continued to move different articles between different

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themes. The moving of the sticky notes on the table in my living room in itself
became a kind of choreographic play. At the end of this process, five themes
emerged: learning through creativity; choreography as writing and pedagogy;
comparisons between dance and choreography and play and sport; children’s
play and environments understood as choreographies; and choreography ascritical play interventions in public spaces.
In this article, I define choreography as the rules of movement in a broad
sense. If we look at the five themes, we see the use of choreography on a spectrumwith productive and liberating rules at one end and manipulative and coercive
rules at the other. I find another distinction that moves across this spectrum:
explicit rules versus implicit and hidden rules. A player might observe a systemof rules that regulate and enable his or her movements when playing. However,
can this player also see a possibility of changing the system by making newrules, either through nonverbal changes in movement patterns or by defining
new explicit verbal rules?

Learning through Creativity
This theme highlights creativity rather than play. The focus is on physical activities in education and how they support young people’s academic and social
development. The physical activities serve to make learning meaningful. I
include these studies, even though they rarely thematize play as a phenomenon,
to embrace research conducted outside a Nordic research context, in which playand creativity are more often distinguished. Notwithstanding this, the studies
show a development in the understanding of how choreography is related to
playful processes.
Through empirical experiments involving students in teacher educationand the teaching of mathematics, a study by An and associates (An et al. 2017)shows how mathematics becomes more meaningful for students when practiced
through dance and movement. Miriam Giguere (2006, 2011) uses experiencesfrom artist visits in a fifth-year class in Pennsylvania to describe how children’s
cognitive development and ability to solve problems are facilitated in dance,
movement, and choreography (Giguere 2011, 2006). Giguere’s (2011) point isthat children do not express their emotions only by moving but also by applying,developing, and practicing advanced forms of thinking when choreographingdances. Giguere (2006) associated creativity with problem solving and compared

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choreographing a dance to the practice of writing. Bishop and al-Rifaie (2017)use descriptions of the creativity of dancers and choreographers to challenge
specific theories of creativity that disregard its bodily and social aspects. The
social element in some types of dance activities is also thematized by Karen
Schupp (2015), who recommends that, by training young people’s collaborativeskills through dance, educational institutions can support their subsequent success in their working lives.
In this first theme, it is the educators who create a choreographic framework to let students learn through movement. The students find possibilities toplay inside the choreographic framework introduced by their teachers. The rulesof these playful choreographies are productive; however, the rules lean toward
the controlled end of the choreography spectrum. It can also be questioned
how closely these creative activities are related to the phenomenon of play, if
play is primarily used instrumentally as a skill (Sundsdal and Øksnes 2021) for
succeeding in education and working lives.

Choreography as Writing and Pedagogy
In the second theme, choreography lies at the core of studies of creative writing
and pedagogy. Bannerman (2010) compares the choreographic process withcreative writing and argues that texts written by choreographers can be understood as expressions of bodily experiences of moving and being moved. Basedon phenomenology, neomaterialism, and the work of Gilles Deleuze, Ulmer(2015) provides three examples of choreographic writing focused on helping
choreographers write in a way related to the specific creative characteristics ofdance. Building on philosophy of mind, Irvine (2016) shows that working with acertain type of choreographic method, the writing of dance scores, helps dancers
make decisions as they are dancing. Dance scores come in different variations,but, in simple terms, they consist of a number of rules or instructions that serve
to guide the movements of the performers. Choreographer Jonathan Burrows(2010) describes two kinds of dance scores. The first he calls a representation of adance piece similar to a musical score. Describing the second, he notes that “whatis written or thought is a tool for information, image and inspiration, whichacts as a source for what you will see, but whose shape may be very different
from the final realization” (141). Finally, using choreography as an approach toteaching, Harrington (2014) examines the relationship between choreography

Playful Choreographies and Choreographies of Playand pedagogy through descriptions of a teaching course with dance students,
in which choreography becomes a pedagogical tool for the teacher and a structuring link between different subjects in cocreative processes for the students.
All four studies emphasize the importance of the creative element in choreography. It is the play actors themselves who make rules of movement both tocreate and to describe playful movement. Nevertheless, these descriptions ignore
possible and already established social and cultural systems of movement rulesthat influence the possibilities open to the play actors.

