Articles

Choreographies of the Digital Everyday: Intimacy and the Aesthetics of Home Dance Productions

Author
  • L Archer Porter (University of Nebraska, Lincoln)

Abstract

Bodies are central to new media and its corollary repository of images. Not only do bodies produce media through their engagements with technology, but they also help define the composition of a production, particularly when they appear in-frame. Self-produced images circulating on and across platforms, for instance, are the result of orchestrations with the camera, choreographies of space, dynamics of movement and form, and the relationship between the gaze of the subject and that of the camera. Through such processes, the body captures a slice of itself, its subjecthood, and its intimate world.

Foregrounding the nuances of corporeality, this article presents a lens for understanding the aesthetic dimensions of everyday, self-produced media online. In it, I propose the theory of intimaesthetics, or the aestheticization of intimacy, to articulate the mechanisms by which subjects cultivate a sense of closeness with viewers through their choreographies of body, space, and media. Based on the study of thousands of home dance videos on Instagram, 2010-2020, and grounded in discourses on the gaze, affect, and the dancing body, this piece reveals four types of intimaesthetics: candid dancing, the moving selfie, nonchalant gestures, and home concerts. Each type articulates a distinct modality of practice, defined by the performer’s complex relationship with the camera.

In addition to offering a body-centric lens for conceptualizing new media productions online, this article makes a case for performer agency and positionality in a network society. By posting their media online, performers participate (often unknowingly) in a system of surveillance capitalism, wherein intimate data is collected, sorted, commodified, and traded (Zuboff 2019, Andrejevic 2019). Studies on these power structures are integral to combating hegemony in digital culture; at the same time, a focus on such forces tends to disregard the ways in which performers navigate them, the aesthetic dimension of their work, and their techniques of practice. This essay, part of a larger book project entitled Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press), highlights the performer’s new media praxis, while also placing that praxis in conversation with systems of power undergirding digital culture.

The concept of choreography offers an apt framework to reconcile the performer’s aesthetic work with their participation in a system of networked power. Choreography harbors associations to at once the formal composition of performance and the subject's relationship to hegemonic order. For instance, Dance Studies scholar Susan Foster (1998) defines choreography as “a structuring of deep and enduring cultural values,” which manifests foremost through the body. Foster also acknowledges the intellectual history of choreography as a craft of performance-making. Choreography, then, attends to the dual question of how do we choreograph, and how are we choreograph-ed? The “homebody” on new media is a productive case for understanding this dynamic.

Keywords: dance, performance, intimacy, social media, new media, everyday aesthetics, social choreography

How to Cite:

Porter, L., (2025) “Choreographies of the Digital Everyday: Intimacy and the Aesthetics of Home Dance Productions”, communication +1 11(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/cpo.2091

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Published on
28 Feb 2025
Peer Reviewed