Curating Dramaturgies: How Dramaturgy and Curating are Intersecting in the Contemporary Arts 9780367487560, 9780367711993, 9781003042785

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Curating Dramaturgies

Curating Dramaturgies investigates the transformation of art and performance and its impact on dramaturgy and curatorship. Addressing contexts and processes of the performing arts as interconnecting with visual arts, this book features interviews with leading curators, dramaturgs and programmers who are at the forefront of working in, with, and negotiating the daily practice of interdisciplinary live arts. The book offers a view of praxis that combines perspectives on theory and practice and looks at the way that various arts institutions, practitioners and cultural agents have been working to change the way that art and performance have developed and are experienced by spectators in the last decade. Curating Dramaturgies argues that cultural producers and scholars are becoming more cognizant of this overlapping and transforming field. The introductory essay by the editors explores the rise of interdisciplinary live arts and its ramifications in cultural and political terms. This is further elaborated in the interviews with 15 diversely placed arts professionals who are at the forefront of rethinking and consolidating the ever evolving field of the visual arts and performance. Peter Eckersall is Professor of Theatre Studies in the PhD Program in Theatre and Performance at the Graduate Center, CUNY and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. Bertie Ferdman is Associate Professor at BMCC at CUNY.

Curating Dramaturgies How Dramaturgy and Curating Are Intersecting in the Contemporary Arts

Edited by Peter Eckersall and Bertie Ferdman

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Peter Eckersall and Bertie Ferdman; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Peter Eckersall and Bertie Ferdman to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-48756-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-71199-3 (ebk) ISBN: 978-1-003-04278-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgments Preface Curating dramaturgies

vii ix xi 1

B E RT I E F E R D M A N A N D P E T E R E C K E R S A L L

Keywords

17

1 A way of living and coexisting

28

I N T E RV I E W W I T H R I TA AQ U I N O A N D F E L I P E D E A S S I S

2 To create a ‘state of being’ on stage

38

I N T E RV I E W W I T H K R I S T O F VA N B A A R L E

3 We’re not idle witnesses

49

I N T E RV I E W W I T H M A RC B A M U T H I J O S E P H

4 In the belly of the political beast

58

I N T E RV I E W W I T H RO N B E R RY

5 To be a critic of our own practice

70

I N T E RV I E W W I T H P H I L I P B I T H E R

6 What is the DNA behind this?

85

I N T E RV I E W W I T H L I L I C H O P R A

7 The object of my inquiry I N T E RV I E W W I T H G U RU R E RT E M

95

vi Contents

8 We don’t travel with headlights but we leave tiny traces

109

I N T E RV I E W W I T H F E R N A N D O J O S É G A RC Í A B A R RO S

9 The complexity of various registers

120

I N T E RV I E W W I T H J U DY H U S S I E -TAY L O R

10 Will the f lirting continue?

131

I N T E RV I E W W I T H A N A J A N E V S K I

11 How can one employ strategies from theater as curatorial strategies?

141

I N T E RV I E W W I T H F L O R I A N M A L Z AC H E R

12 Everybody has a space in the circle

151

I N T E RV I E W W I T H É M I L I E M O N N E T

13 Acts of self-preservation

159

I N T E RV I E W W I T H G A B I N G C O B O

14 Just responding to history is never enough

168

I N T E RV I E W W I T H C H I A K I S O M A

15 A different kind of politics to the table

180

I N T E RV I E W W I T H N AT O T H O M P S O N

Bios Index

191 197

Figures

1.1 O Evangelho Segundo Jesus, Rainha do Céu (Portugueselanguage version of The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven)—FIAC Bahia 2017, featuring Renata Carvalho 29 1.2 Seminar on cultural production and curating strategies, with Fernando Garcia Barros and Rita Aquino—FIAC Bahia 2017 31 1.3 For the Sky not to Fall, Lia Rodrigues Cia. de Danças— FIAC Bahia 2017 33 1.4 Peso Masculino, Jaqueline Vasconcellos a.k.a Jack Soul Revenge Girl—FIAC Bahia 2018 34 1.5 FIAC publicity in Salvador, Bahia—FIAC Bahia 2017 34 2.1 Kris Verdonck, CONVERSATIONS (at the end of the world) 39 2.2 Kris Verdonck, SOMETHING (out of nothing) 44 2.3 Michiel Vandevelde, Paradise Now (1968–2018) 45 2.4 Michiel Vandevelde, Human Landscapes – Book 2 48 3.1 /PEH-LO-TAH/ 51 3.2 Marc Bamuthi Joseph 55 4.1 David Zambrano, Soul Project—Fusebox 2012 @ Tops Warehouse 60 4.2 Guadalupe Maravilla—Fusebox 2017 62 4.3 Justin Shoulder, Carrion—Fusebox 2018 @ Festival Hub 65 4.4 Shaboom, Fusebox Opening Ceremonies 2017@ Festival Hub 67 5.1 Ralph Lemon’s Scaffold Room in rehearsal at the Walker Art Center 2014 73 5.2 Installation view of Merce Cunningham, Common Time at the Walker Art Center, 2017 76 5.3 a–b Maria Hassabi: STAGING, 2017.  Installation view at the Walker Art Center, 2017 78 5.4 Performance of Merce Cunningham’s Events, 2017, in Perlman Gallery, as part of Merce Cunningham: Common Time at the Walker Art Center 79 5.5 Meg Stuart & Jompet Kuswidananto/Damaged Goods: Celestial Sorrow, 2019, Walker Art Center 83 7.1 Rimini Protokoll Radio Muezzin 99

viii Figures

7.2 Rosas danst Rosas 105 8.1 Courtesy of proyecto mARTadero 110 8.2 Courtesy of proyecto mARTadero 112 8.3 Courtesy of proyecto mARTadero 115 8.4 Courtesy of proyecto mARTadero 116 8.5 Courtesy of proyecto mARTadero 118 9.1 Eiko Otake with Paul Chan’s sculptures, An Evening with Paul Chan & Claudia La Rocco (part of Platform 2016: A Body in Places), Danspace Project, 2016 123 9.2 Javier Madrid and Archie Burnett, Elements of Vogue (part of an evening created by Cori Olinghouse during Platform 2011: Body Madness), 2011, Danspace Project 125 9.3 Ralph Lemon, An All Day Event. The End (part of Platform 2012: Parallels), 2012, Danspace Project 126 9.4 Variations on Themes from Lost & Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd, directed by Ishmael HoustonJones and Miguel Gutierrez (part of Platform 2016: Lost & Found), Danspace Project, 2016 129 10.1 Judson Dance Theatre, The Work is Never Done, 2018 133 10.2 Trajal Harrell, The Practice, 2014 134 10.3 Jerome Bel, Artist’s Choice: Jérôme Bel/MoMA Dance Company, 2016 136 10.4 Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Work/Travail/ Arbeid, MoMA 2017 137 11.1 “Truth is Concrete” at steirischer herbst 143 11.2 “Truth is Concrete” at steirischer herbst 144 11.3 “Training for the Future” 149 11.4 “Training for the Future” 149 12.1 OKINUM, by Émilie Monnet, Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui, 2018 152 12.2 Skeena Reece’s performance, Musée d’art contemporain de 153 Montreal, ICS 2018 12.3 This Time Will Be Different, by Lara Kramer & Emilie Monnet, ICS 2017, Darling Foundery, Montreal 155 12.4 Performance Sharing with Victoria Hunt, at Festival TransAmériques, Indigenous Creators Exchange, Montreal, 2018 157 14.1 ‘Playing Japanese’ by Hikaru Fujii @ Theater Commons 171 ’17, Tokyo 2017 14.2 ‘Tokyo Heterotopia’ by Akira Takayama / Port B @ Festival / Tokyo ’13, Tokyo 2013 176

Acknowledgments

Bertie and Peter would like to give our heartfelt thanks to all our contributors who freely gave their time to be interviewed and opened their artistic worlds in their conversations. We would like to extend our deep thanks to our exceptional research assistant Eylül Fidan Akinci who has been working on this project with us since the beginning. Thanks also to Anny Mokotow and Esther Neff for additional editorial work. Thanks to Laura Hussey and Swati Hindwan, our editors at Routledge, for her continuing support for this project and thanks to Claire Bishop, Frank Hentschker, and Jovana Stokic for introducing us to some interlocutors for the book. This project received support from a Community College Research Grant (Collaborative Research) from the City University of New York and we thank CUNY for their support. Kristof van Baarle and Frederik Le Roy from the University of Antwerp kindly invited us to present an earlier version of our introductory essay at a dramaturgy symposium and workshop at Kaai Theatre, Brussels in 2019. We also presented a joint paper at the American Dramaturgies for the Twenty-First Century symposium held at the Sorbonne, Paris in 2018. Peter would like to thank his Graduate Center Colleagues. Thank you to Maaike Bleeker, Paul Jackson, Kris Verdonck, Alexis Destoop, Rachael Swain, Ed Scheer, Helena Grehan, Katalin Trencsényi, Anny Mokotow, Marin Blažević, and David Pledger for conversations and dramaturgical thinking. Bertie would like to thank her BMCC colleagues and administration for their continued support of her research, as well as Erika Latta, Jill Samuels, Jovana Stokic, Daphnie Sicre, and her family, without whose support this book would not exist. A special thanks to Julien, Paloma, and Talia. Feb 2021

Preface

The work for this book was undertaken prior to 2020, a year that was marked by the Covid 19 pandemic and by so many social, cultural and political challenges. The pandemic that has brought so much hardship and tragedy to so many people around the world is also a warning of the need to take care. It is a reminder of the need for a respect for science, for sustainable living, care for the environment and regard for human lives and for the rights of the diversity of peoples everywhere. It is a reminder of the need to reject authoritarianism and overturn the necro-capitalist system that will take us all over the cliff. While we are unable to address the exigencies and outcomes of the pandemic in this book, we acknowledge the work that the people who are interviewed here have been doing both prior to and during the pandemic year. 2020 has been a year of enormous challenges for the arts and also a year in which artists and arts institutions have been called upon to help make sense of things, to give hope, and show the worth of human lives. We have seen how artists and arts workers have responded to this and we have seen the central place of artistic practice in movements such as Green movements, the work of First Nations peoples, refugee rights organizations, Black Lives Matter, movements that address economic, welfare and educational inequality, and the list grows. While this book was not conceptualized in response to the cataclysmic events of 2020, we hope that it honors the work of the many people who have been working in the midst of things and surviving in an era when survival itself has been an existential question. The book acknowledges the work of artists, cultural workers, arts administrators and creative leaders of cultural organizations, community and cultural activists, scholars and teachers of the arts, and supporters of the arts. We do hope that the themes of this book: connecting art and performance with ideas, artistic communities and inclusion, art and cultural critique, empowerment and the arts, and the innovation and creativity of interdisciplinary arts practices will be seen at the very heart of the work of the people interviewed here. Bertie Ferdman and Peter Eckersall New York January 2021

Curating dramaturgies Bertie Ferdman and Peter Eckersall

This book is concerned with the rapprochement between visual and performing arts and the ways that the arts have been transforming in the last two decades. While artists have always experimented with form, collaborating across disciplines and breaking disciplinary boundaries, what is unique about the last decade is how this rapprochement has become manifest at the institutional level. Visual art institutions have increasingly commissioned dance and theater artists to engage with the spaces of the museum. A large number of exhibitions in art galleries have not only embraced theater and dance but have been using durational components and audience engagement as integral to the very process of exhibit-building. Museums have opened and expanded performance departments and have been dealing with concepts otherwise familiar to theater and dance studies, such as ephemerality, the immaterial, the live, the embodied, and dramatic structure. The very term performance has come to embody what previously might have been referred to as performance art, itself an expanding form inclusive of hybrid art and performing arts practices such as dance, music, sound, installation art or scenography, spoken word, film and video, social and participatory art (Ferdman and Stokic 2020: 6). In other words, this broader turn to performance, especially within visual art institutions, incorporates both performance art and performing art lineages and practices.1 The term’s use is also ref lective of its global appeal; the translation into other languages such as Spanish and French, for example, remains the same: performance.2 While dance and performance art (which as expressed above have by now been subsumed by the more general turn to performance) have historically been a part of the visual art establishment,3 the interest in performing arts has become especially prevalent in how exhibits and art spaces are conceptualized. As Glenn D. Lowry, director of MoMA since 1995, emphasized in an interview with The New York Times in 2013, museums have had to “make a shift away from passive experiences to interactive or participatory experiences, from art that is hanging on the wall to art that invites people to become part of it (in Dobrzynski 2013).” It seems as though theatricality is no longer infiltrating art but art has gradually become theatrical, particularly as visual art practices sought to create social environments that put people in relation

2  Bertie Ferdman and Peter Eckersall

to one another. It has become common to see live bodies in galleries, for its spaces to be f lexible, and to cater to certain production needs such as “backstage” crews and spaces, lighting and sound equipment and staff, along with the specialist personnel for producing such events. This seems to have been a global trend, especially in capitalist, neoliberal, experience-based economies, where large museums have found that to remain competitive, relevant, and sustainable, they have had to make their galleries suitable for performance. Moreover, as with museums, theaters and especially contemporary performance festivals have over the last two decades been increasingly faced with artists whose works challenge conventional disciplinary uses and modes of display. For example, staging durational works for an audience that can come and go as they please (like in the museum), or works that take over the entire building (as opposed to just the stage), or that perform for one audience member at a time, and that as such, challenge conventional frameworks and production processes. Performing arts institutions have sometimes hired curators from the visual art world4; contemporary performance festivals, too, have experimented with this rapprochement between the visual and performing arts.5 Museums, galleries, and performing arts spaces, as well as theater festivals and biennales, have therefore been faced with the reality of having to rethink not just what they show or present, but how they present it. In light of these transforming aesthetic and cross-disciplinary developments that have been brewing over the last two decades, (re)defining the experience of art, we see dramaturgy and curating as the two institutional-creative practices that bridge this trend.

Curating and dramaturgy To curate is to “care for” and is drawn from the Latin cūrātus – a medieval European and Christological use of the word meaning caring for souls. The term curator historically derives from the visual arts as one who cared for museum collections and art objects. Discourse within the realm of the visual arts has increasingly engaged with questioning the state of curatorial practices, mostly as a result of the shift from object-driven to time-based exhibits, as art critic Paul O’Neill explains: “Art and its primary experience re-centered around the temporality of the event of the exhibition rather than the artworks on display” (2012: 2). Curatorial practices have evolved as a medium of caring for art, with the range of tasks and operations growing to include the oversight of collecting art, the organization and programming of displays and exhibitions, working closely with artists and others in cultural fields, researching art in historical and cultural contexts, and fostering the discussion of art in talks, publications, catalogue notes, and so forth.6 In his article titled “Art Without Artists,” artist and critic Anton Vidokle notes how curatorial practices in the contemporary moment go beyond the work of collecting and looking after art and focus on the wider social and

Curating dramaturgies  3

political dimensions of the role. Curators “administer the experience of art by selecting what is made visible.” In working with art collectors, sponsors, and institutions, Vidokle suggests that curators “act as intermediaries between producers of art and the power structure[s] of our society” (Vidokle 2010, italics ours). In other words, curators have become mediators of artistic sensations and producers of experience. In drawing attention to the quality of experience, Vidokle also acknowledges how curators are connected to an awareness of spectatorship and audiences. At least in part, curators think about how human interactions with art are productive in the sense that they can moderate and remake the social conditions of our daily lives. Ideally – and our book shows ample evidence for this in the many approaches of the curators, dramaturgs, and programmers that we interview – curatorial thinking can open new pathways to understanding human experience and address key questions about the world such as inequality, climate change, racism, technology, and authoritarian politics (to name a few of the many issues that art is dealing with). Travel the other way is also seen. As more exhibitions in art galleries and museums have shifted to embrace theater and dance, visual and conceptual art is presented in performing arts institutions and festivals. The act of “curating” – or caring for – performance has become vital to both its development and its reception. As Bertie Ferdman has argued, the emergence of performance curating in the twenty-first century has gone from taking care of content – selecting performances – to also taking care of context, structure, and form – conceptualizing how performances are to be presented (2012).7 In contemporary performance, the act of curating is now present not only after an artwork has been created (as collection), but also accompanying it in its early stages of development to its fruition (as commission).8 In tandem with the rise of the performance curator in the visual arts and a rethinking of what curating entails for contemporary art, the last decade has also seen a reconfiguration of dramaturgy in contemporary theater practice, which has become more hybrid and attuned to visuality. Performances often include new media, mix dance and acting, or include documentary material and non-professional performers. As performing artists increasingly employ site-based practices, challenge modes of spectatorship, and create live encounters that blur the boundaries between what is real and what is staged, we have seen a shift in what we could call the dramaturgy of liveness and a “dramaturgy of the real” (Martin 2012). Visuality and the presentation of embodied states of action are often more in the foreground and dramatic text is replaced by monologues, poetic fragments, and atmospheric staging that surround and immerse the audience in a sensorium of visual, audial, mediatized, and embodied sensations and experiences. These developments ref lect advances in dramaturgy since the introduction of “new dramaturgy,” a term coined by the late Belgian dramaturg Marianne Van Kerkhoven in 1994 to identify a trend in devised theater and contemporary dance. Also important was the English translation of Hans-Thies

4  Bertie Ferdman and Peter Eckersall

Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre in 2006, which drew from a genre of theater that had been developing since the 1980s. The “post-dramatic turn” unhinged dramaturgy from its connections to Aristotelian drama. Postdramatic theater, as described by Lehmann, was a theater after drama that put visuality “in place of a dramaturgy regulated by text” (2006: 93). Postdramatic theater moves away from theater’s traditional reliance on dramatic conf lict and results in performative rather than dramatic strategies. Thus, we argue, the visual arts are becoming an expanded media that include a more developed dramaturgical awareness of performance. Crucial to this is how the practice of new dramaturgy, via van Kerkhoven, has become important to the rise of hybrid visual and performing arts practices. The link to visuality is stated in van Kerkhoven’s description of dramaturgy as, “an alternation between ‘looking at something’ and ‘walking in something,’ an alternation between observation and immersion, between surrendering and attempting to understand” (van Kerkhoven 2009: 11). For van Kerkhoven, performance brings to the field of artistic practice new ways of production in which the viewpoint of the spectator is also emphasized; we are looking at something that is enacted and we become more attentive to ocularity and the sensory impact of the visual field. There is an active sense of “push-pull” – a multi-perspectival tension is created from the awareness that making and viewing are both practices connected to the artwork. Van Kerkhoven thinks about the way that artworks can shift our perspectives and are made in such a way as to open up new possibilities and offer new forms of knowledge. To make an artwork, to situate it in a performance or exhibition context, for van Kerkhoven, this is a political action as it invites thinking about the world and our place in it. The “push-pull” of observation and immersion is the recognition that we cannot be separate from the experience of art and that it holds us accountable. Peter Eckersall has argued that dramaturgy is a creative practice that bridges an idea, a worldview, and an activist message with its presentation or representation in and through live performance. It is an agent in a creative process that draws attention to the structure, means of expression (language, sensibility, aesthetics, form), framing and conditions of performance. It has become greatly important to the idea and practice of contemporary performance, so much so that the medium itself is expressly dramaturgical (Eckersall 2018: 241). The artist and the spectator look for and follow dramaturgical threads that draw us into an awareness of performance as a medium that embodies, rather than merely represents, social relations. In this way, the creative uses of bodies, text, spatialization, proximity, design, atmosphere, and music are legible and discursive dramaturgical practices that are made to engage the spectator entirely with their senses and intellect. In this way too, a performative event, no matter if it is presented in a gallery or a theater, or in a non-traditional space for the display and presentation of visual and performing arts, offers affective experiential moments that invite critical readings and activate an awareness of the terms of participation (Eckersall 2020: 104–120).

