Choreography is the art of designing and arranging movement for performance — the writing of dance.
Choreography (from the Greek 'khoreia', dance, and 'graphia', writing) is the art of composing structured movement for the stage. Before the late 19th century, ballets were credited largely to their composers and impresarios; the role of the choreographer as primary author crystallised with Marius Petipa, who created the Russian classical canon — 'The Sleeping Beauty' (1890), 'Swan Lake' (revised 1895), 'Raymonda' (1898) — over forty years at the Imperial Theatres in St Petersburg. The 20th century brought distinct choreographic visions: Mikhail Fokine and Vaslav Nijinsky for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey in American modern dance, George Balanchine in neoclassical ballet, Merce Cunningham in chance-based composition, Pina Bausch in tanztheater, William Forsythe in deconstructed classicism. Choreography is unique among the arts in that, until late 20th-century notation and video, its primary medium of preservation was the body of the next dancer.