Whether the 'ordinary dance' of Yvonne Rainer, the ballet-derived language of Michael Clark or the mass, participatory actions of artists Francis Alÿs or Katerina Sedá, each time I have written about choreography, I have considered it in fairly specific terms: as a form with the capacity to conjure utopian visions of social life, and as one that might, in aesthetic ways, reinvent relations of communality. Drawing inspiration, in part, from Andrew Hewitt's observation of dance's combined status as depiction and performative generator of relationships in his book Social Choreography: Ideology as Dance and Performance in Everyday Movement (2005), I have thought about choreography's evolution from medieval folk to the Renaissance, and traced the origins of 'ordinary dance' in the 1960s back to ballet's role as an extension of courtly etiquette. All of these readings of dance treat it as a deliberate, learned manner of movement, whether practiced or directed, with a sociopolitical dimension.

The choreography at play in Catherine Sullivan's work is something else. Appearing to privilege internal impulse over external form, Sullivan's work seems to be about exposure rather than aspiration. Crystallised in emblematic works such as D-Pattern (2005) or The Chittendens (2005), Sullivan's choreography offers, perhaps, a register of our world rather than a proposition for how we might live in it differently. Dance is inherently concerned with moving: whether as physical passage (to aesthetic ends) or as a conceptual implication of progression, with utopian ambition. Sullivan's choreographic movement is curiously static on both counts, however. Hers appears as a kind of involuntary dance form, one that its performers strive to repress.

A five-screen installation, The Chittendens, is set partly within a suite of offices that are in