Curating dramaturgies  5

Change, transformation, agency, affect, artistic labor, mobilization, activism, presentation, ideology, aesthetics, and politics are terms associated with dramaturgy both as a social operation and as an artistic practice. Thus, while noting how dramaturgy proliferates in its meanings, the “expanded” uses of the term in visual and performing arts are not only productive, but necessary. Just as a diverse range of artists are increasingly questioning the form of performance just as much as its content, using “the live” as the source for their work, curators have been thinking dramaturgically about interdisciplinarity, community-building, and new festival and biennale formats that aim at offering tools for thinking differently, not only about art, but about the contemporary moment. Curating performance combines production demands with aesthetic goals and can provoke the audience to think beyond “the box” or “stage” or even “the show” and conceive of performance as an event, with tailor-made structural considerations for an audience, such as accessibility, space, duration, and ticket prices. Whether it be programming interdisciplinary live encounters, rethinking questions of participation, assembling the public, or bringing a heightened critical awareness to their own practice, these are, essentially, dramaturgical concerns. As art curator Kathy Halbreich articulates, the curator is also becoming analogous to a dramaturg, unpacking the context and the meaning, helping the cast move forward with that understanding, enriching the sense of the performance. The dramaturg also keeps track of the history of the play, of its innards, which I think is similar to what a curator does.9 To think dramaturgically about curation and programming, as Florian Malzacher reminds us in the pages of this book, is an idea put forward by art historian Beatrice von Bismarck in a special issue of Frakcija dedicated to curating in the performing arts (the first of its kind).10 With the advent of the performative turn in museums and galleries, as well as the interest in visuality in contemporary performing arts practices, there is now considerable crossover between curating and dramaturgy. Indeed, these two creative practices have become almost indivisible from one other.

About the interviews We interviewed curators and dramaturgs who are working in, with, and negotiating the daily practice of visual and performing arts. We began the project in 2017, with the last interview taking place in February 2020, right before COVID 19 exploded outside Wuhan, China. As you might imagine, things have changed quite dramatically since, in ways we could not have anticipated. The interviews thus ref lect on a specific moment in time, since the premiere of Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present in Spring of 2010, which for us marks when the “performative turn” took on high speed in the

6  Bertie Ferdman and Peter Eckersall

visual arts world, even though it was certainly on the rise before that, up to the current pandemic. Since 2010, which also happens to be the advent of The Arab Spring, we witnessed the rise of populism and White nationalist movements, global anti-immigration agendas, a massive refugee crisis, increased global warming, and unprecedented levels of social inequality. Concurrently with such global precarity, the last decade also saw the rise of establishment art institutions and the increasing realization that, in order for change to occur, systemic inequality, racism, and gender discrimination must be addressed at the top levels of arts management and funding structures. The curators, artistic directors, and arts managers we selected are cognizant and sensitive to the crucial role they play in generating a more transparent and equitable playing field that is more inclusive, diverse, and sustainable. We began every interview with the simple question: How would you describe what you do? Intentionally open-ended, this question enabled interviewees to self-identify what they saw as their main objectives, goals, tasks, and so on. Most, if not all, wear many hats and see themselves as cultural agents spanning a variety of roles. The interviews ref lect a diversity of ­perspectives – cultural, geographic, disciplinary, and economic (from those who work at large established institutions to independent contractors who run smaller nonprofit organizations or festivals). We interviewed professionals working independently and/or in various kinds of institutions in the United States, as well as in Brazil, Bolivia, Germany, Belgium, Japan, South Africa, Turkey, and Canada. We selected the interviewees because of the projects they have worked on, more than the geographies of where they are based, though that certainly affects how they work. Our interviewees are also drawn from different times in their career; some are just beginning their work, many are mid-career, and we chose a few veterans with extensive experiences from which to ref lect on. We discovered that the notion of “cultural institution” means something very different for individuals, depending on the local, cultural, economic, and political contexts. All, however, readily take risks and see their work in art and culture as politically and socially relevant. Some interviewees raise the issue of how to build culture and art from the ground up and incorporate a grassroots and collective approach. Many interviewees are artists themselves, and address how cultural management and audience engagement form an integral part of their artistic practice. Together, the interviews look at the ways that various arts institutions, practitioners, and cultural agents are working to change how art and performance are developed, displayed, staged, and experienced. The changing nature of the spaces of art and performance, including galleries and museums, festivals and community venues, and their local cultural geographic and economic contexts, is also a factor in these transformations. In our conversations, we were interested in curators’ perspectives on dramaturgical thinking and their ideas about the expanded notion of the “dramaturgy of the event,” building community through performative encounters, and how that affects

Curating dramaturgies  7

cultural management. In essence, how are curators thinking dramaturgically? We were also interested in perspectives of working dramaturgs on curating and how they develop relationships with artists. How are dramaturgs thinking curatorially? We aim for this book to help advance the scope and practice of dramaturgy and curatorship; however, we also recognize the criticism that these practices can have too much inf luence in a time when the arts are seen as part of a creative industry. Curators and dramaturgs are sometimes seen as creating barriers to the direct transmission of an artwork’s meaning. Another criticism is that they unnecessarily complexify the artistic process and interrupt the artist’s intuition and imagination. More substantial is the skepticism about the claims for critical intervention or activism in art and performance, claims that are often amplified in curatorial and dramaturgical statements. The theoretical sequestering of art and performance can pacify our urge for resistance to power and lead to a legitimation of the idea of art as a vicarious act of resistance or as mere entertainment. The philosopher and dramaturg Bojana Kunst warns against preaching to the converted and notes that artistic freedom and the rise of contemporary art and performance are exactly proportionate to the relative powerlessness they show in regard to effecting wider social change (Kunst 2015: 7). The political theorist Jodi Dean is disparaging about the role of art in politics and she argues that this creates a false consciousness; only collective modes of solidarity and activism can do political work (Dean 2012). Curator Ralph Rugoff notes how criticism of such relations to art typically links “the development and display of … populist immersive or participatory installations to a shift in marketing tactics used by major museums seeking to attract larger audiences” (Rugoff 2016). Interestingly, as the director of the Hayward Gallery, a preeminent contemporary art venue on London’s Southbank, Rugoff is known for developing precisely this kind of immersive, adventurous, and popular contemporary arts programming. The degree of self-awareness and willingness to admit to the implications of being embedded in commercial partnerships and neoliberal systems of power is one of the great ironies of programming. An idea of programming and “caring” for art that is countercultural and radical, or art that makes visible the vectors of power and inequality in economy and society sits uneasily with the eloquent analysis of how artworks are ineluctably produced by these very same systems. This is in many instances the paradoxical and tortured vernacular of cultural producers. In responses to these concerns, many of the interviewees in this book discuss how their work attempts to both acknowledge and subvert the transactional nature of performance. They remind us how curators and dramaturgs are faced with existential questions about how to develop strategies for the programming, display, and reception of art and performance. How does one deal with the many forms of commodification and entrapment? Is it meaningful to make visible the means of production and how does one do this

8  Bertie Ferdman and Peter Eckersall

without reducing or essentializing the experience of art? And how does one sit with art and performance that has high attendance prices, requires international travel, and is enmeshed in a web of soft power and sponsorship by companies and individuals who have made their money by shady or invidious means? How does one balance the multiple claims to make and see art and performance from diverse groups without becoming exclusive or censorial? Such questions only ever seem to grow in their complexities and often seem to overwhelm and curtail artistic and performance practices. But, as the interviews show, these are also questions that are always present in curatorial and dramaturgical work.

Festivalization, or the re-conceptualization of festival One of the most instructive overlaps between visual performing arts in terms of both theory and practice has been the rise of art events, biennales, and festivals. Curators have become much more visible for their work in programming large art fairs and festivals such as Documenta, the Venice Biennale, Avignon Theatre Festival, International Edinburgh Festival, and others. Variations on the festivalization of art and performance (Bennett et al. 2014) have been a major trend in the last three decades in many places around the world. A great many of these events have been remarkable for their transformational effects not only on the arts but on society and culture more broadly, both locally and globally. For example, the famed Documenta and its edition 14 (Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk 2017) was staged in multiple sites across Kassel and Athens in a continuing austerity era and made a feature of an extensive array of performance works. This trend is not restricted to Europe or economically wealthy societies. Making a virtue of diversity, we see attempts to develop artistic events in many places around the world. No longer mere exhibitions nor only lucrative undertakings, these have evolved as not only global but also local art events that explore social and political themes and respond to urgent issues in their local communities and contexts. They are often a major part of the cultural and economic infrastructures of their host cities. While an extended discussion of the cultural politics and artistic inclinations of such events is beyond the scope of this essay, the point that we would like to stress here is how much these events are intermediary: the role of curator is one that bridges artistic practice and the work of ideas, institutions, and events, in a parallel way that we argue is the case for dramaturgy. A collective throughline among many of the people we interviewed in this book was a desire to re-discover, or question, the notion of what a festival of contemporary performance is or could be. These individuals are highly invested in re-conceptualizing the festival format: questioning for whom the festival is for, where, when, and how it can take place: generating imagined spaces, developing new temporalities, and engaging local communities. Inspired by contemporary dance dramaturgies, in particular where

Curating dramaturgies  9

choreographers focus on the relation between bodies, Rita Aquino, co-­d irector of FIAC Bahia (Festival Internacional de Artes Cênicas da Bahia) along with its founder Felipe Assis, highlight how such thinking helps them to ref lect on “the what and why of a festival.” They see dramaturgy as a productive way to combine artistic programming with a larger moment of coexistence: “The festival has become a process to think together possibilities for a better way of coexisting.” Ref lecting on Truth is Concrete, a one-time festival (2012) which focused on artistic strategies in politics and political strategies in art, German-based dramaturg and curator Florian Malzacher gathered an audience for a continuous 160 hours.11 As he explains in his interview, he wanted to suspend the normal way of how we do a festival. We tried to find a format that would make the festival more of an intervention, more radical, something that would transform what the people who are invited could do in terms of timeframes and settings. Inf luenced from his time as a student at The Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at Giessen, which is known for its interdisciplinary and non-­h ierarchical approach to the arts, Malzacher became interested in experimenting with the arts event structure. “What if you do a conference where everybody has to walk while the lecturers are speaking?” “What would it do to the discourse? What does duration do with an audience?” Ron Berry, Artistic Director and founder of Fusebox in Austin, Texas, echoes this commitment to changing assumptions about how we make, distribute, receive, and experience performance as part of a larger event. “The past 13 years have been an exploration of festival as a thing, as a platform, as an idea,” he tells us. In order to develop a different relationship between the art they presented and their audiences that was not transactional, Fusebox made the decision to make the festival free, which ultimately changed how people came to experience and value the work. Post-COVID 19, we will need to think about changes to festival and biennale formats. Cultural managers, curators, artistic directors, and programmers will be forced to rethink their focus. Upon canceling the International Edinburgh Festival for the first time since its inception in 1947, Festival Director Fergus Linehan ref lected on imminent shifts: “Over the last 30 years or so, it’s been easy to be drawn into a world in which the arts are framed as part of a wider economic regeneration agenda that’s all about tourism and never-ending growth.” Emphasizing a more local and people-­ centered way of doing a festival going forward, Linehan added how “the old approach is no longer sustainable either environmentally, or in terms of the real value of the arts, which are much more than just a branding exercise (McLellan 2020).” The re-conceptualization of festivals moving forward will not happen without dramaturgical thinking, in ways that will undoubtedly engage the public in unprecedented ways.

10  Bertie Ferdman and Peter Eckersall

Social dramaturgies for art and community engagement Deep interest and engagement with art as a social practice in the last three decades is an outgrowth of the recognition that art and society are interconnected. It is therefore not surprising that practices within the arts such as dramaturgy and curatorship are also becoming connected to social practice. Social practice arts are created and/or mobilized by curators, cultural producers (artists), and dramaturgs to create contexts for social interaction, intervention, and sustaining communities. They involve convening publics in an expressly active and sometimes self-ref lexive way in the making of and participation in artistic practice. As Shannon Jackson’s (2011) and Claire Bishop’s (2012) inf luential texts show, there are many examples of social practice arts. Their studies highlight this diversity while also showing how the field as a whole has been characterized by contemporary performance’s shift into gallery spaces and opening the visual arts to new ideas of participation and experimentation that come from the performing arts. Social practice arts have led the performative turn; they can offer curated and dramaturgical experiences that may aim to educate and develop and empower people’s creativity, resilience, and imagination. They foster different ways of being and can work across lines of class, race, and other barriers and in so doing they can confront systems of power. They produce new forms of knowledge, sometimes in a very visible way as when theaters and exhibitions become sites for conferences, and dramaturgical thinking changes the academic field of performance research. They are seen at many levels of cultural production and inspire art and performance events in many places, from schools and community groups, to private homes, public institutions, and civic places where people gather, from small halls and galleries, to major arts and performance venues. There are, however, theoretical and practical concerns about the way that social practice curtails artistic production and plays into the neoliberal and cultural political idea that art is best when it serves the society and is visibly and demonstrably productive in various ways. It is not only free-market ideology that produces this state of affairs but also socio-culturally interventionist ideas as well. It is a postmodern condition that is imbricated in capitalism and also cognizant of its Marxist lineage. In a special issue of Theater titled “Curating Crisis,” Thomas DeFrantz calls out the “doing of community outreach” by historically white male institutions and delineates the importance of moving away from programming diversity to a real dynamic engagement with marginalized communities and publics. Ref lecting on the Performance Curation and Communities of Color Working Group convenings which took place on 2015 and 2016 at Duke University,12 DeFrantz articulates the necessity in the twenty-first century for a different model of curating (“curating as social engineering”) that centers its efforts on creating relationships among publics. “What if we actually sought to create counterpublics or particular publics that could make manifest possibilities for performance that are not simply slotted into season-driven planning?” (DeFrantz 2017: 13).

Curating dramaturgies  11

The interviews in this book speak to the engaged curatorial practices DeFrantz advocates for. Many of the conversations document the variety of activities and programs related to social practice arts, as well as a ref lexive form of critical self-awareness around issues of diversity, inclusion, and privilege, and ways that dramaturgical thinking can enhance both access and public engagement strategies. Marc Bamuthi Joseph, for example, calls on curatorial practice to be strategic not only in “introducing the aesthetic sublime,” but also in asking how the work implicates the people watching it. “More than anything,” he asserts, “I have to ask myself who are the communities or what are we going to gain by bringing certain communities together?” The notion of implication is especially useful because it views the artwork presented not in marketing terms (audience outreach, box office returns, annual membership revenues), but rather as an exchange with and for communities. It promotes a collaborative model of social engagement. In speaking about the mARTardero Project, the art and cultural center he founded in Cochabamba, Bolivia, Fernando García Barros recounts the importance of cultural managers’ need to understand contemporary complex social interactions. “It is not enough to say a space is ‘available’ to artists and audiences,” he explains; spaces must be actively generated with diverse artistic communities. With Onishka Productions, the Montreal-based art organization she founded to create bridges among contemporary indigenous performance artists worldwide, Émilie Monnet recounts the care she brings to creating spaces that feel whole and nurturing, the emphasis being on the encounter and the relationships generated.

