Choreo-Constellating: An Artistic Practice of Embodied Storytelling and Collective Sense-Making
In a time of increasing complexity, fragmentation, and systemic crisis, how might we collectively sense and respond to forces shaping our lived experiences? How can the body become a site of knowledge, not only for personal expression but also for collective understanding and transformation?
Choreo-Constellating is an emergent artistic practice that offers a response to these questions. Developed by artist and choreographer Liv Schellander in close collaboration with her peers, the practice interweaves choreography with systemic inquiry and constellation work, forming an embodied methodology for storytelling, sensing, and sense-making. Through this hybrid form, movement becomes a tool not only for artistic expression but also for mapping relations, exploring unconscious narratives, inviting speculative futures through the body, and engaging with socio-political and ecological questions.
A Living Map: The Poetics of Relational Choreography
At its core, Choreo-Constellating operates as a kind of living map—a dynamic and relational choreography in which participants embody various elements within a chosen theme or system. These embodied roles might represent a place, a human or nonhuman being, a historical site, an emotion, a question, or a speculative future. Participants might become a surrendered body, soil beneath concrete, a glacier, a revolution, or a collective longing.
Initially, participants are invited to embody these elements without knowing what they represent. This opens up a space for intuitive exploration, where the body becomes a sensory tool for perceiving and responding to the spatial, emotional, and energetic dynamics of the constellation. Through movement, gesture, voice, and presence, participants share what they perceive, gradually unfolding the web of relationships between elements.
As the constellation evolves and the roles are revealed, a poetic dialogue between the known and the unknown emerges. This interplay encourages a deeper understanding of interdependence, complexity, and the often-unseen forces that shape our experience.
From Somatic Sensing to Collective Inquiry
Drawing on methods from contemporary choreography, systemic constellation work, somatics, and neurophenomenology, Choreo-Constellating positions itself as both an embodied research method and a participatory performance practice. It resists linear narratives, instead privileging spatial, relational, and multisensory forms of knowing.
Participants do not merely "perform" ideas—they live and move through them, experiencing the tensions, alignments, and frictions that emerge in real time. The nervous system becomes an active participant, attuning to shifting dynamics and enabling deep listening—not only to others but to space, history, memory, and sensation.
In this way, Choreo-Constellating becomes a form of collective embodied inquiry, where abstract themes such as climate, individualism, historical movements, or political themes are processed through the body. The resulting constellations are not static representations but evolving, co-created rituals that offer space for shared meaning-making, emotional resonance, and imaginative speculation.
Between the Real and the Imagined
While the practice is grounded in theoretical frameworks—phenomenology, neurocognitive science, systemic theory—it also embraces the visceral, intuitive, and ritualistic dimensions of artistic engagement. It creates space for the magical, the ephemeral, and the unspoken—those dimensions of experience that often elude language but are deeply felt.
In each session, whether in a workshop, installation, or research setting, Choreo-Constellating invites participants into an altered mode of attention: a collective attunement where gestures carry meaning, silence speaks, and spatial arrangements echo the emotional landscapes of a group. Through guided improvisation and poetic facilitation, participants are offered the freedom to explore how the body can serve as both a receiver and transmitter of meaning.
Articulating the Ecological and the Political
One of the most recent applications of Choreo-Constellating lies in its ability to address urgent societal and ecological concerns in an embodied form. In the project Animalariums’ Constellations, which tours as part of Perform Europe 2025, the practice is applied in site-responsive performances, workshops, and research encounters. Here, Choreo-Constellating becomes a method for engaging with themes such as climate crisis, land-based memory, multispecies cohabitation, and postcolonial ecologies.
In collaboration with Sámi artists in Guovdageaidnu/Sápmi, as well as partner organizations working on site-specific themes, these constellations offer space for bodily negotiation of complex questions. The process acknowledges trauma—both human and more-than-human—and invites participants into speculative gestures of repair, reimagining, and resistance.
By bringing people into collective spatial awareness, Choreo-Constellating also nurtures a kind of interdependent presence—a stance that contrasts with the individualizing and isolating tendencies of contemporary culture logics. It invites us to sense our interconnectedness not just as a metaphor but as a felt reality.
Where the Practice Lives: Platforms and Communities
Since 2023, Choreo-Constellating has been shared at diverse platforms including Diffractive Dialogues at Tanzquartier Wien, Backpulver Think Tank for Contemporary Dance, and Raw Matters Tender Steps.
In 2025, workshops and research labs will be facilitated by Animalarium Dance Collective across multiple sites: Trollhättan and Ställberg in Sweden, Future Farm Vienna, WUK Performing Arts in Vienna, and Guovdageaidnu/Sápmi, with support from Proda Norge. These formats range from professional trainings to community-based gatherings, always centering embodied co-creation.
To Be Continued: A Space for Embodied Futures
Choreo-Constellating offers a practice-based invitation to reimagine how we relate—to ourselves, to others, and to the world. In times of instability and uncertainty, it becomes increasingly important to cultivate spaces where complexity can be held, where relationality can be felt, where past, present and future can be explored and sensed not only through thought but through movement, presence, and collective resonance.
It is not just a method—it is a ritual of attention, a dance of perception, and a gesture toward collective transformation.
About the Artist: Liv Schellander
Liv Schellander is an artist working in the fields of performing arts, somatic practice, and collaborative research. As a dancer, choreographer, Somatic Experiencing (SE)® practitioner and process facilitator, she engages in participatory formats and long-term artistic collaborations that center the body as a site of knowing, sensing, and transformation.
At the heart of Liv’s artistic work is a deep engagement with embodiment as a fundamental mode of thinking and relating. Her recent works investigate the relationship between the individual and the collective, highlighting the body’s capacity to generate meaning and navigate complexity through movement, attention, and shared presence.
Since 2023, Liv has been developing the performative research practice Choreo-Constellating, which interweaves choreography with systemic inquiry. Through this hybrid form, she explores how movement, relational mapping, and collective spatial awareness can be used to engage with societal, ecological, and poetic dimensions of experience. Choreo-Constellating workshops, installations, and artistic research projects are facilitated both individually and in collaboration with her close network of peer artists.
Liv has taught and facilitated workshops at Tanzquartier Wien, Backpulver – Think and Practice Tank for Contemporary Dance, Anton Bruckner Private University Linz, ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival, and other platforms. From 2018 to 2021, she curated and led the Training & Workshops program at Tanzquartier Wien, shaping spaces for embodied exploration and transdisciplinary dialogue.
Her research continues to cultivate spaces where somatic inquiry, collective storytelling, and artistic practice converge, inviting participants and audiences into processes of shared meaning-making, sensory depth, and poetic presence.