Meditations on Choreography

What, I've often wondered, is the language of choreography? How is the idea of movement communicated; how does it evolve? What lives within that mysterious shift space of motion and narrative?

When I began to take ballroom dance lessons from the choreographer Jim Bunting, at DanceSport PA, I had the chance, at long last, to ask questions. Ultimately I had the chance to visit Jim while he was at work on a piece with two young dancers—to watch him yield his story to them. I wrote a bit about all of this in a piece that recently appeared here, in The Dance Journal. The essay opens with these words:

Love walks down the street and sits in the park in the sun. It tenders its hand in apology or desire, corrupts the knees, revokes the arch of the foot. Love is the story, never finally told in words and, perhaps, never finally told at all, though one gets fleeting glimpses of it in the choreographic work of Jim Bunting.