The dramaturgical curator How can we respond to the many issues and questions about artistic autonomy and solidarity and activism in art and performance? How can we move away from the feeling in much of today’s programming that is a “Noah’s Ark” of contemporary visual and performing arts, that takes two of everything and rapidly consumes arts from diverse places, often appropriating others’ cultures and traditions? Perhaps we can be guided by what Oliver Marchart in his recent book Conflictual Aesthetics (2019) calls the curatorial function. “If, therefore, the curatorial function consists in the organization of the public sphere, then we might conclude that it must include the organization of conf lict and antagonism” (Marchart 2019:145). As he elaborates, the problem here is that art cannot just invent antagonism (keeping in mind his agreement with much of Chantal Mouffe’s work, his differentiation rests on a notion of antagonism apart from a concept of agonism; see Marchart 2019: 28) – such a thing is never organized nor can its essence be captured in a dramaturgical or curatorial moment. Marchart’s suggestion is that we should make a virtue of this contradiction and create conf lictual aesthetics from this very sense of impossibility. Curating, and here we also add dramaturgy, therefore becomes a practice in “organizing

12  Bertie Ferdman and Peter Eckersall

the impossible” – creating or bringing into view an impossible public sphere through art, an impossible mobilization of ideas, an impossible politics (Marchart 2019: 146–147). But what does this mean in practice? The idea of an impossible or unrealizable politics in relation to an impossible art has been with us since the beginnings of the avant-garde. Moreover, an impossible politics was explored in the counterculture and performance movements of the 1960s that produced waves of new artistic ideas and practices in different variations and contexts. They wanted to enact and embody politics directly and manifestly on a human level and turned toward a fully realized and corporeal and transgressive avant-garde. But something more sensitive and f lexible and human is needed now. Marchart proposes a number of possibilities for the field of art and by extension, for performance and dramaturgy. His primary idea is to remember that curating is a collective activity with inside-outside standpoints. (T)he curator’s true standpoint is in the contexts outside of the field of art. They are actively organizing in social and political contexts beyond the art institution, and they connect these back to the field of art. In this case, the curatorial function is essentially collective. (2019: 149, italics in original) He also asserts that in the act of exhibiting arts, one is taking up a position – “the curatorial function is a form of taking a position” (2019: 150) – that must be an antagonistic one, hence one born of the idea of conf lictual aesthetics; no accommodations with the status quo or vague phrases about artistic transgression as a virtue for economic growth. The curatorial position must be formed in a politics that is against the status quo. For Marchart, this is also his definition of collaboration, a kind of artistic thinking that extends beyond the field of art – and in drawing the threads between the fields of art and politics he advocates building relations, a form of cooperation or coming together – this is how collaboration is understood in Marchart’s terms. Collaboration is butting together two worlds, two spheres of activity, neither reducible nor subsumed by the other, both antagonistic and held in productive tension. Exactly how realistic these propositions are given the embedded nature of art and performance in class perspectives, ideological policing, and wealth is of course difficult to know. However, as this book shows, there are many threads of collective endeavors and many ways that lead to “the political opening of the institution” (Marchart 2019: 152). What are some of the possible futures for the arts in and through the overlapping practices of dramaturgy and curatorship? Our aim for this book is to offer both practicalities and thoughts on how these fields of cultural production might deal with their various overlapping histories, practices, and needs. Responding to Marchart’s viewpoint on curatorship

Curating dramaturgies  13

as a continuum of social practices in an abrading contact with the arts, how do we arrive at a collective practice, or, perhaps better said, a conf lictual-­ collaborative one? How do we “look after” or “care for” and better connect with the work of artists and performance makers and provide curatorial-­ dramaturgical involvement and the necessary levels of technical support for their practices? As the interviews in this book expressly demonstrate, dramaturgy and curatorial practices are by now interrelated and overlapping practices, especially in the way that they have a combined inf luence on shaping the current situation of visual and performing arts. It is no longer possible to talk about these practices in isolation. Rather, artistic practices are now seen in terms of a continuum and an interweaving of ideas and practices that are developed through curatorial strategies and dramaturgical thinking. They are made in and for local contexts and global sites, they are crossing media, drawing on cultural and political perspectives, and thinking about aesthetics as collaborative strategies. This overlap is ref lective of the increased presence of performance and performativity in the visual arts and the awareness of the expressive vibrancy of visuality that have been, and will continue to be, a significant source of inspiration in contemporary performance.

Notes 1 Both Roselee Goldberg and Catherine Wood, for example, discuss theater, dance, and performance art, in their most recent books, which incorporate the more expansive “performance” terminology in their titles. Performance in Contemporary Art (Wood, 2018) and Performance Now: Live Art for the 21st Century (Goldberg, 2018). 2 See, for example: Diana Taylor, “Hacia una definición de performance,” Performancelogía, 2007. http://performancelogia.blogspot.com/2007/08/hacia-unadefinicin-de-performance.html and Patrice Pavis, Dictionnaire de la performance et du théatre contemporain (Paris, Armand Colin, 2018). 3 Some prominent examples are documented by Jonah Westerman and Catherine Wood in their article “From the Institution of Performance to the Performance of Institutions,” in Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art, pp. 226–227: In 1968, the Tate Britain (then Tate Gallery) commissioned an “action-happening” conceived by Nouveau Réalist artist César; in 1970, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented work by choreographers Yvone Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, and Deborah Hay; in 1971, the MoMA staged a Happening by Yayoi Kusama, to name a few. 4 The tumultuous hiring of the former Tate Modern curator Chris Dercon as the Head of Volksbühne is a prominent example of this (albeit failed) attempt. See, for example, “‘No Initiative or Ideas’: Details Emerge about Why Chris Dercon Lost His Job at the Head of Berlin’s Volksbühne Theater,” by Henri Neuendorf for Artnet, 18 April, 2018. Accessed https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ chris-dercon-volksbuehne-resignation-1269914. 5 See in particular Barbara Gronau and Matthias von Hartz, eds, How to Frame: On the Threshold of Visual and Performing Arts (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), which came out of Foreign Affairs, the international performing arts festival of Berliner Festspiele, which lasted from 2012 to 2016.

14  Bertie Ferdman and Peter Eckersall 6 For literature on the development of curating in contemporary art, see: Terry Smith’s Thinking Contemporary Curating (2013), Paul O’Neill’s The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (2012), Beatrice Bismarck’s Cultures of the Curatorial, and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s A Brief History of Curating (2008). 7 For further information, see the Special Issue of Theater 44.2 (2014) titled “Performance Curators”, co-edited by Ferdman and Thomas Sellar. 8 See in particular Philip Bither’s essay in Keywords; and Tate Modern’s research project on Curating Performance on their website. 9 http://intermsofperformance.site/interviews/kathy-halbreich 10 See: Beatrice von Bismarck, “Relations in Motion”, in Florian Malzacher, Tea Tupajić, and Petra Zanki, Frakcija 55 (2010), pp. 50–57. Florian Malzacher mentions this in his interview, page #. 11 See Florian Malzacher and Herbst Steirischer (eds), Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2014). 12 An additional symposium took place in 2017 in Montreal. Configurations in Motion: https://sites.duke.edu/configurationsinmotion/

References Bennett, A., Jodie Taylor, and Ian Woodward, eds (2014). The Festivalization of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Bishop, Claire (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Arts and the Politics of Spectatorship. London and New York: Verso. Bither, Philip (2016) “Collecting,” in In Terms of Performance, Shannon Jackson and Paula Marincola, Eds. Berkeley: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia and Arts Research Center, University of California. Available at: http://­ intermsofperformance.site/keywords/collecting/philip-bither (Accessed May 19, 2020). Dean, Jodi (2012). The Communist Horizon. Verso: London. DeFrantz, Thomas (2017). “Identifying the Endgame,” in Thomas Sellar, Ed. Special Issue “Curating Crisis” Theater 47 (1): 17–37. Dobrzynski, Judith H. (2013) “High Culture Goes Hand in Hand,” The New York Times, 13 August. Available at: www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/­opinion/ sunday/high-culture-goes-hands-on.html?pagewanted=all (Accessed April 15, 2020). Eckersall, Peter (2018). “On Dramaturgy to Make Visible.” Performance Research 23 (4): 241–243. Eckersall, Peter (2020). “Between Contemporary Art and Performance: Dramaturgy and Flow,” in The Methuen Companion to Drama and Performance Art, Bertie Ferdman and Jovana Stokic, Eds. London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 104–120. Ferdman, Bertie (2019). “From Content to Context: The Emergence of the Performance Curator,” in Curating Live Arts: Critical Perspectives, Essays, and Conversations on Theory and Practice, Dena Davida, Jane Gabriels, Véronique Hudon, and Marc Pronovost, Eds. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 15–27. Ferdman, Bertie and Jovana Stokic (2020). “Squaring Performance Art,” in The Methuen Companion to Drama and Performance Art, Bertie Ferdman and Jovana Stokic, Eds. London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 3–18.

Curating dramaturgies  15 Goldberg, Roselee (2018). Performance Now: Live Art for the Twenty-First Century. New York and London: Thames & Hudson. Gronau, Barbara, Matthias von Hartz, and Carolin Hochleichter (2017). How to Frame: On the Threshold of Performing and Visual Arts. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Halbreich, Kathy (2016). “Interview with Kathy Halbreich,” in In Terms of Performance. Berkeley: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia and Arts Research Center, University of California. Available at: http://intermsofperformance. site/interviews/kathy-halbreich (Accessed March 19, 2020). Jackson, Shannon (2011). Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. London and New York: Routledge. Kunst, Bojana (2015). Artists at Work: Proximity of Arts and Capitalism. Alresford: Zero Books Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006 [German ed. 1999]). Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. New York: Routledge. Malzacher, Florian and Herbst Steirischer, eds (2014). Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics. Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press. Marchart, Oliver (2019). Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Martin, Carol (2012). Theatre of the Real. London and New York: Routledge. Neuendorf, Henri (2018). “No Initiative or Ideas: Details Emerge about Why Chris Dercon Lost His Job at the Head of Berlin’s Volksbühne Theater,” Artnet, 18 April. Available at: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/chris-dercon-volksbuehne-­ resignation-1269914 (Accessed May 3, 2020). O’Neill, Paul (2012). The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge: MIT Press. Pavis, Patrice (2018). Dictionnaire de la performance et du théatre contemporain. Paris: Armand Colin. Rugoff, Ralph (2016). “Experience Economy,” in In Terms of Performance. Available at: http://intermsofperformance.site/keywords/experience-economy/ralphrugoff (Accessed April 7, 2020). Smith, Terry 2012. Thinking Contemporary Curating. New York: Independent Curators International. Taylor, Diana (2007). “Hacia una definición de performance,” Performancelogía. Available at: http://performancelogia.blogspot.com/2007/08/hacia-una-definicin-deperformance.html (Accessed May 15, 2020). Ulrich Obrist, Hans (2011). A Brief History of Curating. Zurich: JRP/Ringier. van Kerkhoven, Marianne (2009). “European Dramaturgy in the 21st Century: A  Constant Movement.” Performance Research, “On Dramaturgy”, 14 (3): 7–11. Vidokle, Anton (2010). “Art without Artists,” E-Flux Journal. No. 16, May 2010. Available at: www.e-f lux.com/journal/16/61285/art-without-artists/ (Accessed April 6, 2020). von Bismarck, Beatrice (2010). “Relations in Motion: The Curatorial Condition in Visual Art—And Its Possibilities for the Neighboring Disciplines.” Special Issue “Curating Performing Arts” Frakcija 55: 50–57. von Bismarck, Beatrice, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski, eds (2012). Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

16  Bertie Ferdman and Peter Eckersall Westerman, Jonah and Catherine Wood. “From the Institution of Performance to the Performance of Institutions,” in Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art, Bertie Ferdman and Jovana Stokic, Eds. London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 220–246. Wood, Catherine (2018). Performance in Contemporary Art. London: Tate Publishing.

Keywords

As we read over the interviews, we found ourselves drawn to certain terms that either stood out from an individual conversation or, more often, repeated as themes that are discussed in a number of interviews. We selected our favorite keywords below. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list and readers of the interviews will take away from their reading different responses to the terms therein. Nevertheless, in the spirit of Raymond Williams’s 1976 publication Keywords, we aim for this to be a generative way of thinking to expand on and learn from the interviews and to better read between the shared themes and the concerns raised therein. Access: Access to the arts is for the majority of our interviewees not taken as a given. On the contrary, it is an issue that is at the front and center of their projects, which begin not only with what is presented, but also, and concurrently, with who it is for (who benefits) and how will that community experience and access it. Ron Berry, for example, explains how he was interested in taking the basic assumption about the mechanism of the festival (a “pay per show” model) and turning that into a conversation about access. That thought process led him to change the economic model of Fusebox, making all performances free, and converting those voluntary ticket buyers and pass holders into donors instead. Ambiguity: Contemplating the function of art in society, and criticism of didactic art forms, Nato Thompson offers the notion of a productive ambiguity. I think [art] produces a space of possibility, a space for questioning. Ambiguity is also interesting because it makes people insecure, uncomfortable. It’s a delicate thing politically because we live in a world that is eager to make all of us either super secure or super uncomfortable or fearful.” The term also strikes us as a useful one to describe how performative works can resist singular readings or challenge community expectations and still be accessible. Hence, ambiguity is imaginative and generative, rather than confusing.

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Artistic thinking: “We think about the festival like a big art project,” says Ron Berry. More than a keyword per se, artistic thinking was a recurring theme in terms of how many of our interviewees approached curating and dramaturgy: with an open mind, endless questioning, experimentation, intuition, and collaboration. Artistic processes intersect with cultural management, especially since many of the people we interviewed are also working artists. “We bring together a variety of events into a coherent whole, which for us oscillates between creating and shaping a work,” explains Felipe Assis in discussing how their artistic sensibilities (along with partner Rita Aquino) inform their curating practice. Chiaki Soma sees her role as a curator as one that proposes new ways of thinking and new ways to see the world. Gabi Ngcobo’s vision of the curatorial is an embodied way of thinking that is boundless: “It’s a means of understanding where the coffee you drink comes from, and the way you speak to your kids and family.” Judy Hussie-Taylor has choreographers guest curate each Platform Project, a series she created which seeks “another way of framing a multiplicity of events.” Assembly: Judith Butler calls the act of collective assembly in public spaces “concerted actions of the body” that call into question the current state of politics (2015: 9). In a similar vein, in his interview, Florian Malzacher states that: “The space of togetherness is the main feature of theatre.” Many of the interviewees in the book experiment with new forms of assembly – both physical and virtual. Less interested in spectators than in “participants or at least witnesses,” Malzacher’s projects, as with a number of projects referenced in this book, are committed to experimenting with theater’s ability to assemble and mobilize as politics. Malzacher references Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonism (2013), with the potential of theater to create political space. His work focuses on the “creation of temporary communities within a specific frame.” For Truth and Concrete, a one-time festival which engaged artistic strategies in politics and political strategies in art, Malzacher physically gathered an audience for a continuous 160 hours. “By spending time with each other,” Malzacher said of the participants, “their collectiveness changed.” Post-COVID 19, the notion of assembly will have been altered. We are all alone, together, and it remains to be seen how and what new forms of assembly will emerge. Lacking the embodied collective experience of politics that Butler explores, we don’t know how assemblies will be in the future. Censorship: How the arts are censored in different times and places arises in myriad ways throughout this book. For some interviewees, the possibility of censorship is a constant reality that impinges on daily events and decisions. Censorship is institutionalized in many countries and the arts are subjected to its codes and ethos. The rise of religious fundamentalism in many societies has also seen widespread attacks on the arts. Working in Turkey, for example, Gurur Ertem tells how in 2010, the fundamentalist religious newspaper Yeni Akit campaigned to cancel the performances of

Keywords  19

Lick but Don’t Swallow, written by Özen Yula and directed by the arts collective biriken. Ertem says: They had probably read about the play, which involves an angel who returns to the world as a porn star, somewhere. I am not even sure if angels exist in Islam, but clearly, they couldn’t tolerate the idea. It is not unprecedented in Turkey that people or artworks are attacked on the grounds of religious sensitivity. In other cases, censorship comes from unexpected quarters, and curators and programmers are faced with a cultural backlash or media frenzy that reduces the meaning of complex artworks and subjects them to condemnation. Creaction: In his interview, Fernando García Barros introduces us to this term, a translation from the Spanish word creacción, which summarizes the methodologies implemented in his cultural center, mARTadero. The word is a play on the terms: creation, action, and reaction. “It is a phase of creative re-­action, it’s going to involve a lot of things, to rethink who we are, to rethink relational structures in art and art management,” says Barros. Coexistence: Felipe Assis and Rita Aquino emphasize this term in articulating what they aim to achieve in a performance festival. “A moment of coexistence” they offer as a way of thinking about the aims of FIAC Bahia (International Festival of Performing Arts Bahia). They see the festival as an instrument for building and creating the future, especially in relation to political issues that highlight voices of historically marginalized communities. They see their own role – as the festival’s curators – as providing a “healthier and more equitable coexistence.” Collaboration: Many of the interviews discuss the nature of collective projects and stress the ways that successful projects are an outcome of people working together. At the same time, interviewees are sometimes more reticent to use the term “collaboration” and perhaps this is a sign of a reaction against the mobilization of the term in contemporary arts. Judy Hussie-­Taylor notes in her interview how collaboration in her field was taken for granted but not deeply considered: We collaborate. We all pitch-in in the theater. Have we really unpacked what that collaboration is? I do think there is something powerful about looking at what it is that we do, what we take for granted, examine it, and make that strange. People in theater do this. Collections and Commissions: Philip Bither addresses the inherent differences between these two areas, in particular as they pertain to performance. “It is still a work in progress how contemporary art museums are grappling with collecting ephemeral forms and time-based works,” he

