Choreographer entered Broadway credits only in 1936
Designing motion in space, shape, time, and energy is ancient practice, yet American English dictionaries listed choreography in the 1950s. George Balanchine took the credit choreographer for On Your Toes in 1936—earlier bills said dances staged by or simply dances by.
Choreography is the art of designing movement sequences—or the design itself—most often for dance, framed in terms of space, shape, time, and energy. Composers of dance lean on organic unity, theme and variation, repetition, and improvisation, drawing movement from ballet, jazz, hip hop, folk, religious dance, even ordinary walking. The Greek roots mean dance-writing, and the word reached American English dictionaries only in the 1950s.
Renaissance Italian dance masters set social steps; sixteenth-century French courts patterned dances artistically. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, social and theatrical dance split, and choreography first named written records—later called dance notation—before naming the theatrical arranger. Jean-Georges Noverre stood out in the late 1700s, and nineteenth-century ballet built its own vocabulary under figures such as August Bournonville and Marius Petipa. Modern dance then brought Michel Fokine and Isadora Duncan’s naturalism, and Alvin Ailey (1931–1989) ranged across ballet, jazz, and theatre.
Two methods dominate. Improvisation hands dancers a score of loose directives—one performer retreats while another is told to prevent the retreat—whereas planned choreography fixes motion so tightly that little is left to interpretation. Group pieces rely on named devices: mirroring, retrograde (a phrase run backwards), canon, levels, shadowing, and unison. The same craft now shapes cheerleading, synchronized swimming, marching bands, ice skating, and video games.
Law has caught up slowly. Section 102(a)(4) of the US Copyright Act covers choreographic works made after 1 January 1978 if they are fixed in a tangible form, but ordinary gestures and social dances may not qualify. When Kyle Hanagami sued Epic Games over a Fortnite emote, the court dismissed his copyright claims, finding a two-second, four-beat sequence unprotectable. Hanover’s International Choreographic Competition, running since about 1982, is the oldest such contest.
Source: Choreography
