Curating Live Arts - Critical Perspectives, Essays, Conversations on Theory Practice

Situated at the crossroads of performance practice, museology, and cultural studies, live arts curation has grown in recent years to become a vibrant interdisciplinary project and a genuine global phenomenon. Curating Live Arts brings together bold and innovative essays from an international group of theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline. Reflecting the field's characteristic eclecticism, the writings assembled here offer practical and insightful investigations into the curation of theatre, dance, sound art, music, and other performance forms-not only in museums, but in community, site-specific, and time-based contexts, placing it at the forefront of contemporary dialogue and discourse.

List of contents

List of illustrations

Prologue: Bethinking One's Own Strengths: The Performative Potential of Curating

Florian Malzacher

Acknowledgments

A Collective Introduction

Dena Davida, Jane Gabriels, Véronique Hudon, and Marc Pronovost

A NOTE ON CURATORIAL STATEMENTS-A THIRD SPACE: CHASING THE INTANGIBLE

Michèle Steinwald and Michael Trent

PART I: HISTORICAL FRAMINGS

Chapter 1. From Context to Concept: The Emergence of the Performance Curator

Bertie Ferdman

CURIOSITY AND INTUITION

Marie Claire Forté

Chapter 2. Exhibiting Performances: Process and Valorisation in When Attitudes Become Forms-Bern 1969 / Venice 2013

Beatrice von Bismarck

Chapter 3. Can We Curate Dance without Making a Festival?: On Dance Curatorship and Its Shifting Borders

Elisa Ricci

Chapter 4. Curating Performance from Africa for International Stages: Thoughts on Artistic Categories and Critical Discourse

'Funmi Adewole with Jareh Das

UNTITLED

Isabel Sachs



Chapter 5. The Curating Nation: Emergence of Performance Curation in Singapore and Its Impact on Cultural Politics

Ken Takiguchi

Chapter 6. The Curatorial Chronotope

Peter Dickinson

LAYERS

Harun Morrison

Chapter 7. More Weirdness, More Joy: Performance Curation and Pedagogy at Danspace Project and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance

Judy Hussie-Taylor

PART II: ETHICAL PROPOSALS

Chapter 8. Dancing the Museum

Thomas F. DeFrantz

Chapter 9. Curatorial Discourse and Equity: Tensions in Contemporary Dance Presenting in the United States

Naomi Jackson

HOLY MOTOR-A MECHANICAL METAPHOR SURROUNDING THE LIVE ARTS CURATOR

Cécile Tonizzo

Chapter 10. Noticing the Feedback: A Proposal to the Contemporary Dance Field, and/ or This Revolution Will Be Crowdsourced

Michèle Steinwald

Chapter 11. Email to a Curator: An Introduction to The Curator's Piece

Tea Tupajic & Petra Zanki

CURATING LIVENESS

Victoria Mohr-Blakeney

Chapter 12. Curation as a Form of Artistic Practice: Context as a New Work through UK-based Forest Fringe

Deborah Pearson

PART III: THE ARTIST-CURATORS

Chapter 13. The Artist-Curator, or the Philosophy of 'Do-It-Yourself'

Julie Bawin

"SOFT CURATION," POLLINATION, AND RHIZOMES

Yves Sheriff

Chapter 14. Being in Vanguard of Sensibility: Artists as Curators in Performing Arts-A Study of Collective Affect

Kasia Tórz

Chapter 15. Familias: Artist-Activist Curation in the South Bronx, New York

Jane Gabriels

Chapter 16. What We Talk About When We Talk About Curating the 'Unexpected'

Syreeta McFadden

GREATER THAN

Shoshona Currier

Chapter 17. Because I love Art, I Want Art to be Different. The Project Perverse Curating and a Few Things I've Learned From It

Jacob Wren

Chapter 18. Making Stage: Contemporary Dance and Performance Curation in the Caribbean

Makeda Thomas

AS WE

Nadège Grebmeier Forget

Chapter 19. The Work of the Musician-Curator and the Notion of the "Concert Scenario"

Marie-Hélène Breault

Chapter 20. Pseudo-, Anti-, and Total Dance: A Self-Interview on Curation

SALTA

Chapter 21. Collective Creation and Improvised Curation: A Discussion with Body Slam

Body Slam Dance Improv Collective: Gregory Selinger, Helen Simard, Roger White, Xavier Laporte, Victoria Mackenzie, and Claudia Chan Tak

PART IV: EXHIBITIONS AS EVENTS

Chapter 22. A New Kind of Critical Elsewhere

Travis Chamberlain

Chapter 23. Re-enact History? Performing the Archive!

Julia Kurz

Chapter 24. Choreographing Archives, Curating Choreographers: Yvonne Rainer, Xavier Le Roy, and the Dance Retrospective

Fabien Maltais-Bayda and Joseph Henry

THE TITLE AS THE CURATOR'S ART PIECE

Steve Giasson

Chapter 25. Exhibiting Dance, Performing Objects: Cultural Mediation in the Museum

Erin Joelle McCurdy

Chapter 26. The Curator's Work: Stories and Experiences of Tino Sehgal's Events

Véronique Hudon

PART V: ARTIVISM

Chapter 27. Framing a Network, Charting Dis/Courses: Performance Curation, Community Work, and the Logic/Anxieties of an Emerging Field

Roselle Pineda

CURATE

Natalie Doonan

Chapter 28. Food=Need: Constraints, Reflexivity, and Community Performance

Pam Patterson

Chapter 29. ARC.HIVE of Contemporary Arab Performing Arts: Memory, Catastrophe, Resistance and Oblivion