20 Keywords

asserts. At the Walker Arts Center, Bither explains how collections still prioritize objects that come out of performance, with program notes and catalogues reserved for explaining the context of the live performance out of which the objects (costumes, set designs, props, etc.) came from. This is changing, he tells us, as institutions such as the Walker begin to explore new ways of collecting performance that are themselves commissioned by them: “What will happen to the commissioned performance 50 years from now?” he asks. How does such work need to be cared for? When we are commissioning something from a performing artist, we always ask to get a copy of the script, score, or other ephemera that is otherwise not considered fine artwork, for our archive collection. As a performance curator, Ana Janevski echoes Bither in highlighting how these two (collections and commissions) represent her two main tasks: paying close attention to collections and commissioning work from performing artists interested in working in a museum context. “So much of this performance history is not present in the large narrative of the museum,” she tells us in her interview, which consequently was conducted a year before the opening of her highly successful exhibit Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, which ran from September 2018 to February 2019 at MoMA. Craft: Kristof Van Baarle discusses the importance of having a craft and reminds us that curators and dramaturgs must work to continuously refine and develop their skills. In his job as a dramaturg with Kris Verdonck – a practice that spans installation arts and performance – they use the term métier, from the French, to describe an approach to practice that has a discernible craft and method. In the complexity of making and showing an artwork there is not only creative thought processes but also an attention to how things get made. Even if you want to have a postdisciplinary approach to creative practices, which of course, is not the way all artists want or have to work, you still need some kind of base, some kind of craftsmanship that you can then let go or make use of to transform your medium into something else. This also becomes relevant for curators, or programmers, or dramaturgs, to have a deep knowledge of the field they are departing from or wanting to work with. Creative ecosystem: Many of the interviewees cite examples of projects that bring people together in the spirit of working on a common project by bringing their diverse skills and perspectives into the creative process. This is sometimes described in terms of a symbiotic relationship or ecosystem – a

Keywords  21

creative hothouse in which participants and their practices start to inform and transform each other. For Marc Bamuthi Joseph, this can also be about a community of viewers as well as creative practitioners. As he states: What happens if my goal is to develop a community rather than to build an audience […] A creative ecosystem is an ecology of people from different sectors that are connected by values. We ask them all to respond to the same question at the same time, nurtured by institutional space and resources […] The work is the development of the network of these collaborators who ordinarily wouldn’t be working together. Economies: The economies of performance come up quite often in the interviews. From its precariousness – even within a large institution like MoMA (as Ana Janevski points out) – to a desire to circumvent the model of art as transactional (as Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Ron Berry describe). Working as a Performing Arts curator in a historically interdisciplinary institution like the Walker Arts Center, Philip Bither highlights how the different economies of the visual art world and performing art organizations affect their products, as well as how these circulate, are exhibited and collected. “Our board is made up of corporate leaders and large individual donors,” he explains regarding the Walker, who are often also collectors and thus think of object-based culture in a very different way than they do of ephemeral culture. I think that is changing and we are working on it, but it is not balanced out yet. Ends: Discussion of ends in terms of outcomes and conclusions are in the interviews alongside mention of the theme of end times – of ecological disaster and pandemic. For example, Kristof Van Baarle sees an end not as a finality, but as a point of transition. He is interested in: what it means to look at today as an ‘endtime,’ not necessarily in an apocalyptic sense of the word, but in a time that is ending, where many things that we had considered eternal, or at least not temporal, are ending. Later in his interview, he compares the literalness of “ends” with various evolutionary and technological processes: “I am interested in what the impact can be on an ethical level and on a political level, but just as much so, on an artistic level.” In a different vein, for Gabi Ngcobo, endings are also beginnings, and she notes that in her practice, “certain works will be removed [only to be] replaced by other things.” Geographies: The geographical span and scope of this book aims to show practices of curatorship and dramaturgy in a diversity of sites and contexts and with attention to many local differences. We are interested

22 Keywords

in how these practices have become global in their reach and have been criticized for the ways that they can impose norms around questions of collecting, preservation, categorization, display, presentation, and so on. At the same time, the experiences of the curators, dramaturgs, and programmers highlighted here show a heightened sense of geographical and geopolitical specificity and a network of interlocutors, university training programs, galleries, and festivals that is transnational. The heightened sensitivity to the local conditions of production and dissemination is often butting against the globality of the arts. For example, in her interview, Chiaki Soma talks about how Western art and performance often seem to her to be narrowly concerned with their own historicity and identity, whereas while working in Japan this is not possible. As she writes: “ just responding to history is never enough. First, I have to look carefully at the reality of the present moment in the time and space in which we and the artists are living.” Gabi Ngcobo also sees the need to resist only “responding to what the West is doing.” Gurur Ertem notes how the “fascination of Western [European] arts organizations towards the East” was motivated by curiosity but also by funding programs and the need to find partners from Eastern Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. As she explains in her interview: “There were of course also curators who did their research well and invited people on individual merit, but one must also keep in mind other motivations and factors.” Fluidity: Many of the interviews discuss artistic practices in terms of their inherent f luidity and draw attention to the importance of non-binary and transdisciplinary ways of thinking and working. Noted that the neoliberal economy enforces notions of f luidity and f lexibility in the workplace and the concept of “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000) describes a “melting of solids” as the f luid economic reterritorialization of modern life. But many examples from the arts run counter to this and have developed new theories, practices, and politics for the idea of f luidity and f low. Fernando García Barros, working in Cochabamba, Bolivia, talks about needing “hyper,” “poli,” “pluri,” and “trans” ways of working in cultural management. As he notes: “These are simple prefixes, but they help us to rethink. For example, placed together, curating with trans will suddenly give you a different concept of where else it is going, and where else we have to go.” Hope: In their interviews, both Gurur Ertem and Florian Malzacher single out the notion of hope. While pursuing a doctorate in sociology, Ertem looked at associations between storytelling movements in Turkey and their relationship to hope. “The rise of storytelling is very interesting – the politicians who are jailed are turning into storytellers. I find that I resonate with those who are trying to regain and redefine hope from despair, and from the gutter.” In his interview, Malzacher identifies hope in theater as a tangible alternative to intellectual and abstract thought, a productive response – a performative doing – a way to make propositions rather than critiques: “proposing a situation and being affirmative while at the same time not forgetting

Keywords  23

critical thinking.” The catharsis of tragedy brings relief and the Epic theater insight; we seek refuge in and hopeful contemplation through our participation in the arts. Implication: In his interview, Marc Bamuthi Joseph emphasizes what he terms the alchemy of implication. He asks: “How do you create a set of conditions where it becomes clear to the audience either immediately or over time that they are implicated in the work?” He is interested in the artist’s intention, who this is for, and how they get people involved over the work’s process – from inception, through to development and creation, to fruition. “More than anything,” Bamuthi asserts, “I have to ask myself who are the communities [involved] or what are we going to gain by bringing certain communities together?” The notion of implication is especially useful because it views the artwork generated not in marketing terms (audience outreach, box office returns, annual membership revenues), but rather as an exchange with and for people. Indiscipline: Felipe Assis and Rita Aquino prefer this term over the more common “interdisciplinary.” As with many of the curators we interview in this book whose festivals feature multiple disciplinary forms, Assis and Aquino are working with a great diversity of practices and contexts, for which they use the term indiscipline. They place works that are difficult to categorize in one determined discipline in relation to another, so that perhaps, “a new discipline arises.” They do “not establish separations or restrictions in terms of categories or genres or artistic disciplines” and, instead, there is a productive sense of things always being in play and shifting. Institutions: All of the interviewees deal with artistic institutions and networks that produce and disseminate the visual and performing arts. Gurur Ertem states in her interview: “It is usually institutional dynamics that frame what you do.” Marc Bamuthi Joseph talks about the need to lead institutions away from their historical role as “cultural citadel” – “the cultural institution as isolated from the social contract [is no longer] permissible.” There are different institutional contexts highlighted in the book. Some interviewees work for major arts organizations that can set the agenda and establish terms for artistic engagement. Others work in more precarious ways that involve marshaling resources and support from various institutions, including local government and non-government organizations. Some institutional contexts are mandated by legislation or by profile, while others have to be invented to enable the artworks to be produced. Scholars have studied the “institutions of new capitalism” (Harvie 2013: 47) that aim to instrumentalize and commodify art. Meanwhile, many of the people in this book are involved in creating countervailing or activist networks that imagine the institutional organization of society differently. Listening: The importance of listening was a recurring theme in the interviews. A heightened awareness and sensibility both to artists’ needs and to durational, temporal, and spatial contexts, political, economic, and social issues is an important part of the work. As a self-described artist-curator, Felipe Assis speaks about exercising a form of “deep listening” in maintaining a contemporary arts festival. Chiaki Soma reveals how she begins precisely

24 Keywords

by listening carefully to artists’ voices. “They have a special perception of the world compared to those who are not artists,” she explains. “They see things others don’t.” Lili Chopra focuses on “finding the right contexts and creating the right frameworks” to present artists’ work, “listening and using intuition” to foster projects, build partnerships, and bring people together. Describing how each Platform series is generated, Judy Hussie-Taylor places emphasis on the ongoing conversations she has with the choreographer-curators. “I listen to that, because that is the only way I have worked in this field,” she tells us ref lecting back on how Danspace Project’s Platform 2016: Lost & Found originated: listening to Ishmael Houston-Jones talk about the artist friend he had lost, John Bernd, led to a Platform about HIV/AIDS. Gabi Ngcobo speaks of a heightened awareness of everyday habits, which very much extends to her curatorial practice, where she seeks to question habitual patterns. “This is the kind of drama that we were trying to develop, like a syntax of a kind of trying to do things differently. When things are expected, they tend to work in a different way.” Of course, in order to change, raise awareness, or do things differently, one must listen, deeply. Recent scholarship in performance has focused on a political understanding of listening. For example, Helena Grehan argues for a slow, attentive listening, “in which the listener is attuned to the speaker in a way that makes room for a range of responses – the possibility of deep understanding and agreement, for partial acceptance, for dissonance or disagreement as well as for misunderstanding” (Grehan 2020: 53). Networks: There is a sense that for curators and programmers the network that one has is a calling card. Can you bring this artist or that performance project to your gallery, theater, or arts festival? Networking has become an essential part of the work as seen in the rise of so many arts fairs, performing arts meetings, and peak bodies nationally and internationally. Networks are the way to support large-scale projects and to promote new and emerging art forms. They can identify and develop new ideas in the arts and produce alternatives in political and cultural life. Ideas such as relational aesthetics and Actor Network Theory have transformed contemporary arts and performance in the last two decades. But networks are also sites for gatekeeping, nepotism, and complicated political dynamics between the production of art and its support by the corporate world, for example. As we write these lines, the ceaseless networking and travel to art events has suddenly stopped because of COVID 19. It is unclear what will happen when the means of production based on intense levels of networking and exchange is so completely and suddenly broken. Nourishment: In her interview, Émilie Monnet brings the notion of nourishment when speaking about what she deems essential in organizing artist workshop series. “When I talk about ‘whole,’” she explains, it’s like thinking of how in traditional indigenous ways there would be an elder. We would have an elder that accompanied us throughout the process and we have food – it is very important to feel that we are nourishing our bodies with food.

Keywords  25

Monnet raises an important issue concerning subsistence: the arts require care for growth and health. It struck us that thinking about nourishment as a complete embodied state is necessary for cultivating the well-being of contemporary art. Poiesis: Creative practices are about making something, expressing ideas, and giving us access to aesthetic sensations and new forms. For cultural producers, making art involves practical questions (how, where, when, for who, etc.) but there are also questions of aesthetics, poetics, and considering artistic representations in history and over time. Marc Bamuthi Joseph notes how aesthetic experience is also a question of activating audiences: “introducing the aesthetic sublime into your community … more than anything I have to ask myself who are the communities or what are we to gain by bringing certain communities together?” For Gurur Ertem, poiesis is “something that connects us through art; art in the understanding of poiesis, of transforming trauma into a tangible form. The symbolic is being rediscovered.” Scale: The measure and reach of projects discussed in this book draw attention to the question of scale. Different institutions and contexts come with resources and expectations about the scale of a work or a project. Some imagine or require a large canvas and many resources, while others aim to keep their sense of intimacy and specificity. Working in large intuitions, the possibility of having a project happen on a vast scale brings questions as well as possibilities. Ana Janevski notes how major visual arts institutions have opened dedicated spaces for performance. “I think there is something about the scale that changes the meaning of things. It’s much more difficult to be experimental at MoMA than to be experimental at another smaller institution.” With Marc Bamuthi Joseph, some works happen on a scale that requires intimacy and community connections, while other works attempt to motivate a whole city. Scale is “a dynamic and emotionally provocative question,” he explains. Space: In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre famously argues how space, which is socially constructed, actively shapes an event. Space itself is never fixed; it continuously evolves as a social entity (Lefebvre 1974). In the spirit of Lefebvre, space takes on both a concrete and a metaphorical sense throughout the interviews in this book. Interviewees discuss space in terms of the different types of physical and virtual locations where performances may take place, as well as how their work entails generating new spaces for conversations, inclusionary practices, and community engagement. As a performance curator at MoMA, Ana Janevski addresses how “the museum has become a space where artists are willing to share their process.” As the former program director of Festival/Tokyo, Chiaki Soma stresses how she was interested in “creating a space where there is a discourse around emerging contemporary expressions.” Émilie Monnet founded Onishka Productions to provide space for the Indigenous contemporary scene. Through her network, Monnet creates a series of events that interrelate over a number of days. There is an exchange of practices and an experimental laboratory, in order, as

26 Keywords

Monnet emphasizes, “to create spaces that feel whole and nurturing- for Indigenous contemporary performance artists.” As the director of mARTadero project, Fernando García Barros highlights how the project is about creating, constructing, and strengthening community. “To create such a space,” he says, “we have to create spacers. [Spacers are] managers and people that are able to understand contemporary complex social interactions. It is not enough to say that a site is currently ‘available,’ and its transformation happens automatically.” As the former Artistic Director of Creative Time, Nato Thompson is cognizant of the ways that the organization of space, especially in the city, operates as a carefully constructed spacialization, where private interests often dominate public space. I don’t think you can talk about public art without having a good language around the cultural production of space. It would be just disingenuous. […] I deal with a developer on every project I work on in public space because it isn’t ‘just’ space. Temporality: Performance and visual arts traditionally have different temporalities and the question of how the artwork exists and/or is situated in time is an important one. The ephemerality of performance unfolds in time and draws attention to sensibilities of duration, movement, and, by extension, chronopolitics, or the politics of time. Curatorial practices have a strong sense of history and the art gallery is a repository for the circulation of art through time. Ron Berry discusses the rhythm of programming and presentation: What is interesting thematically in relation to these projects? Some of it is almost rhythmic. … How do we compose the rhythm and the notes of this festival in a way that f lows, or do we want to break it up in a particular way? Judy Hussie-Taylor references temporalities in her conception of the Platforms series: They require changing the way we think about time curatorially. Inside the Platforms, I talk to the curators about time from the beginning. ‘If we are going to break down the status quo, then we have to revisit the way we are using time.’ Undoing: “I think of the curator’s role as a way of undoing,” says Gabi Ngcobo in her interview. “We exist in this society where a lot has to be undone.” Responding to a question regarding her work curating the 10th Berlin Biennale, Ngcobo spoke about shifting the lens, specifically regarding decolonization not as the sole responsibility of one group of people or one standalone practice. “It [the curatorial] is not a thing that you go and do at work and then when you come home you are done with your decolonization.”

Keywords  27

Instead, Ngcobo emphasizes how the curatorial work of undoing an apolitical or ahistorical mindset, habitual patterns of behavior, for example, is never done. She sees this undoing as a process that is an ongoing, continuous, and collective effort, a shared responsibility that should never really end.

References Bauman, Zygmunt (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith (2015). Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grehan, Helena (2020). “Slow Listening: The Ethics and Politics of Paying Attention, or Shut Up and Listen,” Performance Research 24.8: 53–58. Harvie, Jen (2013). Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lefebvre, Henri (1992). The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Blackwell (French version originally published in 1974 by Anthropos in Paris). Mouffe, Chantal (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso. Williams, Raymond (1976). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York and London: Oxford University Press.

