Curating Live Arts

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.

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