Comparisons of Dance andChoreography to Play and Sport
Within this theme, four articles—each in their own way—draw parallels between
the art of dance and other bodily movement and playful practices. Klein (2012)
looks at football through the eyes of a dancer and finds common characteristics as well as differences, arguing that football is a “playful interaction, whose
tension is not acted out between the poles emotion-motion, but in the fight for
victory or defeat” (13). The Amsterdam-based choreographer Carolien Hermans (2018) describes an experiment in which she first invited three boys into adance studio and asked them to play and then used their interactions and movements as an inspiration for a dance improvisation session with dance students.
Lindqvist (2001) compares children’s play with local dance classes in Sweden
and concludes that this kind of dance teaching ignores children’s preoccupation
with roles and narratives in play. Thus, according to Lindqvist, there is a gap
between dance activities related to “movement-training in relation to music” anddance activities related to drama and fiction (41). By contrast, Chappell (2007)
directly addresses Lindqvist’s point in a study involving specialist dance teachers by showing that “these dance teachers encouraged play rooted in physicality
and embodied knowledge within a strong dance/movement meaning-making
framework which could be coupled with dramatization” (50).
It is worth noting that when Chappell mentions choreography, she places it
in opposition to the play structures in dance activities and as “formulaic choreography” (42). Thus, Chappell does not herself directly link play and choreography.
Overall, this third theme addresses the differences between play and choreography. Furthermore, Lindqvist and Chappell point toward a missing link:
the ability to understand the embodied and choreographic aspect of roles and

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Children’s Play and Environments
Understood as Choreographies
In line with the other themes, the research of the fourth theme applies choreography in a variety of ways. In a structural sense, Kornerup and Gravgaard (2017)
describe early morning in a day care center, with all its interactions, welcome
routines, and practices, as a choreography. Ärlemalm-Hagsér (2010) applies
Barrie Thorne’s (1993) concept of gender choreography to analyze the genderstereotypes used by day care professionals on a playground when they try tostimulate children’s play. A study by Martha Sif Karrebæk (2011) applies theconcept of “social choreography,” as formulated by Karin Aronsson (Aronsson
1998), in a microanalysis of four boys’ play in a day care center focused on how
the play commences, develops, and concludes, as well as which positions andcharacters the participants create through negotiation. Manso, Ferreira, and Vaz(2017) characterize children’s play as improvised choreographies. Without using
choreography in the description, Berkhuizen (2020) focuses on children’s ability
to construct their own original and unconventional places for play as somethingoften ignored by adults as chidren’s play practices.
In relation to adult ideas about children’s play, it is striking that the studies
related to the first and second theme describe the physical movement practicesof schoolchildren and students in higher education as creative. By contrast,
the studies related to this fourth theme describe as playful the physical movement practices of preschool children. The fourth theme concerns the different
aspects of the adult framing of children’s play in both productive and unproductive, manipulative ways. We see these power relations among children when
they play together, for instance when one child acts as the choreographer bymaking other children dance or move in particular ways (Manso, Ferreira,and Vaz 2017). Even though Manso, Ferreira, and Vaz use the term “improvisational choreographies,” still they understand choreography as a practicein which choreographers are distinguished from dancers in a hierarchy ofdecision making. Berkhuizen (2020), on the other hand, shows that children,
collectively, can create their own secret choreographic system of imagination
within the rules made by adults.

