Social Choreographies of Emotion

In her research project Social Choreographies of Emotion, choreographer Dragana Bulut explores how our emotional worlds are shaped, directed, and economized by social forces. Based on everyday social situations, she develops performative formats in which the audience becomes both participants and observers—thus recognizing the invisible choreographies that shape happiness, fear, love, and nostalgia. In this text, Dragana Bulut provides insights into her artistic practice, her methods, and the political dimensions of her long-standing research.

Dragana Bulut
Choreographer, performer, artist and researcher

 

At the core of my research, Social Choreographies of Emotion, lies the conviction that choreography extends far beyond the stage. It unfolds in everyday life, where our movements, choices, and affects are continuously choreographed—often invisibly—by dominant ideologies. I approach the theatre not primarily as a representational space but as a site of social gathering: a temporary community in which shared attention makes social constructs perceptible. Over the past fifteen years, my work has played with and critically examined these constructs, exploring how they choreograph the ways we live, relate, and feel.

This project investigated the commodification of emotions through the lens of social choreography. Focusing on happiness, love, and fear, it examined how these affective states are choreographed within contemporary capitalist societies—for example, how happiness becomes something to optimise, or fear something to manipulate. I also looked for openings where it’s possible to step out of these patterns and create alternative affective practices. Basically, I asked whether social choreography can function as a reflective method for making visible the mechanisms that choreograph our subjectivities and emotional lives. The research culminated in a book of the same title, bringing together its findings, methodologies, and artistic explorations.

I focused on three themes: how today’s happiness culture is shaped by ideas from positive psychology, how a growing emphasis on safety influences our experience of fear, and how new technologies and digital life are changing the way we experience love. The research brought together insights from sociology, psychology, and technology but always stayed close to lived, everyday experiences. My understanding of emotions is aligned with Sara Ahmed’s theory of affects, which argues that emotions are cultural practices, not psychological states. At the same time, my working procedures engage with psychology and the therapeutic discourse of self-help and life coaching—fields that significantly shape contemporary emotional life and the mainstream horizon of understanding emotions.

Methodologically, I draw upon established social formats—speed dating, life coaching seminar, safety procedure, auction—transposing them into performative contexts. The audience becomes part of this negotiation, oscillating between real social participation and performance fiction. In Beyond Love, for example, when I transposed the speed-dating format into theatre, strangers who met during the performance often formed real connections. Some became romantic couples after the performance; others became friends or even small groups who continued meeting long after the show. Even inside the fictional frame of the theatre, something very real can happen—people meet, connect, and sometimes carry those relationships far beyond the short time we share. In these moments, the audience steps in not just as viewers but as participants who co-produce the experience of the work. Together they create a temporary community that makes the social choreographies of everyday life easier to see.

My most recent work Remake continues this trajectory by shifting the focus towards choreographies of nostalgia. Drawing on my own Yugo-nostalgic sentiments, the performance stages a speculative re-enactment of the collective voluntary Youth Work Actions in Yugoslavia – initiatives that mobilised thousands of young people to build public infrastructure. What happens when the old ideologies of collective work are transplanted into new soil? In Remake, the stage becomes a film set where audiences step in as extras, invited to work, contribute, and re-enact these past choreographies of solidarity. What once belonged to the narrative of socialist progress is reassembled here as a practice of remembering and reimagining what binds us together today. Nostalgia is here not a sentimental longing for the past, but a critical lens attentive to its contradictions and possibilities.

www.draganabulut.com