How do choreographed words work and what do they have to say? Reading kinetic textuality in Indispensible Blue (Offline)

Text-based choreographic experiments are omnipresent on contemporary western dance stages. Even though experimentation with different forms of textuality clearly transcends the contemporary moment, the current artistic–choreographic research on language seems to be more explicitly oriented towards treating language itself as a medium for choreography, by emphasizing its rhythm, the physical effort it requires to produce language or by using it to describe movement. In response to the different ways in which performing artists approach language from a choreographic point of view, it has become more and more pressing to start looking at these texts from the choreographic context in which they appear as well. My article proposes a possible framework to do so, by introducing the term ‘kinetic textuality’ and by demonstrating what the choreographic mechanisms behind it possibly signify. Through a close reading of how kinetic textuality functions in the performance Indispensible Blue (Offline) , I will in the first place demonstrate that a choreographic perspective on language allows to recognize the dance that is taking place in a piece that seemingly does not have anything to do with dance. Meanwhile, as I will argue, this choreographic perspective on language also allows us to better understand the theoretical gesture underpinning a performance, whose complexity we risk failing to grasp if we only focus on the content of the words.