1 A way of living and coexisting Interview with Rita Aquino and Felipe de Assis

I interviewed Rita Aquino and Felipe de Assis via Skype in March of 2018. I had met them in person a few months earlier when I traveled to Salvador de Bahía for the 10th edition of the International Festival of Performing Arts of Bahia (FIAC) in October of 2017. Thanks to Rita Aquino’s invitation, I participated in the seminar she initiated as part of the festival’s educational outreach: Curatorship and Mediation in Performing Arts. At the time, there was rising conservatism in Brazil and growth of right-wing politics, in particular mounting racism against black and indigenous Brazilians, as well as heightened transphobia. The performance of The Gospel According to Jesus: Queen of Heaven, written by Jo Clifford, directed and translated by Natalia Mallo, and starring trans artist and activist Renata Carvalho, for example, was censored and Felipe and Rita had to scramble to find a last minute “underground” space to hold the event. This interview was conducted in Portuñol (a combination of Spanish and Portuguese). Bertie Ferdman: How would you describe what you do? Felipe de Assis: In relation to curating the festival, we create a relationship with the city so that it really feels festive. We also create different ways of cohabiting. How to be together? We see one area of the format of the festival as a moment of coexistence—with the artists, with the city, the public, through various actions—that we establish in different places. We develop activities within the central location of the festival, in the Goethe Institut patio, and throughout the city. In some editions of the festival, not all, although we’d like to have it be in all, we organize parties every night after the programming. The other area of curating is the artistic programming—the performances, the plays, that are in the conventional theater spaces and also the shows in the alternative spaces like the streets, etc., as well as all the activities we program into the festival in the form of debates, seminars, conversations, lectures. The idea is that with these distinct actions we place the public, the artists, and the performances into a horizontal environment where they can share experiences in relation to what they are living in the festival and in life,

A way of living and coexisting  29

generally speaking. So what we do, to answer your question, is elaborate a way of being, a way of living and coexisting, a way to think about the political sphere, the ethics and aesthetics that envelop and surround us. Rita Aquino: To complement what Felipe is saying, I think it’s important to highlight that we also work as artists and researchers—me as a dance professor at the Universidad Federal de Bahía, and in Felipe’s case, as a director. These roles are in constant dialogue with our role as curators. All these actions are mobilized by this idea of how to be and make together, the dimension of coexistence, of building relationships, which Felipe initiated in relation to FIAC, which he started, and which we continuously pursue. It is the ensemble of all these forces that define what we do, which is significant because we see these different fields of being as feeding into one another. FIAC is constantly fed by our artistic field and our art is inf luenced by the ideas of coexistence we pursue with the festival. FA: Yes, our work as artists directly informs our curation and vice versa. We bring together a variety of events into a coherent whole, which for us oscillates between creating and shaping—as with dramaturgy—all with a clear intention and the fact that the act of creation requires the collaboration of many peoples. We are interested in horizontal collaborative strategies and methods of participation and engagement. BF: Your work as artists and pedagogues has inf luenced how you envision the festival and how it has developed over time, in relation to the surrounding communities and the city. Both of you have artistic sensibilities—Felipe you as a director, Rita you as a choreographer/dancer. You mention this strong link between your artistic work, your pedagogical work—teaching and research at the university—and your curatorial work within the festival. How

Figure 1.1  O Evangelho Segundo Jesus, Rainha do Céu (Portuguese-language version of The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven)—FIAC Bahia 2017, featuring Renata Carvalho Source: © Leonardo Pastor.

30  Interview with Rita Aquino and Felipe de Assis

does this inf luence your notion of what a festival is and does? How do you see this as an artistic process? FA: Today I am comfortable with the idea of being an artist-curator. I see myself not as a critic-curator or an historian-curator or a journalist-curator. I am guided by an artistic vision and from there, that is where I engage with curating. It is artistic practices that sustain me to curate a festival. In this sense, curating for me is not limited to selecting works for a festival. As with any artistic project, it has to do with a conceptual design in which the diverse activities of a festival relate to one another and are incorporated organically. So for example if I am thinking about the notions of participation and collaboration, I don’t understand that in looking for programming that illustrates those things, but I will instead think about how these ideals will be present in the festival’s programming, in relation to the performances, the activities, and even within the festival’s management and its staff. So my idea of artistic practice is linked to curatorial practice. In other words, I look to artistic practice to think about my curating practice. RA: One thing to add to what Felipe is describing is my experience understanding the relation between training (as a dancer) and creating, which I have integrated over the years. In terms of the festival, this for me means thinking about the relations between artists and the relations of the artists with the public and the community of the city. Another important aspect is that I come from education and pedagogy, but I am also constantly inf luenced by the inventive, the sensitive, the creative dimension, which comes from the field of art. These two fields end up being one. The festival has developed within these two fields—the educational and the creative or artistic one. FIAC’s unique identity comes from how we continue to integrate these within all aspects of the festival, including its management and administrative branches. BF: Can you talk about how the festival has evolved over the years? I would also be interested to hear how your curatorial approach has changed since its inception. FA: For me the transformation is evident. I began curating at 29 and back then my idea of curating—there were three of us—was being responsible to sort of “author” something. After many years of working and establishing the festival, asking questions, and after meeting Rita, I began to think conceptually about what curating meant—linking ideas about education and creation along with a strong sense of collectivity, collaboration, and participation. I started researching what curating meant in the visual arts and to discover that there were possibilities of thinking through curating that were not tied to “authorship” or a personal signature—as in creating “one work” using everyone else’s work. What interested me most was to stimulate and create encounters between people and to set the stage for debates, for questions that I think are linked not only to the arts but also are linked to the human notion of living together. In this sense the festival for me has to do with creating a place in which we live with community, politically within the city. For us, curating the festival has become a way, or a process, to think together possibilities for a better way of coexisting.

A way of living and coexisting  31

Figure 1.2  S eminar on cultural production and curating strategies, with Fernando Garcia Barros and Rita Aquino—FIAC Bahia 2017 Source: © Leonardo Pastor.

BF: When I was at the festival this year I realized that there is an ongoing local conversation about national politics in relation to what is happening in Brazil, and also a conversation at the artistic level with what is going on internationally. Is this something you try to promote—a political and artistic engagement? RA: The past two years—which is when I became more involved with this process of integrating the theme of curation within the format of the ­festival—these two movements have become increasingly interlaced. We listen very carefully, from a production perspective, to what it is the work proposes. What could it be in dialogue with? How is it developed? And on the other hand, how does it relate to the current moment? Does it have political agency? For example, in 2016—which was a significant year for us because there was a coup in Brazil and at that moment in which we were planning the festival we were occupying a building and fighting together with the Minister of Culture here in Salvador to see whether all of us would even be able to continue to exist. This experience of surviving that political moment along with so many strong transformations in our society, brought a whole new level to the importance of what curation means in the context of a festival. Collectively, we also had the notion that it was necessary to define a way to treat such political issues, of precarity in particular. To think together about what is necessary and how it is important to define a way for us to treat these issues. It was then that we assumed this goal of participation within the festival’s programming. It came out of a listening process that had to do with a crisis of representation and access and of how we can think about participation more directly, so we moved in that direction. That’s how we began establishing relationships with communities and diverse interlocutors.

32  Interview with Rita Aquino and Felipe de Assis

The year 2017 was the 10th anniversary of the festival, which meant we had been thinking a lot about what the festival meant: How to deal with the passage of time? How to frame? How to deal with history, memory, the archive? All these questions we realized could be an instrument for the future. FA: I think there is also something in relation to being able to understand this process as an ongoing one. As Rita said, our job is to listen to see what are the urgencies—to see what international parallels there are with both Brazil, but also more locally, in Salvador. As a festival, we feel a lot of political responsibility, even though we are not a festival whose thematic is necessarily political. But we also recognize that we do have a political position in the world. So in this sense we cannot disregard these questions. RA: With the example we were talking about earlier from 2016 with the idea of participation… It does not mean that participation has to be a theme per se or that all the performances have to talk about participation. Not at all. It’s how we as a curatorial team are able to connect and tease out this idea throughout the various components of the festival’s web. The relations between people, the mode of communicating with the public and the festival’s visual identity are all a part of this. We try to maintain coherence, and in this way, try to provoke a larger line of inquiry. FA: What does not exist for us is an intention to force one idea. Instead we launch a set of challenges, a set of wishes and issues to discuss and debate, rather than defend a specific point of view. BF: What I experienced in the festival were many throughlines, performances using different aesthetic forms, interdisciplinarity, various models of temporalities, in terms of when I could experience certain activities and their various durations. How do you integrate such differing experiences and temporalities into the festival? FA: We have been working with the notion of indiscipline, where we try to place works that are difficult to categorize in terms of a determined discipline in relation to one another. In this sense a new discipline arises. We start from that principle—to not establish separations or restrictions in terms of categories or genres or artistic disciplines. In addition, we incorporate the notion of participation that we have been working with—in our expanded curatorial practice—with everyone that makes the festival. We respect the time and space that each one dedicates to this activity. If we respect the asymmetries of each individual, it is easier to have a work that is continuous and heterogenous—some will come over the years and participate in all the activities; some will engage with less, etc. You get what you put in. BF: You’ve introduced different encounters, ways of seeing and different disciplinary models. Do you feel audiences have changed their perspective or expectations about how they experience performance? FA: I think so. I hope so! The intention is that people—starting with an identification of a determined work—can easily access the festival. From there, they can get to know other works and to see them from another perspective they might not experiment with in their daily life. Festivals have this trait. The public is encouraged to see something they might otherwise not

A way of living and coexisting  33

Figure 1.3  For the Sky not to Fall, Lia Rodrigues Cia. de Danças—FIAC Bahia 2017 Source: © Leonardo Pastor.

attend. Salvador, for example, does not have enough of a public to sustain a year-round active spectatorship for this kind of work. The festival feeds into a conversation about contemporary performance by bringing other possibilities and many artistic disciplines condensed into these ten days. RA: An example to illustrate this would be in 2017, we were looking at a way to problematize the notion of an overarching hegemonic narrative or throughline, and precisely to bring tension to it, creating a space for different viewpoints, different ways of seeing the world, different ways of placing oneself. This ref lects for us different artistic configurations. Different ways to approach ideas and discuss them. This year was interesting for us in the sense that we had ten works from local artists—from Bahía—all working from diverse approaches and coming from different artistic trajectories, so we were able to present a range of aesthetic configurations that allowed for multiple narratives. FA: An analogy would be religion here—we don’t have a monotheism—it is polytheistic. In this moment in Brazil there exists an intention of monotheistic religion, Catholicism, to assume the dominant narrative. Our responsibility in terms of resistance is to counter these totalitarian, unilateral and homogenous ideas. Polytheism is inherent in art. BF: Let’s go back to the first themes you touched on: coexistence, relationality, participatory aesthetics. Many of the works I saw this year at the festival played with these forms: Lia Rodrigues Dance Company’s For the Sky Not to Fall, Rimini Protokoll’s Casa, Neto Machado and Jorge Alencar’s Biblioteca de Danza, Ntando Cele’s Black Off, The Gospel According to Jesus (directed by Natalia Mallo starring Renata Carvalho), Giltanei Amorim’s Canto Piu. You selected these artists’ works not only because of their content, much of which is political, but also how they are researching new aesthetic forms and languages.

34  Interview with Rita Aquino and Felipe de Assis

Figure 1.4  Peso Masculino, Jaqueline Vasconcellos a.k.a Jack Soul Revenge Girl – FIAC Bahia 2018, photo by Isabela Bugmann

Figure 1.5  F  IAC publicity in Salvador, Bahia—FIAC Bahia 2017, photo by Leonardo Pastor

A way of living and coexisting  35

RA: Yes certainly. FA: Yes this is our concern: how to place and think different ways of relating one show to another in terms of the larger picture as well as audience’s place within each show. It would be very boring for us to have two, three, four, or even ten shows that had the same way of thinking and/or relating to the audience. That would be affirming that there is one way to make art which is the opposite of what we are going for. BF: How do you maintain the contemporari-ness of the festival? FA: My brother, who is not an artist, gave me a definition that I think is great. He said: “I understand contemporary art as a way of always questioning, right?” I think this is the way we try to maintain a contemporary arts festival, by exercising a form of listening, deep listening. As an artist however, there is a danger to try to locate or identify a specific characteristic that is necessarily or obviously “contemporary.” BF: I’d like to bring the notion of dramaturgy into the conversation, which you mentioned brief ly at the beginning of our conversation. Sometimes this term can imply a paying attention to context, making meaning—not defining necessarily—but establishing a relation with the audience, a way of telling a story that is not chronological or linear, introducing another narrative form, etc. How do you see the festival as a context for creating new dramaturgies? RA: The word dramaturgy within the field of dance is a little different than its use in theater. In dance, dramaturgy centers on the body, and the states of the body, and many choreographers have begun to look at and focus on the relations between bodies, whether it be through the body’s actions and/or the transformations of a determined passage from one space to another. I’m drawn to this idea of dramaturgy as above all a relationship. If we extend this to the idea of a festival in terms of placing diverse elements in relation to one another—without having to necessarily define one theme—but yes to rubbing, tensing, extending, like moving a little bit, how to dialogue. In this sense dramaturgy is an interesting term to think about the what and why of a festival and how it can provoke the production of meaning from those diverse moments of encounter woven into its programming. Essentially, how and at what moment does it come to life? How does something begin to take shape in the moment we experiment, in the moment that these relations occur within an encounter with the audience? What are the different agents that allow movement and how can they make an event come to life? FA: This relationship to dramaturgy—which gives different parts a sense, a unity of meaning—is very present in theater and of course drama. I find more liberating however, as we arrive to the 21st century, where there begins to be ruptures that question this idea of unity, of harmony, especially in relation to what a festival is. For example it’s very different from an exhibition where we know the routes—where the spectator enters, where they walk, where they exit. In a festival the notion of a fixed route simply does not exist.

36  Interview with Rita Aquino and Felipe de Assis

When Rita talked about the possibility of thinking festival as a place where people come to be in relation to one another, this idea is dramaturgy ­materialized—provoking the spectator to choose their own path, their own route, their own point of view in relation to those works and those activities that the festival proposes and to relate it to their life. We distance ourselves from the idea of curator as a central figure and relinquish control of any sort of predetermined way or route. However we do care for the movement of those diverse bodies and situations that, following their own nature, will collide, attract, dispute, and possibly rearrange themselves. RA: It’s like if the festival offers a map but each individual creates their own cartography. Each participant is free to chart their own routes. BF: Do you see FIAC as a festival that can travel? FA: Our intention is not for FIAC to be a transferable model that can be implemented elsewhere or in other cities necessarily. However, the ideas and questions that drive the festival are things that can definitely serve to help to launch other festivals’ conceptual frameworks. Because FIAC is so locally rooted, we would have to see how the concepts might be translated to another place. BF: It seems that with FIAC you have generated a new model of putting people in relation with one another through live art. You have a very clear vision of what it is to bring art together with community. RA: Over the past years FIAC has been constituting itself as a space where numerous initiatives are tested and then grow outside the festival as autonomous projects. For example, our cultural mediation program, which we began in 2011, gained so much traction that during the two and a half years that followed, the city of Salvador hosted over 3,000 people to discuss this topic. Later it grew to four counties involving over 4,000 people learning about cultural production and creating new campaigns. I think this outreach to the public of the contemporary arts is a more democratic or equitable way toward institutional change—small social transformations that translate the urban dimension to an artistic experience. Through specific actions—workshops, lectures, guided production visits—which grew out of FIAC—the festival opened itself up toward the outside and over the last few years we have been thinking more about how to integrate such conversations and workshops more formally back into the festival. Now we have a few seminars that are a part of FIAC—one to think about the role of the curator, the one you participated in, and the other on cultural mediation. To circle back to one question you asked earlier about the relationship between curating and artistic practice, Felipe and I have begun a project called Looping: Bahia Overdub in relation to music, dance, and festival, that involves the themes of coexistence and participation we have been using to curate FIAC. One has inf luenced the other very much. For us we see the festival as a large playing field, a place to experiment with different relational models and forms, and from which new and different

A way of living and coexisting  37

and unexpected actions will hopefully emerge. We hope these will continue to develop and gain their own traction, their own life, so that this chain of discovery remains fresh. BF: How do you see the future of the festival, specifically its role within Salvador and Brazil? FA: I would like for the festival to transform into a turning point so that each iteration is more suitable for its time. In concrete terms, I’d love for the festival to be a space where artists and the public can meet one another and not be on opposing sides. Another thing that I’d love very much is that artists experience the festival as a way to position themselves in the world, to move their work, to question institutional systems of power endemic to the art world itself. We work to create a festival not only for the artists to show and present their work at that one moment, but so that hopefully the moment extends to activities throughout the year. RA: We’ve also been thinking a lot about who comprises the audience of the festival. 2017 was the first year we had an initiative to research who frequents the festival. These results will help us to also think about how to expand and diversify our audiences as well as possibilities for growth outside the festival, but still in connection to it. We did not really touch on it but there are many more issues related to audiences, like for whom is the festival, what exactly is its relation to the city and which city, because there are many “cities” within Salvador or any city. We have a set of very concrete wishes of continuing to transform the festival in terms of these trajectories. FA: The festival does not stop being an instrument for building and creating the future, especially in relation to political issues that highlight voices of historically marginalized communities, and that we are fighting for because we want to live in a future with more diversity and a healthier and more equitable coexistence, as well as institutions that preserve this. I think that as long as we keep a political and social function within the city—then, and only then—the festival continues to make sense.

