The language of the body: Jorge Dorsinville’s fashion choreography

Jorge Dorsinville is a Brazilian-born, New York–based Creative Movement Director and Choreographer, known for shaping the language of fashion choreography. His transcendental method, BODYtelling, transforms the body into an instrument of narration, using movement as a device to unify and project the connection between the ethereal and the physical. He has composed for some of fashion and film’s biggest names—Balmain’s Les Éternels fragrance with Olivier Rousteing and Carlijn Jacobs, David Yurman’s Holiday 2024 by Anthony Seklaoui with Sterling K. Brown, photographer Glen Luchford, and the Elle US May 2023 digital cover with Maty Fall, Alex White, and Sharif Hamza. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he launched JDOnlyLove, a clothing brand rooted in a mission of universal love, partnering with charities such as Ali Forney Center, UNICEF, and Every Mother Counts. Jorge sits down with hube to discuss his evolving regard for his medium, the body, and himself as he changes with it.

hube: You’ve said that you feel ‘movement heals, transforms, inspires, and moves the planet, just like nature’. What encounters or turning points revealed this truth to you?

Jorge Dorsinville: I discovered that truth through a series of moments that felt like quiet awakenings. One was deeply personal: times when I carried heaviness in my body or spirit, and it was only through moving—sometimes dancing, sometimes simply walking—that I found release. Movement became medicine. It reminded me that healing doesn’t always come from words or stillness, but from letting the body flow. Another turning point came through community. I’ve been in rooms where people—sometimes strangers—moved together, and within minutes the energy shifted. Smiles appeared, laughter spread, barriers dissolved. I saw how movement could inspire transformation not just within one person, but in the collective heartbeat of a group. And then there’s nature. Watching rivers flow, trees sway, or even the wind weaving through a field, I realised that the planet itself is never still. Movement is its way of staying alive, renewing, evolving. When I allowed my body to move with that same rhythm, I felt part of something much larger—like my own motion was echoing the motion of life itself. Those encounters—personal healing, shared energy, and mirroring nature—revealed to me that movement truly heals, transforms, and inspires, just as nature does.

h: How did growing up in Brazil—a place often associated with rhythm, vibrancy, and collective expression—influence your relationship to movement? Is there a specific memory, landscape, or community that continues to echo in your work today?

JD: Movement for me is a form of spirituality. It’s how I pray, how I listen, how I connect to something greater than myself. It’s not about religion—it’s about presence, about becoming so connected to your body that you can hear what your soul is saying. I grew up in a house called Terreiro de Umbanda (a syncretic Afro-Brazilian religion founded in Brazil during the early 20th century, blending African diaspora religions, Catholicism, Amerindian shamanism, and Kardecist spiritualism), where my older brother practised the Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil—and that shaped everything I believe about movement. In the rituals, we don’t just move for expression—we move to invoke, to embody, to honour. Each gesture carries a force, each rhythm carries an energy, each movement channels something ancestral and divine. That stays with me in everything I do. When I’m working, whether it’s on a fashion set or in a rehearsal room, I’m always listening for that same vibration—the movement beneath the movement. I believe the body remembers: it holds stories, wounds, joy, resistance. And when we move with intention, we unlock that memory. We let it breathe. We let it transform us.

So yes—movement, for me, is sacred. It’s how I stay connected to my origins, to the elements, to my ancestors. It’s how I make space for healing—in myself, and in others.

h: Movement is universal yet deeply personal. Do you believe it has a language of its own, one that transcends words and culture? How do you translate that language for different audiences?

JD: Absolutely—I believe movement has its own universal language, one that transcends words, culture, and even time. It’s the language of the body, and because every human has a body, it speaks to something primal and shared within us all. A gesture, a rhythm, a simple sway can communicate emotions that words often fail to capture—joy, grief, love, resilience. When we move, we tap into that shared vocabulary, and it becomes possible to connect without translation. At the same time, movement is deeply personal. Each person carries their own history, identity, and story in the way they move. For me, translating this ‘language’ for different audiences begins with listening—observing who they are, what they value, what they need. Sometimes that translation means creating simple, accessible movements that invite anyone to join. Other times, it means honouring cultural traditions or weaving in symbolism that resonates with a particular community. Ultimately, I don’t think of it as changing the language itself—it’s always movement—but rather shifting the dialect, the rhythm, the framing, so people can recognise themselves in it. That’s how movement becomes not only a form of expression but also a bridge—one that connects us across boundaries of culture, background, and even belief.

h: As a movement director, your medium is both physical and ephemeral. How has working so deeply with the body shifted your understanding of the intangible—memory, energy, even spirit? Has it affected the way you connect to your own body over time?

JD: Working with the body as my primary medium has completely shifted how I understand the intangible. At first, I thought of memory, energy and spirit as things that lived somewhere ‘out there’. But through movement, I’ve learnt they live in the body too. Memory doesn’t only reside in the mind—it’s stored in posture, in gestures, in the way muscles respond. A simple movement can unlock a memory more vividly than words ever could. Energy, too, became something I could feel, shape and exchange. In rehearsal rooms or performances, I’ve witnessed how collective movement amplifies energy until it becomes palpable—almost like a field we’re all moving inside. That has made me more attuned to how I hold and direct my own energy in everyday life. And spirit—perhaps the most elusive—has become less abstract and more embodied. There are moments when movement dissolves the boundaries between physical and spiritual, when the body feels like a vessel for something greater than itself. Those experiences have deepened my respect for the body as not just flesh and bone, but as a living archive and a channel. Over time, this work has changed how I connect to my own body. I’ve learnt to listen to it more closely, to trust its intelligence and to honour its cycles of strength, fatigue and renewal. Instead of seeing the body as something to discipline, I’ve come to see it as a partner in dialogue—one that constantly reveals new layers of the intangible through motion.

h: What is the ultimate visual or emotional ambition of your work? How do you know when a piece has reached the point where it fully embodies your vision?