Adham Hafez

Chapter 30. Collective Walks / Spaces of Contestation: Site-Specificity, Community Involvement, and Mobility Employed as Curatorial Strategies in the Creation of Participatory Performances

Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte

Chapter 31. Sound Citizen: Curating Sound Art in the Distributed Public Sphere

Morten Søndergaard

CURATION AS A PRACTICE OF RADICAL CARE: A DEFINITION

Nicole L. Martin

PART VI: INSTITUTIONAL REINVENTIONS

Chapter 32. Rethinking the Role of Institutions and Curators in a New Interdisciplinary Age

Philip Bither

Chapter 33. The Curator as a Culture Producer

Marta Keil

DEFINITION OF CURATION

SALTA

Chapter 34. How to Build a Manifesto for the Future of a Festival

"Festivals as Thinking Entities," a Conversation with Judith Blackenberg, Daniel Blanga-Gubbay, Silvia Bottiroli, Livia Andrea Piazza, initiated by Silvia Bottiroli and Berno Odo Polzer

Silvia Bottiroli

Chapter 35. The Curatorial Gesture as a Decolonial Gesture

Arnaldo Rodriguez Bagué

PROPOSING INTERVALS-CURATING AS CHOREOGRAPHY

Gabriele Brandstetter

Chapter 36. Are You Not Entertained?: Curating Performance within the Institution

Rie Hovmann Rasmussen

Chapter 37. Bodies in Museums: Institutional Practices and Politics

Véronique Hudon with Boris Charmatz

CURATING HISTORY, CURATING RESISTANCE

Jaamil Kosoko

Chapter 38. What Can Contemporary Art Perform? And Then Transgress?

Emelie Chhangur

Epilogue: Situation Critical: What Comes Next for the Field of Performance Curation?

Tom Sellar

THE PARABLE OF THE CURATOR

Michel Herreria (drawing) and Jean-Paul Rathier (text)

Index

About the author

Dena Davida co-founded, directed, and is currently the in-house curator of Tangente, Québec’s first dance presenting organization. She also co-founded the CanDance touring network, and co-founded and co-programmed the Festival international de nouvelle danse de Montréal from 1985 to 2005. She has taught at the Université du Québec à Montréal for over 25 years.

Marc Pronovost is General and Artistic Manager and a co-founder of B21, an organization exploring the social impact of artistic projects in relation to sustainable development. He holds a master’s degree in Development Studies from the Graduate Institute of Geneva. He is the author of Art et développement (2013).

Véronique Hudon is a researcher, author and curator of living arts whose work is situated in the space between gallery and stage. She is a PhD candidate in Arts studies and Practices at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She currently collaborates with several periodicals in the arts field.

Jane Gabriels is the co-curator and Project Director for the Young Roots Performance Series at the Hostos Center for the Arts and Culture, City University of New York. Her publications include interviews with artists in Movement Research Performance Journal, Latino Rebels, and Bronx Dance Magazine.

Summary

Curating Live Arts brings together innovative essays from international theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline.

Additional text

“The volume appears as an assemblage that is not immediately easy to approach, but precisely because of that, it is an extremely interesting polyphony that can illuminate our understanding of what we are talking about when we talk about curation today.” • JRAI

“[This book] provides momentum for the evolution of research in the curation of performance, performing arts, theatre, music, and other media included in the live arts.” • ESSE (European Journal for the Study of English)

“Anyone interested in the significance, purpose, or agenda of curating and curators in performing arts should read this book. The curators promoted here are not rock stars, they don’t wear expensive designer clothing or hang out with celebrities, but they are deeply committed to their work, to the artists they work with, and to the communities they serve.” • thINKingDANCE

“The outstanding group of researchers in this innovative book engage in a lucid flow of passion and creative power. Its narratives are drawn from experimental approaches grounded in their authors’ rich lives. This anthology is comprised of unexpected revelations about curation that break the barriers of its canonic definitions, while remaining concerned with Beauty as a fundamental value and the live arts as a celebration of living.” • Alma Salem, independent curator, Syria Sixth Space

“This is a rich, global compilation of pieces that explore issues of power, community, inclusiveness, belonging, aesthetics, history, embodiment, epistemology, and pedagogy, all within the context of performance and the live arts.” • Nicole Stanton, Wesleyan University

“In seeking to reinvigorate one of the art world’s most ubiquitous terms, Curating Live Arts both interrogates and celebrates the historical in tandem with new possibilities for intervention into the complex space between artists, arts workers, art projects, participants and audiences. It asks critical questions about the values, the sensibilities, and the preoccupations of curating the live arts, and includes writing from artists, curators, and activists working in politically urgent contexts far removed from the centres of ‘high’ art. This wide-ranging anthology makes an invaluable contribution to the complex aspirations of this ever-expanding field.” • Sarah Miller, University of Wollongong

Product details

• Authors: Dena Pronovost Davida
• Assisted by: Dena Davida (Editor), Davida Dena (Editor), Jane Gabriels (Editor), V. Hudon (Editor), Veronique Hudon (Editor), Véronique Hudon (Editor), Marc Pronovost (Editor)
• Publisher: BERGHAHN BOOKS, INC
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.10.2018
• EAN: 9781785339639
• ISBN: 978-1-78533-963-9
• No. of pages: 382
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet; Dance, ART / Museum Studies, PERFORMING ARTS / Dance / General, Other performing arts, Museology & heritage studies, Museology and heritage studies