2 To create a ‘state of being’ on stage Interview with Kristof van Baarle

Bertie joined me in my office in New York and we interviewed Kristof via Skype in November 2019. Kristof and I coedited a book on the work of Kris Verdonck Machine Made Silence: The Art of Kris Verdonck (2020). Kristof is the dramaturg for Kris’s work and was also a visiting scholar at the Graduate Center CUNY. Bertie Ferdman: We always start the interviews with the same question: Can you tell us a little bit about what you do? Kristof van Baarle: I have a schizophrenic combination of functions or roles that I play. On the one hand, there is the academic part of what I do, which comes out of my PhD. And, I am still working as a postdoctoral researcher and research assistant at the theatre studies department of Antwerp University, where I continue to do research. Another part is my involvement with dramaturgy. For the past seven years I have been working with Kris Verdonck as a dramaturg, and over the past three years, I have been collaborating with the choreographer Michiel Vandevelde.1 In the last month, Kris Verdonck and I have started a research project in artistic research at KASK – School of the Arts in Ghent (BE). Belgium, artistic research is a little different from academic research, so this is a new environment for me to work in. I am also still working as a theatre critic. I am part of the editorial board and the collective editing team of a Belgium magazine for the performing arts and write reviews for them regularly. Peter Eckersall: The magazine is Etcetera isn’t it? KB: Yes. Etcetera indeed. BF: You have mentioned four branches: the academic, the dramaturgy, the artistic research and the editorial work as a theatre critic. Many questions arise from this, but for the moment, could you expand a little on the research part of what you do? KB: My PhD research focused mainly on the field of posthumanism in the performing arts. What I tried to do is to have a critical review of the concept of the cyborg – a notion that is dominant when thinking about the relationship between technology and human beings. To further my thinking, I started to work with the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben,

To create a ‘state of being’ on stage  39

and particularly the notion of the ‘apparatus’ as an impersonal approach to technology. This examination came after seeing a lot of performance work from Belgium or Western Europe, that commented on the use of technology in everyday life, but also on its use in political fields, economic fields and social fields. What I was seeing didn’t really correspond to what I was reading and researching regarding the concept of the cyborg. I felt the need to develop a discourse that could interact with the philosophy as well as with the artworks. An artist that I found to be an example of this new, up-to-date or contemporary approach was Kris Verdonck. Before I worked with him, I had started to research and write about his work in relation to the philosophy that I was reading. Agamben is a varied thinker who is mostly known for his political theory, but he is in fact also a really interesting thinker on aesthetics and language. What I am more interested in today, is to take the post and the posthuman quite literally; to really think in terms that stretch beyond the human and the non-human. My focus is now on terms that refer to ‘after,’ to ‘ends,’ on what it means to look at today as an ‘endtime.’ Not necessarily in an apocalyptic sense of the word, but in a time that is ending, where many things that we had considered eternal, or at least not temporal, are ending. What could this mean for performance? In thinking further on the practices that I have seen evolving and those that have a very strong political awareness, I can see a shift towards the notion of exhaustion and extinction. That again has implications for dramaturgy, because there will be no more drama after post drama. So, I am trying to develop a vocabulary and a framework for what it is that we have now – but this research is only in its early stages.

Figure 2.1  Kris Verdonck, CONVERSATIONS (at the end of the world) Source: © Kurt Van der Elst.

40  Interview with Kristof van Baarle

PE: What you have been saying leads me to two questions. The first is in the way that you work productively, theoretically and creatively between theory and practice, which you have talked about in relation to the work of Agamben. This opens the possibility for thinking theatre as theory and theory as theatre in what we could call, a ‘post.’ The second relates to the current condition that you have identified around the question of ‘ends.’ What kinds of thinking or practices are evolving or are you involved in that explore that condition; but also, is there such a thing as a ‘post end’? KB: I try to avoid the ‘post’ by using the word ‘end,’ but of course it comes down to the same thing. I actually hadn’t planned for the theory and practice to come together like this and it really came about in a very anecdotal way. I was actually writing about Kris’s work and at the same time I was developing a PhD project. In Belgium, you have to apply for doctoral funding, and it can take a year before you know if you have the funding or not. Kris had read my MA-thesis and after I submitted the application, he asked me to do an internship with him – he said “well, you might be onto something, so let’s have a talk and see if you would like to play more of a part in the production and creative process.” It was only then that I gained insight into the position of the dramaturg. At the time Kris was working with the excellent and fascinating dramaturg Marianne van Kerkhoven. You could call her the godmother of dramaturgy in contemporary European theatre and choreography, and I had the chance to observe how she works, as well as hear some of her ideas on her work. One of the things I noticed was the vastness of her knowledge, and the breadth of what she had read. I found that this was an incredible asset. The time it takes to collect that knowledge, even just to read through her library – part of it is still in Kris’s atelier, and I still look at it in astonishment. That became an incentive to spend time reading and researching, and Marianne was also a very strong motivator to do so. For a PhD, you are offered four years in which you can read and enrich yourself. In the end, all the knowledge you carry with you, you also bring to the studio. I received a scholarship to start a PhD but then, Marianne got very ill and passed away. I took on the position of dramaturg with Kris; although abrupt and sad, it still felt like a very organic process as I was already working in a similar position and close to the project. For a very long time, however, I kept these two worlds separate: the academic world and the studio practice. I had realized that bringing Agamben into the studio was really of no use. Problems regarding performance, things that arise from and during practice are not in his field. In hindsight, I was dealing with the same issues in both worlds; objectification of human beings, animation and subjectification of objects and machines, and dehumanization. It was actually only when I tried to develop a methodological frame towards the end of the research period of my PhD that I began to

To create a ‘state of being’ on stage  41

understand what a deep inf luence one had on the other. It became clear that there are many elements in creative practice that can be seen from a political perspective. For example, in the performance M, a Ref lection, we used a Heiner Müller text and the actor Johan Leysen. Leysen plays against or with his virtual double, but the audience can’t see the difference. 2 When we were making a promotional video for the production, we couldn’t film the virtual double, so it became like a ghost. The video that we used ended up being an excerpt of a prerecorded video image featuring ‘both’ Leysens, as if the relation between the real and the virtual couldn’t be captured. The questions we were dealing with in that performance were precisely that of the uncanny double and how this also manifests itself in the virtual realm. There is a quote from an article by Rudi Laermans, a sociologist and very respected dance theorist in Belgium, in which he says that in the case of posthumanist performances, the question is not “‘what does it mean?’ but ‘how does it work?’”3 And that was a very important insight for me. It allowed me to bring the knowledge I had developed finding solutions or rather observing problems from inside a process to a theoretical level. BF: The collaboration you have with Kris Verdonck reminds me of Katherine Profeta’s work with Ralph Lemon. These are artists who are open to working with a dramaturg as a real collaborator, and who work on research together with them along the way. Not all artists will do that. KB: It is a very particular practice and also, it’s a collaboration that evolves. As you interweave ideas the collaboration becomes stronger. I really enjoy not having ownership over these ideas because you can’t keep track of who came up with them, although it is very clear to me that Kris is the artist, the one who has the impulse, and with very particular skills that are different and also independent from mine. I like to compare the dramaturg’s position to how Bruno Latour uses anthropology. Latour uses the figure of an anthropologist to look at how objects, non-human actants, operate in relation to humans. If you really want to know how objects perform, you have to see how they develop in the studio; not only how they end up behaving on stage or within an installation. In that sense, I am trying to transform/refine what I see as an organic coming together of academics and dramaturgical practices, so that it can become an articulated field. But I still haven’t spoken about ‘the end’! PE: On the question of the ‘end’; given your interest in after thoughts, after-effects and post – is there a post, or does the ‘end’ have a certain kind of finality? KB: You can take the question of ‘ends’ very literally: on technological, economic, social, political and now also ecological grounds. There are various evolutions and technological processes that lead to all kinds of ends; ones that generate a cultural sense of ending. I am interested in what the impact

42  Interview with Kristof van Baarle

can be on an ethical level and on a political level, but just as much so, on an artistic level: if the end is happening, what is to be done, and why would you still do it? This is also a problem that Kris and I have encountered, as his work also deals with the notion of ‘end’ or ‘end time.’ I can recall a strong anecdote from the final scene of Untitled (2014), a performance about mascots. At this stage of the performance there was a mascot that didn’t have anything going for it – wrong person, wrong place, you could say; but it did have an audience. So, we decided to get the mascot to entertain the audience, but it didn’t have any choreography, and it didn’t really have the skill to perform or entertain. It became a very strange, comic, and yet deeply tragic performance. In the end, the mascot is replaced by a Lego, a small robot version of itself which is then engulfed by a nightmarish scenario: a landscape appears in which large inf latable structures take over the stage. We were wondering, “what can this mascot still do after this end, after the ends?” and we were trying to develop a scene, thinking “what could an action still be?” But we never managed to develop that action. The scene ended up being a robot that drives around in circles between the inf latables. The problem of how to make these final scenes after the ‘ends,’ is something that keeps returning. Two years ago, we made Conversations (at the end of the world) [2018], with a text from Daniil Kharms, a Russian writer who wrote in a kind of post-apocalyptic environment: after the Russians Revolution, after the First World War, after the Stalinist purges; a kind of artistic and politically desolate situation. He wrote his final text during the Leningrad siege. As his texts already exist in a situation of ‘ending’ we placed the performers within an ‘end’ setting. The show begins as a soiree, and as we staged the end, the soiree was already over, and so after 15 minutes the show was effectively over; but then it had only just begun. This situation continues up until the point when a shower of grey snow would cover them and make them disappear. The intention was to make a scene from underneath this – from the grave, you could say, but we did not find the right words that could still be said in such a scene. PE: This problem of the ‘end’ is attenuated in the political circumstances of our time, but it is also a problem that is really connected to dramaturgy. When we look at the history of dramaturgy, we are looking at the history of these impossible endings, whether it is thinking about the structural form of performance or what happens to performance in/after the twentieth century. On one level that’s a political question, on another level, it’s a very fundamental dramaturgical question. BF: I was thinking of this from a material point of view, because one always thinks of the product as ‘the end’: what is the end product? What show are you making, what are you creating as the ‘end’? KB: What we aim for is to create – and I am talking about Kris’s work now – a ‘state of being’ on stage. If the show is good and if it’s well made, then we can share that ‘state of being’ with the audience. Hence, it’s a way

To create a ‘state of being’ on stage  43

of giving shape to the state of being of an end time, of a dark contemporary world. In the attempt, or the effort of giving shape to it, of making something out of it, there is always an important gesture – you could also let go and do something else. But in the practice with Kris, looking the beast in the eyes and doing something with it to create ‘a state of being’ on stage and to create a device through which the performers can attain that ‘state of being’ is a way to deal with the situation. We do this through texts, in conversations, or in combination with the scenography, like that of a desolate landscape with heavy grey rain for instance. You can also do this with choreography. We did this in SOMETHING (out of nothing) [2019], the show that we made last year in which we worked with four dancers. In this piece, the end situation is constructed from a dramaturgical perspective. We had been looking into the work of Samuel Beckett. In relation to ‘ends,’ Beckett is a very important reference – but we were also interested in the way he deconstructs dramatic structures. We also used structures from the Noh theatre. Without having the pretence of being specialists in the field, we felt that there were some interesting things about the dramaturgical principles in Noh theatre that might help us to give shape to this ‘end – state of being.’ What Beckett and Noh share somehow, is repetition and the idea that dramatic action belongs to the past. In Noh plays, the story is often repeated three times from various perspectives, each time moving towards a more intense experience of the narrative. There is a text by Deleuze on Beckett, The Exhausted, and I will summarize, probably wrongly, how I use it for myself.4 The principle is: if all options to change something, to actualize a change in reality are tried and fail; if there are no more options, then anything becomes possible. When we work in the studio with the dancers, this is the ‘state of being’ that we are looking for. So, when working with ‘ends,’ I think that creating a shared ‘state of being,’ has something of a ‘potentiality’ in it, which is not necessarily a ‘thing’ that will change the world, but something that will at least suggest an attitude towards this end time and an attempt to understand some of the underlying dynamics. That is how I look at the work, and it’s probably the motivation behind the recent performances I have been collaborating on. PE: Let’s switch the focus of our conversation to your other dramaturgical work, and perhaps talk about that within the context of contemporary dance. KB: For the last two or three years, I have been working with Michiel Vandevelde. I first got to know Michiel’s work as a spectator. He makes what some call ‘essayistic choreographies’ or ‘scenic essays.’ He was working on a cycle in which he focused on the position of the image and technology from a political perspective in relation to dance. You could say that it was a strong deconstructive proposition, a critique on society through choreography, but also through the performance of ‘theory.’ His dancers would rap to Heidegger or sing Jean-Luc Nancy texts to a Britney Spears tune. It used a strategy

44  Interview with Kristof van Baarle

Figure 2.2  Kris Verdonck, SOMETHING (out of nothing) Source: © Kristof Vrancken.

of ‘over-identification,’ which I find quite interesting and about which we had lots of conversations. After that, we began working together on Paradise Now, 1968–2018, which is not a re-enactment, but a re-visiting of an iconic performance that had become the symbol for many of the values of ’68. The performance was made with youngsters between 13 and 23. BF: The performance by the Living Theatre? KB: Yes. It was quite interesting, as working with this group of young performers placed everything in particular perspective. The performance started from a sense of loss, a sense of post-history, of being just spectators of history. If I can relate this to the research I am doing, it would, once again, be about

To create a ‘state of being’ on stage  45

Figure 2.3  Michiel Vandevelde, Paradise Now (1968–2018) Source: © Ilias Teirlinck.

working up to the performance of the final scene. What this performance does is first going back in time from 2018 to 1968 through re-enactments of iconic images. To then end up in ’68 and then there is a montage, a very quick and explosive re-enactment of Paradise Now. The 4-hour long show is condensed into 15 minutes. The process then goes into reverse, is performed twice as fast, and ends up back from 1968 in the present. But what is the present moment? As a result of the double re-enactment, the dancers are literally really exhausted, so the present state is exhaustion. What they do in this state is to caress each other, massage each other, hug each other, kiss each other, showing images of friendship and love. What I find interesting is what happens after: just like the Living Theatre, the audience is invited onto the stage and asked to lie down. The space becomes completely dark, and the performers speak texts in dreamy semi seriousness – it’s very serious but because it is so dreamy you can’t really place their tone – they quote from philosophers about living in an end time, living in a state of despair. The atmosphere becomes very intimate; you are lying down, you have made the journey with the young people and you experience the intimacy of a collective effort, a shared experience, and yet, you also begin to think about how bad things are in the world. The combination of lying in a dark space, thinking dark thoughts but having embodied a strong collective experience as audience and performer, is something I find really interesting. BF: Among all the people we are interviewing, you are the only one who self-identifies as ‘a dramaturg.’ Most, or many of our interviewees either identify as cultural producers of some form, artists and /or primarily curators who use dramaturgy. Can you talk about the artistic research you are currently doing at the Arts College and how it relates to dramaturgy?

46  Interview with Kristof van Baarle

KB: The practice of the dramaturg is always relational. If I were just working on my own, I would not be a dramaturg. It is a position that only develops in relation with and to other artists. The conversations that we have are vital. For example, the artistic research that I am involved in is something I have developed together with Kris Verdonck. We developed this research interest in the convergences between Beckett and Noh-theatre and this led to the desire to set up some experiments and to gain particular knowledge that would not directly be functional towards a particular creative process. A school is a really interesting place to do that. It is also a good way to give the research a home base, because it’s not really possible to house it within the structure of the company that Kris has. What we are doing in the school now, is basically working with students and opening up our dramaturgical process. In the past three weeks we have been working on Beckett with the drama students, which is a way to look at the material for an upcoming performance (ACT [2020], in which we worked with Texts for Nothing) anew, from a fresh perspective and to see where that leads. BF: I know that you don’t know what you are going to find yet, and that you are still experimenting, but are you searching for a model or paradigm that might present new methodologies for artistic practice? KB: We are looking for findings situated on the level of dramaturgical principles, and of performative techniques or performative practices. It’s a way to give our own practice new impulses as well as new inputs. When you open up your practice, to students but also by confronting it with practices from different cultural traditions, you become very aware of how you work. What we usually do is work very long on the dramaturgical preparation of a piece, it can take two years to prepare to make a performance or an installation. We wait until the form the work will take becomes a consequence of where we are going with the content. Certain material leads to the need for an installation, at other times it’s a choreography, sometimes it’s a theatre piece, or video work; we try to not start from a medium. That is very interesting about the way Kris works – also as an exercise for the students – to really question your medium fundamentally each time you start with a new project. PE: Thinking primarily from your perspective as a dramaturg, what kind of future artistic practice can you imagine? What should we be doing in relation to thinking about the future? I am inviting a range of responses that might be imaginative, creative, or they may be structural, regarding what kind of training we may need to do, or what kind of system we need to put in place in order to create some possible futures. It is partly a philosophical question, but it is also partly a practical question – if you want to take it that way. KB: This question comes at a very strange moment, because this weekend our government plans for culture were announced, and there were very severe budget cuts on arts funding in Belgium. In Belgium, there is a system in which you have the very big institutions – there are five really large mammoths – and then you have the companies that get five-year funding;

To create a ‘state of being’ on stage  47

this leaves very little money left for the project-funding allocated to the rest of the arts community. These projects are really vital to feed the field, to generate new practices, to experiment, and for mid-career or late-career artists to to keep on experimenting. The total funding for projects will be cut by 60% and the future of the companies is very insecure. What that means, is that the tools that were developed over the past decades in Flanders to create a very f lexible and open field that allows for a lot of experimentation, will be thwarted. To imagine the future now is really a very sad exercise. But when it comes to education, I might have some ideas. I once have been working with Kris on some plans around the direction a school could take. It started from the idea that even if you want to have a post disciplinary approach to creative practices, which of course, is not the way all artists want or have to work, you still need some kind of base, some kind of craftsmanship that you can then let go or make use of to transform your medium into something else. This also becomes relevant for curators, or programmers, or dramaturgs, to have a deep knowledge of the field they are departing from or wanting to work with. I find this important when thinking about the future. Even when it comes to more hybrid practices that move between the visual arts or the performing arts, it is still important to know which field the form comes from or how perception and meaning making works in particular contexts. For example, I have just worked with Michiel on a video installation with text from Nâzim Hikmet, a Turkish writer.5 I think it is important to know that Michiel comes from a choreography background, because the place of bodies in this installation – which includes a live choir that sings Brecht songs – helps to understand the work better. When looking towards the future, it’s interesting to think about how we might be able to develop spaces and contexts in which the final medium is not what is important, but in which the content becomes the basis for selection in programmes and that basis allows the viewer to understand each work through its particular trajectory. I realize this is very complicated. There are many festivals now that present hybrids between performance and visual arts but they often end up looking at it from one paradigm or the other, and not truly looking at the moment between these two mediums as something that is decided by content. Many of the artists I work with, most of whom are from the performing arts, approach this dramaturgically. Hence, it is an important element of my work to find the different dramaturgical elements between media as they come together within one dramaturgical construct. BF: We are nearing the end of the interview. Would you like to add anything? KB: When it comes to this moving across disciplines or looking at it from a dramaturgical perspective, maybe there is one little thing that I have not yet mentioned. Kris’s work moves between a museum context or theatre context and this places it between subject and object relations – theatre is the place of subjects,

48  Interview with Kristof van Baarle

Figure 2.4  Michiel Vandevelde, Human Landscapes – Book 2 Source: © Mathias Völzke, created for steirischer herbst festival 2019.

and the museum is the place of objects. When these two definitions become blurred, the spaces in which they happen also become blurred. I think we are now in a phase where we still know the conventions of both well enough to really play with them and to use them dramaturgically. But I am curious to see what will happen if we get to the point where we forget these conventions as we get into these truly hybrid spaces. I wonder what that would mean for the practices I am involved in right now.