JD: That’s a hard question for me to answer, because at my core I believe everything can always get better. Like movement itself, my work is never meant to be fixed—it’s supposed to evolve, to keep shifting, to stay in constant motion. When I look back at some of my creations, I often find myself wishing I had more time with them, more space to let them grow into what they could fully become. But the industries I work in—fashion and advertising—rarely allow that. They’re moving further and further from the idea of creation as an art form, and closer to simply delivering what people ‘need’ in the moment. That often means work is treated as disposable, consumed quickly and just as quickly replaced. It’s sad, because it pushes against the patience and depth that real creation requires. So if you ask me about the ‘ultimate ambition’ of my work, I think it’s not about reaching a single point of perfection but about capturing a living moment—something that can breathe, move and resonate in its time. I don’t always know when a piece has fully embodied my vision, but I do know when it carries enough energy to touch others, to move them, before it has to give way to the next thing.

h: With JDOnlyLove, you transformed personal creativity into social action. Was giving back always at the heart of your practice, or did this project reveal a new dimension of your purpose? What was the precise turning point that made you take it from concept to reality?

JD: Giving back has always been present in my practice, but not always in such a direct way. In the beginning, movement and creation were very personal for me—they were about expression, healing, discovery. But over time I began to realise that creativity has a responsibility too. It’s not only something to be admired or consumed; it can be a tool to serve, to uplift, to build bridges. JDOnlyLove revealed that dimension in a very tangible way. The turning point came when I started to feel the gap between creating for industry—often fast, disposable and market-driven—and creating for the community. I wanted to see if art could respond differently: instead of being consumed and forgotten, could it ripple outward and actually change something in the real world? That was the moment the concept became reality: when I understood that creativity doesn’t lose its power by being shared—it expands. JDOnlyLove was my way of aligning purpose with practice, of turning what I do every day into something that could give back, not just inspire.

h: As the world becomes increasingly digital, what place do you see for the physical body, live performance, and presence? Do you feel movement becomes more valuable—or more endangered?

JD: I see the body—and live performance—as nature itself. People pass through this life the way seasons pass: temporary, fragile, fleeting. Nature stays. It is alive in its own right, bigger than us, holding the memory of everything that has come before. We are only given the opportunity to be in nature for a short time, just as we are given the opportunity to live inside a body. And while nature can be harmed, diminished, even driven to silence, it also carries the astonishing power to regenerate, to come alive again. The digital world, to me, feels more like the internet—fast, infinite, immaterial. It offers access and connection, but it lacks the rootedness of the body. Our movement, our presence, is the living proof that we are here. The body is to life what nature is to the earth: the grounding, the pulse, the reminder that aliveness is not a concept, it’s an experience. So as the world becomes more digital, I think movement becomes both more endangered and more valuable. Endangered because we risk forgetting it, outsourcing too much of ourselves into screens. But more valuable because when we witness real presence—breath, touch, sweat, vibration—it hits us harder. It reminds us what it means to be alive.

Just as nature outlasts us and reclaims itself, movement too will survive. Even if overlooked, it always finds a way back, because it is life itself.

h: You’ve spoken about the hardships you faced as a child—loss, poverty, resilience. How have these early experiences shaped not just your artistry but your outlook on life? Has fatherhood shifted or deepened that perspective in unexpected ways?

JD: Those early hardships shaped me in ways I’m still discovering. Growing up with loss and poverty taught me resilience, but also a deep awareness of impermanence. I learnt very young that nothing is guaranteed—not comfort, not stability, not even the people you love. That realisation has always been woven into my artistry. It’s why my work often carries a sense of urgency, of movement as something fleeting yet powerful, because I know how fragile life can be. At the same time, it gave me an appreciation for beauty in small things, and a drive to create worlds that are bigger, brighter, more alive than the circumstances I came from. Fatherhood shifted that perspective in unexpected ways. It deepened my sense of responsibility, not just to create but to nurture. Where my younger self saw resilience as survival, fatherhood taught me resilience as care—the quiet, daily act of showing up. It also reframed my relationship with hope. For my child, I want to believe in a future that is gentler, more abundant, and fairer. That desire pulls me forward and gives my work a different kind of gravity. So while hardship built my foundation, fatherhood has softened and expanded it. Together, they’ve taught me that both art and life are about balance—holding pain and possibility, survival and imagination, grief and love—all in the same body.

h: Which projects hold the deepest meaning for you, not necessarily because of their scale or visibility, but because of what they taught you about yourself or others?

JD: The projects that hold the deepest meaning for me are actually the first ones I had the chance to do after moving from Brazil to the US. They weren’t the biggest or most visible, but they were the ones where I was truly tested. At that time, nobody knew who I was, and just getting an opportunity was already a battle. Those early jobs taught me how powerful opportunity can be—how it can change the entire course of someone’s life if you’re willing to step into it fully. I remember one project in particular. Before the shoot, I was warned that another choreographer—a friend of the director—would be on set, ‘just in case I couldn’t do the job’. It was said like a threat, a reminder that I could be replaced at any moment. In that moment, I had to hold my own hands, remind myself why I came into this world and stand firm in my purpose. That project became a turning point, not because of its scale but because it demanded that I trust myself completely.

Those experiences taught me that what gives a project meaning isn’t the size of the stage but the depth of what it pulls out of you—the resilience, the clarity, the courage. And for me, those early opportunities will always be the ones that shaped everything that came after.