Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

We understand the «Choreography of Power» as a political spectacle in motion that is conceived as a tradition and diplomatic tool to exalt the narrative of a government and/or nation. An exalted, non-chronological, sutured and even invented narrative that is used to justify power - who, how, and why it commands, removes, puts or bans - and to deter the enemy; a narrative that uses different disciplines of the arts as means to build the plot, develop the characters, set the tone, and convey its messages to the audience. To present the notion of «Choreography of Power», we study civic celebrations just after major social movements or revolutions that brought about a change in the form of state or government. This work is being carried out through a comparative case study of the celebrations of the “Independence Day” in Bolivia (2006 - 2019) and other analogous spectacles in Europe. This work is approached from the field of knowledge of History and Comparative Art Theory with an interdisciplinary perspective and a theoretical and methodological openness (from the performing arts and history to the hybrid field of aesthetics and politics). It is an eminently qualitative work that combines traditional methods with experimental-exploratory ones to provide a more complete understanding of our research.