A Choreographer’s Handbook

On choreography: ’Choreography is a negotiation with the patterns your body is thinking.’

On rules: ’Try breaking the rules on a need to break the rules basis.’

The updated and revised edition of ’A Choreographer’s Handbook’ invites the reader to investigate how and why to make a dance performance. In an inspiring and unusually empowering sequence of stories, questions, ideas and paradoxes, internationally renowned choreographer Jonathan Burrows explains how it’s possible to navigate a course through this complex process.

It is a stunning reflection on a personal practice and professional journey, and draws upon many years of workshop discussions, led by Burrows.

Burrows’ open and honest prose gives the reader access to a range of principles, exercises, meditations and ideas on choreography that allow artists and dance-makers to find their own aesthetic process.

It is a book for anyone interested in making performance, at whatever level and in whichever style.

Jonathan Burrows is a choreographer, teacher and writer, whose work has been invited widely internationally. He is best known for an ongoing body of work with the composer Matteo Fargion, with whom he has collaborated for over 30 years. He is the author of A Choreographer’s Handbook (Routledge 2010) and Writing Dance (2022) and is currently Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University, UK.