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Choreography as Critical PlayInterventions in Public Spaces
Both through analyses and interventions, the studies related to the fifth and final
theme bring play and choreography into direct interaction with public spaces
and public practices. David Cardell (2010), considering commercial playhouses
in Sweden (sometimes called funzones), also uses the term “social choreography.” However, Cardell does not draw on Karin Aronsson’s concept as related
to the previous theme, but instead uses the concept in a critical sense first formulated by Andrew Hewitt (2005). Cardell understands social choreography as“a way of explaining the interplay between aesthetics and ideology, how actors
are incorporated into structures while at the same time (re)producing them”(5). Cardell’s criticism finds these funzones governed by the desire of adults tocontrol children’s play.
Other studies focus on how choreography in digital spaces shapes the physicality of gamers. Criticizing the typical gender stereotypes of the avatars seenin digital games, Miller (2015) outlines the process of developing a new gamein which participants can create their own original body identity. Isbister andassociates criticize the well-known game Just Dance for its lack of possibilities
for cocreation and playful movement because it uses prescriptive kind of choreography (Isbister et al. 2016). As an alternative, the authors present their designof the battle game Yamove! in an attempt to choreograph playful human interaction in a universe that mixes technology with physical and fun dance battles.
Four of my selected studies address dance and choreography as artistic
practice: Spampinato (2019) analyses an Israeli performance group that stages
public choreographies and rituals such as parades, dances, and games to explore
how political power prevents populations from creating change. Wood (2017)
describes a choreographic practice with three dancers in urban spaces. With
their movements and behavior, the dancers seek to create poetic moments as
a form of public activism. Merriman (2010) seeks to revitalize the concept ofchoreography in architectural geography through descriptions of the happenings
organized in the 1960s by the U.S.-based, avant-garde duo Lawrence and Anna
Halprin that explored how the intended use of architecture could be changed
through dance and movement.
In this fifth theme, it becomes even clearer that a particular choreographic
gaze can reveal the authors of the system of rules. Becoming aware of the unproductive and restrictive aspects of rules enables resistance and innovation and the

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rules in play and games, we might also have the opportunity to change theserules and thereby attempt to redefine the way we move and play together. These
attempts can result in the creation of playful choreographies.

Discussion
With the review’s five themes in mind, I now return to unfolding the idea abouta fruitful relationship between play and choreography. I wish to consider the
initial choreographic exploration of play in this article and tentatively open a newtheme to explore further the landscape of the interplay of our two phenomena.
In my review of the literature, there seems to be as many definitions ofchoreography as there are definitions of play. However, very rarely do the studies view choreography as playful. Often, choreography is understood as a planor a way to move that an agent or authority compels others to follow. In othercases, choreography is understood as a skill or subject one can study in dance
education. Some of the studies do address choreographies that consist of playful
movements (Isbister et al. 2016). Notwithstanding, the existing research gives
little consideration to the detailed choreographies of play.
One way to approach this topic is to consider every physical characteristicof play as choreography. Looking at choreography through the lens of play is to
ask: Where in this specific situation is somebody playing, and how can this playing be described choreographically? Here, concepts from the enactive approach
can serve as guiding principles as we try to describe the variations in what it
looks like when players, through different rhythms and qualities of movement,
create participatory sense-making play action and relate to each other in original
and playful corridor dances.
Research considering the detailed choreographies of play cannot ignore
the practice of improvisational dance, which has several things in common withplay. Besides mentioning the work of Anna Halprin, who pioneered the fieldof experimental improvisation and postmodern dance (Merriman 2010) under
the review’s fifth theme, I have not not addressed the vast range of movement
practices that involve the scaffolding and guidance of playfulness, improvisation,and imagination (Albright and David 2003). More specifically, looking at thedance form known as contact improvisation (Novack 1990) reveals a numberof strategies and democratic values in relation to the occurrence and practice ofPlayful Choreographies and Choreographies of Playplayful movement. Contact improvisers search for the “unpredictable unfoldingof movement” (Foster 2011, 3) as they allow their bodies to interact throughtouch and the sophisticated use of each other’s body weight. Can these interactive movements all be characterized as playful, or is such a description limited
to only particular aspects?
Improvisational dancers have specific strategies in common with songwriters (Preston 2013) and jazz musicians, including call-response structures(Ravn, Høffding, and McGuirk 2021) and turn-taking strategies (Preston 2013),
which are a form of unpredictable conversation. Initially, the actions of those
improvising through music and movement might not always look and feel playful; there might therefore be a phase of pretending to be playful before successfully establishing a playful interaction. Furthermore, some of these playful
practices require expertise, guidance, and many hours of practice. To illustrate,
training for a dance technique like Gaga (Galili 2015) involves a teacher who
uses a specific language designed to guide and evoke practitioners’ imaginationand thereby help them to express themselves using a particular playful andexplorative movement language. If we look at some of these practices from a play
perspective, we might be able to detect and isolate specific playful moments inrelation to different practices and modes of play in everyday life (Karoff 2013).
Another playful approach to examining movement practices that involve
improvisation is to ask if these practices exclude or allow for the hidden, secret,and silent choreographies of play. Even if a movement practice promotes a specific kind of playful movement language, a playful project might look at the
spontaneous and unintended moments outside or in the cracks of the practicewhere there might be contagious outbreaks of joyful group interaction. At firstsight, these moments might not be considered valuable—they might even appear
disturbing. However, in an educational context, it can be useful to understandthe value of unintended and contagious playful choreographies when teachersand educators try to incorporate playful qualities into their teaching.
In relation to rhythm, playful choreographies often arise against a more
stringent background. Thus, we might say that several choreographies coexist in
the same way that philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his rhythmanalysis describes
how activities with a playful and cyclical rhythm often coexist with activities
with linear rhythms (Lefebvre 2004). For instance, Anne-Lene Sand describes
how young people in urban spaces draw inspiration from seemingly hopelessarchitecture to create their own self-organized play activities (Sand 2017).
Another promising candidate for providing a helpful theoretical framework