Notes 1 Kris Verdonck is a performance maker and installation artist based in Brussels. For more information, see his company website: www.atwodogscompany.org/ en/. Michiel Vandevelde is a choreographer based in Brussels. For more information, see his website: www.michielvandevelde.be. 2 The performance used a projection system to double Leysen’s presence on the stage and created an uncanny doppelgänger. For documentation of the work, see: https://vimeo.com/169104812. All of Verdonck’s works are documented on his company website. See: www.atwodogscompany.org/en/projects/10?bckp=1. 3 Was this the quote? “observing a ‘dance performance in general’ is therefore not ‘what does it mean?’ but ‘how does it work?’” and is it from Rudi Laermans (2008) ‘Dance in General’ or Choreographing the Public, Making Assemblages, Performance Research, 13:1, 7–14. 4 Gilles Deleuze and Anthony Uhlmann (1995) The Exhausted, SubStance, 24:3(78), 3–28. 5 Nâzim Hikmet, Human Landscapes from My Country, W.W. Norton & Company Ltd., London, 2008 [1939–1950].

3 We’re not idle witnesses Interview with Marc Bamuthi Joseph

We interviewed Marc via Skype in late May of 2018. At the time, Marc was the Chief of Programs and Pedagogy at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA, a position he held since 2012. In January of 2019, he assumed the newly created position of Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. where he spearheaded the first expansion of the Kennedy Center’s studios, amphitheater, rehearsal space, and outdoor pavilions. He is one of 12 artistic partners at the Kennedy Center and the first to serve in both administrative and artistic roles. Bertie Ferdman: We start with the same question for everyone, which is, how would you describe what you do? Marc Bamuthi Joseph: I’m an artist and a husband and father, and an educator. I make culture for a living, both to support myself and also to create instruments that bridge the present moment to a more inclusive equitable dynamic and inspired future. Some of the tactics that I use include writing and performing from poems to operas, curating at my home institution Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, curating with a number of partner institutions, from Carnegie Hall to not-for-profit organizations that are generally youth centered like Youth Speaks. I create both site-specific works and social practice based works in a modality that I call the creative ecosystem. BF: I’d like to come back to this “creative ecosystem” in a minute. Before we talk further about the now, let’s get a little background. We know you come from inf luences such as spoken word, poetry, hip-hop, site-specific works, community activism, pedagogy, contemporary art and dance. Can you tell us more about what experiences or inf luences have led you to where you are now? Is there something that you would say helped to prepare you for the kind of work that you do? MBJ: I’m a dad and I live in a black body, so I don’t really have time to play around. I don’t approach social justice as an intellectual exercise; it’s an urgent element of my survival. It’s a thing I have to actively *make*. I am subject to the condition of my body, of my history, the condition of coming from a marginalized community, the history of my ancestry. I am a first generation American. My parents were born in Haiti and I have a sense of ancestral and

50  Interview with Marc Bamuthi Joseph

cultural accountability. Those biographical elements impact what I do because there just isn’t room to play or to view art as ancillary or incidental to the social contract. In terms of more formal or academic preparation, I went to a private high school on the Upper East Side and a historically Black college in Atlanta. I grew up in hip-hop culture. I share that all to say that I grew up switching codes. Code switching is not just the preparation for curatorial exercises. It’s also an organic aspect of both my communication style and the communities that I navigate through. My graduate work is in education; I taught high school for a couple of years. Upon graduation, I was the founding program director of a not-forprofit organization that focused on youth literacy and youth expression, and I’ve always had collaboration and collaborative processes at the core of my performing work, my pedagogical and curatorial work. PE: The next questions are about the relationship between artistic process and the process of culture formation or working with communities. Your projects have been remarkably large in scope and involve many different activities and levels of involvement with different communities, and they cross many bridges between not just participants in communities but also art forms. Could you speak about how you came to make projects such as the Living Word Project or Youth Speaks1 (www.youthspeaks.org) and came into this contemporary practice? What led you to make these kinds of projects and how did you develop the processes that speak to this form of collaboration that you’ve described? MBJ: My political awakening came out of hip-hop culture. I was born and raised in the same place at the same time that hip-hop was being born. The autobiography of Malcolm X was a part of my political awakening, and five or six years before that the Public Enemy album “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us Back” came out, and that really forged a burgeoning literacy. That and the sociopolitical pressures of growing up in New York City in the era of Mayor Ed Koch, and also understanding the vulnerability of my body relative to the New York Police Department. There’s a… I know I keep referencing autobiography, but I guess I just want to emphasize that my practice isn’t detached from my personal stakes. This work is deeply personal. I haven’t arrived at these curatorial principles externally or through academic curiosities quite frankly. There is a thing of “if we don’t do this” or “if we don’t do something,” then I put myself at risk. Hip-hop is a poly-rhythmic and also cross-disciplinary form that involves a lot of collaboration in order to express itself most honestly; and hip-hop is a culture. It’s not rap; it’s not DJing; it’s about people coming together. If I think about joy at the center of my work and I try to emulate it or create the conditions for maximum joy around maximum people, then that necessarily means coming together. I strive to be a curator that can animate community in the name of safety, joy, and aesthetic excellence. The space of and the form of education and the development of pedagogical tools is a necessary and probably an organic response to not being a violent person but wanting things to change.

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I’m most deeply inf luenced by the pedagogue Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator whose seminal work is Pedagogy of the Oppressed. At the center of it is this notion of restoring language to marginalized communities, primarily through prompts that ask marginalized communities to inform whatever the next iteration of their existence is going to be by also forming language around that. A lot of the pedagogical underpinnings of my curatorial work or the development of non-profit work is really about the experimentation with and the development of prompts that afford a great scale of opportunity for folks to inform and name their own worlds. That’s really what’s at the heart of the theater that I make through the Living Word Project. It’s at the heart of The Life is Living Festival, and it’s at the heart of what I do here as Chief of Program and Pedagogy at YBCA. The Festival was a co-founded event, involving Chinaka Hodge, Hodari Davis and others. But the binding takeaway for me was less the events we made, than the national organizing strategy we developed to produce those events. Our organizing structure was deeply informed by Brett Cook, Rick Lowe, and of course Freire. At Life is Living, and later at YBCA, we didn’t work with the goal of building audience, we set out to intentionally align community inside of public or institutional spaces. We did that through a system of generating questions that multiple communities can respond to; and then creating platforms for the co-location of the responses to those prompts in one place. That place might be at a park, that place might be on a stage, that place might be on a soccer field, it might be in a theater. Ultimately, all of those inf luences have led me to being strategic about the questions that I ask, and to being hyper-democratic as to who gets to respond to those questions, and then being vigilant about creative circumstances and conditions by which we can correlate responses to those questions. I believe that is how culture gets made.

Figure 3.1  /PEH-LO-TAH/ Source: © Bethanie Hines.

52  Interview with Marc Bamuthi Joseph

PE: Brilliant. Can I ask a follow up question? You mentioned the moment of the Public Enemy album and the work of Malcolm X, are there any other steps along the way that you recognize now in retrospect? The articulation of a process demonstrates some really hard work that’s taken place over probably quite a few years. If you could just tease out that history a little bit more for us, are there any other turning points that you can recognize as being really important? MBJ: Yes! I always go back to the classroom, coming out of Morehouse College in Atlanta, moving to the Bay area, being 21 and teaching 10th grade English. I now have a son who is in 10th grade… what I learned then was charm and charisma wasn’t enough to offset dogma. The lessons I learned in the classroom were particularly with 15-year-old kids. You know the New York Times professes to write for someone with a 6th grade education level. You know through the birth of the Internet that’s changed dramatically. The demise of public education in America. What a 6th grade reading level means now I’m not sure, but I think, how can I make this make sense for 15-yearolds? My time spent in the classroom was highly inf luential in that regard. Jeff Chang’s book Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation was incredibly meaningful for me; Tony Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon was incredibly meaningful. I think that literature and the literary have altered my trajectory in dramatic ways because the internalization of emotion that happens through language is what keeps me inspired, so I have to reference those pieces. I’ve also been highly inf luenced by collaborators at every step. Maybe the person that was the most inf luential in terms of making sure that I keep it humble is the visual artist Brett Cook, who is an astounding pedagogue and curator in his own right. His community practices, his humility in entering communities and truly listening is something that I am continuously inspired by. He was a collaborator on Life is Living, he was collaborator on the project I did for Creative Time, Black Joy and the Hour of Chaos, and he is a collaborator on a piece that I’m developing for SFJazz called The Black (W)hole. BF: I went to see Black Joy at Central Park and felt very much part of the piece—like the audience was part of that performance. You mention Freire, whom Augusto Boal was highly inf luenced by. To what extent are you cultivating Boal’s notion of spect-actors in your work? And does this concept of an audience-participant play out for you as a curator, as an organizer of events, managing an institution, bringing people together? MBJ: The link is the alchemy of implication. How do you create a set of conditions where it becomes clear to the audience either immediately or over time that they are implicated in the work? Agents call me all the time—“I have this great artist and this great artist does this great thing,” and I’m not so much concerned about what the thing is. I’m concerned about what the thing does. You play the trumpet; you’re the most spectacular trumpet player in the world, great! What happens in the room, and what is your intention? Who are you doing this for?

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You can work with artists to create a set of conditions in the room; you can work with however many teams, marketing and production, civic and municipal to draw an audience in, but there’s the transactional expectation which makes curation hard. I’d have no problem curating five awesome things a day, every day, but I don’t have that money and we don’t have that capacity. Curatorial practice then has to be really strategic and, while maintaining a sense of introducing the aesthetic sublime into your community or across communities, more than anything I have to ask myself who are the communities or what are we to gain by bringing certain communities together? How do we activate audiences? That’s the primary difference between the visual arts and the performing arts, to lay down a reductive binary. Very often the visual arts are about the gaze, the looking, the witness, and I think performing arts’ audiences are accomplices. We’re not idle witnesses. So curatorially one of the questions that I ask is: Does this work implicate in some way the people that are watching it? And if that’s not happening, I’m not interested. PE: This question is around dramaturgy. We don’t anticipate that everybody we are interviewing will relate to that term. It has different responses from different people so, but broadly, when I talk about dramaturgy, I always talk about it as a process that bridges the ideas and the practice. It articulates the processes that you’ve just described about how a set of urgent ideas and a certain set of problems you might experience in your community gets translated into an artistic outcome. MBJ: Yes. PE: You are very much working with dramaturgy of scale…. I’m interested in you discussing this because some of your works happen on a very intimate, quite small community base with four or five members or a classroom for example. Other works are attempting to motivate perhaps a whole city… and these require different levels of dramaturgical thinking. Could you respond to this term “dramaturgy” and whether it has any relationship to the work you do and the question of scaling. How do you work across these modalities? MBJ: Yes. I love that question. You know the geek in me loves all things dramaturgical. I remember having a conversation with my director Michael Garces on a project I made called The Breaks about something like “is” versus “was” or “is” versus “am” or something like that. If I can reframe the question just a little bit and think about dramaturgy more as an invitation. In the theater, in the opera, language is both the invitation and also the obstacle for audiences for any number of communities. I happen to like language a lot, playing with it, again I grew up in hip-hop, so I think about language… Kendrick Lamar who just won the Pulitzer makes a lot of sense to me because I’ve always related to the best of rap as the best of black literature. I also understand that I can be very opaque and create obstacles to entry because of the language that I use, which is why the questions, the syntax of the questions and the articulation of questions is so important to my work. That’s really where dramaturgy lies in terms of my curatorial practice. Those questions are

54  Interview with Marc Bamuthi Joseph

open access, open source, and are the primary invitations into the implication that I was describing earlier. For instance, we just curated a festival here at YBCA. The festival is called “Transform,” and the central question for the festival is: Where is our public imagination? Yeah, these questions—where is our public imagination? or why citizenship? or for Life is Living, what sustains life in your community? or for any project that I enter into, as performer, as organizer, as curator, it’s always the dramaturgy of the questions that start anything. Can we design freedom? What does equity look like? How do we find and empower truth? Can we make creative descent matter? These are the questions that in my role as pedagogue at YBCA create a detailed but fun and inclusive process. These are the questions that we ask our multiple publics. These are the questions by which we initially engage artists or thought leaders or partners. These are the questions that we ask in our development meetings. There’s a curation mostly of communities. There’s the further curation of the artist that can inform and inspire and animate those communities, and then there is the mutual invitation between those artists or thought leaders and those communities to respond to a dynamic and emotionally provocative question. BF: Quite often, the word “institution” might signify gate keeping. How do you navigate freedom and creativity within the institution and are you looking to change what the institution stands for? MBJ: Yes. It has to. The institution as a cultural citadel is an eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth-century concept that just will not stand. I live in California, there was an earthquake last week, the waters are rising, and we have a polluter-in-chief. The cultural institution as isolated from the social contract, it’s just not permissible…the stakes are too high. And it’s also a failing kind of business model as well. Rethinking the functionality of these institutions, reframing them and normalizing them, normalizing that reframing in the public imagination is the work of the next 10, 20 years for all of us. We performed /peh-Lo-tah/ with a University presenter a couple of months ago, and prior to performing /peh-Lo-tah/ we did this action that I developed at the Guggenheim called moving and passing,2 which works with young immigrant soccer players to think about American culture. About 300 kids came, and the 300 kids came from probably 30 different countries. This is in Raleigh, North Carolina. But not a lot of people came to the show. We did the thing on a Saturday and then the performance was the following Wednesday, and if there were 300 kids outside on the field maybe there were 150 people in the theater, and for the programmer, the reliance on the transactional—I have to get butts in seats—I’m sure that was very hard for them. They just sent us their National Dance Project report back, and they kept talking about that, like maybe if we’d spent a little less time working on this, we could’ve gotten more people to come to that. So that hierarchy of importance and engagement is very telling. Now I love theater, I love when the lights go down, I love sitting down, I love that whole experience, but 10 years from now, 15 years from now the work of being with 300 kids from around the world that settled in North

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Carolina is going to have more of an impact on the social contract than people coming to see a piece of theater. I’m not saying that we should limit inspiration or limit the conditions or the context for inspiration. It can and should happen anywhere, but the institutions themselves cannot be neutral. To be neutral is to be complicit. I think we historically have thought that the curator or the institution expresses a sociopolitical point of view vis-à-vis the artist that they bring into the space. But we are thinking, living, organic kind of citizen institutions as well. As a citizen, then, what’s your responsibility? How do you reimagine political power outside of the electoral process? When the World Cup happens or when the Warriors are playing I’m very clear where I need to go to hang out with the people that also love sports. I don’t know where to go in culture to go think with other people. Who do I make culture with? I know how to go to my job and make products, but who do I make culture with? Besides our academic institutions, who else in our civic life takes responsibility for that? What I’ve challenged my institution to do, and what I’ve challenged most institutions to do is to think about that. I wrote the vision for an entity that’s emerging in Brooklyn, both a visual and performing arts organization. The mandate is to think about curatorial practice from three emanating points. One, creative excellence, two, the political imagination, and three, art framed economies. What I asked them to do was to have a director of creative excellence, rather than a curator of performance, have a director of the political imagination, and a director of the art framed economy, and make all of your programmatic decisions collaboratively among a board of those three and their respective staffs. If you think about the political imagination and creative excellence with each programming decision, now we’re talking about being a true cultural agent. We’re talking about centering ourselves as public spaces of advocacy, intentional intersection and provocation.

Figure 3.2  Marc Bamuthi Joseph Source: © Bethanie Hines.

