About the Book
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.
Table 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 Tupajić & 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.
Review :
“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