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P L AYfor describing playful choreographies in detail is the concept of social affordances(Rietveld 2012). In the same way as “a person waiting for a coffee machine canafford a conversation and an extended hand affords a handshake” (207), playtaking place in a room with chairs might invite the players to use the chairs inother ways than for sitting (Rucińska 2017). I envisage a choreographic project
here that is even more specific in how these play actors bodily interact with eachother and the environment.
A commanding choreography is not necessarily a suppressive choreography. Sometimes challenging rules and commands create a tension within choreography, and the dancer or player is thereby challenged by having something
to work against. This aspect resembles sport philosopher R. Scott Kretchmar’s(2017) description of constitutive rules in the playground of sport: we invent andredefine rules “to create superior difficulties” (63). Kretchmar’s idea is that actors
in sports, similar to writers of novels, use their sport as a playground where they
reinvent real-life problems. Thus, if the play is too easy, the participants change
the rules to make it more exciting, longer lasting, and more pleasurable. Our
map of playful choreographies should also include this kind of choreographingfrom inside the play world.
Certainly, a choreographed situation can be in opposition to a playful situation. This is described in recent choreographic research (Allsopp and Lepecki 2008; Ehrenberg 2019), as well as in several of the studies I have reviewed(Cardell 2010; Ärlemalm-Hagsér 2010; Chappell 2007). Here, choreographyeither manipulates or stiffens people so much that playing becomes impossible.
It is essential to disclose these choreographic power structures to understandthe possibilities for play. Similarly, exploring the detailed choreography of joyfulplay encounters can offer new perspectives on the relationship between play andchoreography and thus open new and fruitful areas for future study.

Conclusion
I have sought to outline an area of research for the interdisciplinary fields ofdance studies and play studies by unfolding and exploring a fruitful relationshipbetween play and choreography. By understanding choreography as the rulesof movement in a broad sense, I sketch a landscape that shows how previously
published research addresses the relationship between choreography and playthrough a spectrum with productive and liberating rules at one end and manipu-

Playful Choreographies and Choreographies of Playlative and coercive rules at the other. Although the latter kind of choreographic
rules are generally in opposition to play, the first kind of rules create opportunities for playful situations to unfold. Only to a lesser degree does the existing
research explore the spontaneous embodied communication that occurs when
we sense and move physically together in play situations. Furthermore, whenthese spontaneous inventions in play are considered, they are rarely perceived
as constituting a choreography.
Understanding every physical characteristic of play as choreography makes
it possible to open an area of research that can add knowledge about both playand choreography. A choreographic project in relation to play could be used
to describe and understand how players in various play situations physicallycommunicate by offering social affordances as invitations to play and thereby
creating meaningful coaction. This might open doors to ways of understanding,for example, how play in an educational setting can help young people be creativeand imperfect together. In play, we can instantly become collective choreographers in interweaving patterns of multiple forms of movement and rhythm.

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