Michael Klien

Michael Kliën (born Michael Klien, 1973, Vienna) is an Austrian choreographer, artist, and theorist working across performance and visual art. His work has been associated with a reconceptualization of choreography as a relational practice distinct from dance, reframing it as the organization of relations between bodies, environments, and institutions rather than the composition of movement. This approach has extended into the development of social choreography as a field of practice and inquiry, most notably through the long-running participatory work Parliament (2014–). Since 2017 he has been a professor at Duke University, where he is founding director of the Laboratory for Social Choreography at the Kenan Institute for Ethics.