56  Interview with Marc Bamuthi Joseph

PE: Can you say something about your ideas for the future of the spaces that these works would take place in, that art would happen in? MBJ: I think artwork happens everywhere and still happens in galleries and garages and in theaters and parking lots…art happens everywhere. I just think that the administration of how art connects to and envelops and provokes the body politic, I think that’s what changes. The context is more important than audience development schemes. BF: And the context is dramaturgy… MBJ: Yeah. PE: I really take to heart your comment about where I go to find my community of cultural thinkers. If I want to go and watch ice hockey, I know the bar down the road shows it. But I don’t know where I can go in New York really for that. It’s very fragmented as a community… the different parts of it are very isolated and there are no spaces to hang out. There are spaces to make out, there are spaces to see out, but there are no real spaces just to hang out which is something that could be easily addressed in some ways. There are all sorts of questions about how you make a space accessible and usable and visible to multiple communities and so on and so forth as well so, and I get that. It’s a very important point you make. BF: We are getting to the end, and I wanted to go back to your initial comment about generating a “creative ecosystem.” I think what you are talking about relates to this, the people that are players in this kind of artistic cultural world. MBJ: Sure… historically we’ve had a prevailing strategy for audience development. If we’re doing a show about soccer, a week or two or a month or two beforehand, we’ll try to get as many of the people that love soccer in our community to come to the show. What I am more interested in is how to implicate communities in the question that the piece is asking. If the question is “Can we design freedom?” then how many people can I ask that question to, a year or two before we present the show? And what happens if I bring them together and nurture their relationship? What happens if my goal is to develop a community rather than to build an audience? The example that I love is when we presented Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show here at YBCA. I asked her about a year and a half before we presented the work, what are the questions that she was asking herself. She said, among many things, “I am thinking about what was on the other side of my body’s shame and what’s on the other side of my body’s joy?” We convened a group of 30 folks—yoga teachers, actors, people that work with youth, poets, preachers, barbers—and we asked those questions. We brought them together once a month for a year, and we asked them to create gestural responses, gestural or figurative responses in the theater on the same night we presented this show. And it ended up that there were around 700 people inside of the theater to see the show, but there were 2,000 people outside of the theater because

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there was a literal community around the question. And that’s what I call the creative ecosystem. It’s an ecology of people from different sectors that are connected by values. We ask them all to respond to the same question at the same time, nurtured by institutional space and resources. For Life is Living we literally asked 100 people in Houston or whatever city we’re in “what sustains life in your community?”, and then we give them resources to make a response to that inquiry in a public park. We provide infrastructural support, and we create this festival, and the festival is fun and is attended by thousands of people and all that, but the work is the development of the network of these collaborators who ordinarily wouldn’t be working together. PE: We are in a challenging time, in a dark place, how do you think about sustainability, survival, and future-ability? MBJ: We’ve talked about sustainability and about resilience. Anything that is not generative is not sustainable. Quite frankly, our cultural landscape is oversaturated with content, so creatives have to consider that market reality if we want our stuff to be seen. Performing arts institutions similarly want their curated work to be seen as well. I get that there are financial imperatives that we need to respond to, just to keep the lights on or just to keep the brick-and-mortar intact, and I’m talking kind of from a highfalutin place you know, both literally and figuratively. But to sustain ourselves, we have to earn a sense of shared stakes with the public. If sustainability is about importance, the presentation of artists is not going to be the only relevant factor in carrying on the business operation for very much longer. The sustainability of our institutions lays in our ability to generate culture, and not just be a vault for it.

Notes 1 See: https://youthspeaks.org/. 2 See: www.guggenheim.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/guggenheim-m-pactteacher-guide-2.12.18.pdf.

4 In the belly of the political beast Interview with Ron Berry

I interviewed Ron in the open-plan Fusebox offices in Austin, Texas. It was November 2017. After meeting a number of Ron’s colleagues, we sat in a corner facing the garden. I was loving the warm weather—a respite from cold NYC—and the friendly and down-to-earth vibe. Since this interview took place, Fusebox has grown substantially. In addition to its annual contemporary art and performance festival, it now features a comprehensive artist archive and a critical online platform that features writings, interviews, art works, and a podcast, as well as an expanded commitment to creating sustainable practices and supporting the local economy as an integral part of their mission. Due to COVID-19, the 2020 edition of the festival was a Virtual Edition, created alongside Fusebox’s Associate Artistic Director and Curator Anna Gallagher-Ross. Bertie Ferdman: How would you describe what you do? Ron Berry: For the past 13 years we’ve been producing Fusebox and that’s the heart of what we do. We were interested in creating a more meaningful exchange across art forms. My background was in theater, but I was interested in other art forms and felt that they were siloed, at least in Austin. We liked this idea of creating a common space—even if it was for a couple of weeks out of the year—where we could invite artists as well as audiences together to exchange ideas in a different way. In addition to that, we were interested in exchanges across geography. As a theater artist living here, Austin felt geographically isolated. That’s probably less true with music and film since those art forms travel easier, and Austin has a very rich tradition of music and independent film. With regards to live art forms, it felt isolated. I knew nothing about what was happening anywhere else, honestly. I knew that I was a theater maker in Austin and I was hungry to engage with other artists. I was running a theater space at the time, an old converted garage in East Austin. We also had an art gallery; we did monthly experimental film series, made our own shows… We had a month free, in the space, and thought “let’s do this festival!” So, it was a whim, in a way. But those were the two main things: exchange of ideas across forms and across geography. We had no idea that we would do it twice, much less 13 times.

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I also think that the past 13 years have been an exploration of “festival” as a thing, as a platform, as an idea. This felt particularly important in a place like Austin that has a good number of festivals. BF: South by Southwest being the most famous one. RB: Exactly. This year during our festival, there were four other festivals going on! Festivals are a particular way that a lot of people here in Austin like to engage with culture. The past 13 years have been an investigation of that: What are some things that festivals are uniquely situated to do very well? What are some things that perhaps our festival could be doing that a lot of all these festivals are not doing? The first thing we looked at was the exploration of place, and using our festival to encounter different parts of our city, different sites, buildings, alleyways, rooftops. We expanded to food; we got really interested in food as a celebration of culture as well as an organizing principle. Then, we pursued the idea of interrogating this basic assumption about the festival world: How do you go to a festival? You buy a ticket. So, we decided to do away with tickets and see what that does. It created this whole… provocation, for lack of a better word. We created this initiative called “Free Range Art.” We made the whole festival free. It was an attempt to look at who this work is for, how we create some more meaningful invitations into this work, and what the economics of making this work is. We were very clear that it’s not free to make. Artists’ fees are the single biggest festival expense. That’s what we prioritize, that’s where most of our money goes—into paying the artists. We felt that in our old model, where we were charging tickets, it was obscuring what was going on. We were interested in taking this basic assumption about the mechanism of the festival and turning that into a conversation about access, about economics. We were also very interested in trying to imagine a different relationship between the art that we are presenting and the audience, one that’s not transactional. For many of these artists, maybe they’ve been working on a project for two years or maybe it’s part of a life-long investigation. It felt odd that we were asking people to pay for it in this one particular moment. We actually didn’t stop asking people for money, we just changed when we did and how. We were, in a sense, converting ticket buyers and pass holders into donors, which is a different sort of relationship. Most recently, we’ve been asking “Could we use the festival as a way to look at things together as a city, and perhaps, make things together?” We started by looking at how Austin is developing real estate because the city is growing at this explosive rate. East Austin, especially, is one of the fastest gentrifying neighborhoods in the whole country. We created a process that was driven by a local neighborhood in East Austin, which is still largely a working class, Latino, and African-American neighborhood. It was a former industrial brownfield, that’s why it hadn’t been developed. It was remediated and came on the market; then these two developers bought this 24-acre site, but they wanted to do something conscientious. I had known one of them

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for years. We wanted to design a process that allowed the neighborhood to define the priorities for the future site. We used the festival to model some of the ideas that had emerged thus far. We built a pop-up village on site as part of the festival, and invited the neighborhood and the city out to respond “What do you like? What do you not like? What have we not even thought about?” We took that input working with planners and created a master plan, which is now being implemented. BF: What is it? RB: There are two significant affordable housing developments coming up, which is what the neighborhood wanted the most. There’s also a roadway project; the city approved a bond in the 1980s to improve this roadway and they still hadn’t finished it. Finally, it is getting improved. There are trails that kids have made over the past 50 years to get to school, which required them to trespass and climb underneath train-cars just to get to school because of how inconsistent the transportation system was. Now there’s an official task force and half a million dollars in the city budget to improve these trails, make them safe so that these kids can get to school. This was in large part due to a documentary that we produced about the trails, created by Carra Martinez and Deborah Esquenazi. For me, that was really exciting that housing and transportation solutions could come out of an arts festival. It was very radical. BF: Let’s go back to the issue of space and site, because you said you started with a physical festival site—does the festival now have a set performance space? RB: For the first five years of the festival, we had our own site, but we also activated and did things on other sites. BF: Do you have an actual theater?

Figure 4.1  David Zambrano, Soul Project—Fusebox 2012 @ Tops Warehouse Source: © Shilpa Bakre.

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RB: We don’t anymore. We did for the first five years. It was a performance and gallery space. We did most of the festival there, but we also did programs out in Austin. We use existing museums, art galleries, theater spaces, but then we also continue to use the festival as a way to explore a place. We do things in parks, in alleyways, in neighborhoods… I should say part of that was due to our limits—when we started, we had a budget of $5,000. The way we grew was largely through partnerships, reaching out to a museum, a gallery, a theater company to collaborate. At first, that was a strategy to do things that we couldn’t do ourselves and to grow our audience. But now, that has become central to our artistic practice—the act of sitting across the table from other community partners and talking about what’s happening, what would be interesting to do together. In that way, the act of putting on the festival also becomes an act of community building. It’s a way of allowing for parallel points of view. When you look at the festival, it’s not that every project is hand-picked by me; it’s a lot of different eyes and perspectives. That has come through a lot of ongoing relationships throughout the year. It is not a panel process. It is a series of conversations, ideas, and explorations that play out over a period of time. BF: How do you conceive of each festival? RB: Typically, we’re working on two festivals simultaneously. Usually, there are maybe three projects we identify early on that we think are very exciting, and then we start to build the festival from that. We don’t start with a particular theme in mind. In some ways, the festival becomes an act of discovery for ourselves. We ask “What would be interesting in proximity to this project? What would be interesting because it’s in opposition to this project, or it’s in conversation with it in a particular way?” BF: You used to partner with many art organizations. Now you are partnering with the Dell Medical School on a community health project with high school students. How did that come about? RB: That came out of this real estate project that I was explaining earlier. Besides the affordable housing concerns, the next two priorities for the locals of this neighborhood were health and access to healthy affordable food. We started talking to several innovative health professionals in Austin; they were very interested in some new approaches to community health. We could have put in eight clinics in that neighborhood, but it wouldn’t solve the issues. We had to start thinking about health more comprehensively, through food as part of the cultural space, through social space as part of the community health. Simultaneously, University of Texas just opened the biggest new medical school in the country in the past 40 years. As part of the school, they have a design institute for health. It’s a design shop, but they are specifically looking at community health. So, we did another prototype, where we worked with high school students from that neighborhood to help imagine with doctors, with a chef, and with artists, what this new kind of hybrid community health clinic might look like.

62  Interview with Ron Berry

Figure 4.2  Guadalupe Maravilla—Fusebox 2017 Source: © Christopher Shea.

BF: Is this outside of the actual time of the festival? Is it something Fusebox produces year-round? RB: That work was happening year-round, but it also popped up during the festival. We had been working with a chef who’s creating memory recipes, menu items from the neighborhood, so we had a pop-up food truck during the festival. It was very affordable, very healthy and culturally very relevant and specific. The kids from the neighborhood programmed the music in the space; they did performances and hosted a roundtable about their hopes and dreams for this… BF: …and they became audiences for the other shows. RB: Yes, and the school of pharmacy at UT set up a whole mobile clinic where people got screens and testing. It was a featured program in our festival. The festival guests were coming, people from the neighborhood were coming, and it was all designed and driven by these students. BF: It sounds like you are ref lecting on intersectionality in an organic way, which contributes to your progressive reconceptualization of “festival” as a form. How do you think about it? RB: I know that there is not one right approach. We are interested in doing things with people as opposed to “for people.” As with the real estate project, we enjoy applying an artistic, creative lens; but we also weren’t trying to be experts on housing or on community health. What we are essentially trying to do is create a unique kind of space where different stakeholders that have real experience can come together and think about things in a way that they haven’t been able to before. Again, with the real estate example, I didn’t want to commission a playwright to write a play about affordable housing. Instead, I wanted us to figure out if we could actually get them some affordable housing.

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BF: So do you mean that you focus on actual legislative change, having policy stakeholders coming in and changing policies? RB: No, it was first creating a set of clear priorities from the neighborhood in a way that was visible and novel. It brought attention from the press and created a different perception of what affordable housing could be. That interested some private developers. We also got there through an ArtPlace America Grant that was funding this process. The developers got a master planning process that was basically paid for. They’re getting great press, they’ve got a planning process paid for, and they’re still going to make some money on this. It’s maybe not the fastest way for them to make money, and maybe not as much as they could have made if it had been all just market driven. This does not have to be entirely altruistic. But I think we demonstrated that there is a different way of doing this. As a festival producer, it was very exciting to me because that was going on next to a performance by Heather Kravas or Luciana Achugar or Phil Soltanoff. On the surface, they have nothing to do with one another, but I think all of these projects are actually deeply steeped in a very profound artistic inquiry, interrogation, questioning, imagining a new way of making a dance or a new way of making a city, a new way of making a community. BF: You’ve created your own model for a new institution—though I don’t know if you precisely call it that. How does that give you freedom (or not)? RB: I don’t view us as an institution. I think what I appreciate where we’re at is that we have relationships with big institutions and we can do things with them that allow us to do some things on a certain scale that we wouldn’t be able to otherwise. But we don’t have the bureaucracy of some institutions. So it does also feel like we can be very nimble and responsive, and we can try things out in a way that, to me, is very exciting. We lack some of the financial stability, which is not insignificant. I’m glad that we have the institutions because they are capable of providing considerable resources to projects and artists. I’m also glad that there are organizations like ours that can play a different role. We are in a perpetual interrogation mode. A perpetual revolution of how we present or create a framework around art. BF: You said that from the very beginning it has been a hybrid festival where you present live arts, visual arts, and theater. Would you say that there is an increased staging of performance in art spaces? You’ve been doing this for a long time; how has that affected your curating? RB: It definitely seems like there is growing interest in that, and I think it’s exciting that more museums and visual art institutions are looking toward performance. There have been more opportunities to partner with people. I do think, however, that presents unique challenges with work. The way performance is situated in such places is hugely important. Sometimes placing

64  Interview with Ron Berry

a performance in a museum or gallery setting can kill a certain life of the piece. Obviously, there are great success stories of it working wonderfully, but I also think we must be very considerate about how that work is situated in that space. BF: In Fusebox, how do you decide on which artists present in a gallery space vs. a theater space? RB: It’s one of the first and ongoing conversations that we have with the artists. As soon as we become interested in a project, we think about situating each of these projects across our city. How can those different sites and projects be situated geographically in order to spark each other, to logistically promote each other from one cluster to the next, to speak to each other in a way that’s arresting or exciting? That said, there’s always a piece of the festival that I don’t understand, and I believe that it’s essential to live performance. We don’t entirely know how it’s going to play out, so there’s an element of discovery. We are provocative in certain ways, we have some hunches, but we don’t fully know. That contributes to a certain kind of energy and excitement. Also, we learn from our audiences just as much about what this festival was, and what it provoked during and afterward. BF: You are not just producing or presenting pieces that are in isolation from each other. You’re making a whole connection not only with the artist but also with the city, the festival’s audience, and how they relate to one another. Do you relate the term dramaturgy with what you do? RB: I do. It runs throughout the whole process, maybe a bit looser application of that term. For sure, we’re trying to tie together some fundamental concerns. We’re based in Austin, so there are a series of ongoing conversations within the local arts community that we’re a part of. Then there are other socio-political things that are happening in Austin. But we are also part of the national and international conversations about performance. We try to hold these engagements simultaneously and ask where these different conversations overlap. Where do they dovetail? Where do they miss each other? Where do they bump up against each other? Out of that, certain projects start to emerge, and we start to build the festival around that. Some of that is thematic: What is interesting thematically in relation to these projects? Some of it is almost rhythmic. We have a series of shorter projects that are going to be happening here, so what is the rhythm of this five-day festival? How do we compose the rhythm and the notes of this festival in a way that f lows, or do we want to break it up in a particular way? BF: It sounds like you’re creating an art piece. RB: Yes, that’s how we think about it; it’s a big art project. BF: Would it be possible to do this festival in another city? Would you have to take residency, or give permission like a trademark? RB: It would be hard to just duplicate what we’re doing here anywhere else because it came out of a relationship with this place.

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Figure 4.3  Justin Shoulder, Carrion—Fusebox 2018 @ Festival Hub Source: © Christopher Shea.

BF: So can it be considered a site-specific festival, not because of the pieces you feature but because your concept is the location? RB: That’s right. If I were to do another festival somewhere else, I would definitely need to spend time there. BF: What if they wanted “Fusebox” somewhere else? Could that be possible? RB: It could be, but again, it would have to come out of very deep local relationships there. There would still have to be a significant network of local partners, artist organizations that we help to design and imagine it. I’m very interested in artistic vision and curation, but I’m also interested in how we can create space and potential for a plurality of perspectives to go into that. BF: Your work is an example of how you bring dramaturgy to curation. RB: I even think about that in terms of our work culture; how we exist together, and how we make things together is not separated as “administration” and “art.” I like to think about this creatively and infused with the same ethos. BF: When I was reading about your real estate project, it reminded me of Theaster Gates, as another example of not just making art but also creating a way to make art. RB: I think he’s a brilliant artist and a great example. To be clear, I think it’s complicated and almost fraught—that I’m a middle-class white man stepping into these waters, that’s fraught. However, we know what happens when market forces are left to their own devices. So we ask if we can try and create space for a different sort of process that was driven by local stakeholders. BF: I talk a lot about that in the last chapter of Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific. Do you know Aaron Landsman? RB: I love Aaron’s work, yes.

66  Interview with Ron Berry

BF: He’s bringing in different stakeholders to make community art as contemporary radical performance, and you’re doing that with a whole festival, which leads me to my next question about your primary role. As museum curators display objects, you’re thinking of how to display artists. Could you talk more about how you see yourself in relation to the artists? RB: Our work with various communities and our work with artists are all central, we wouldn’t be doing one without the other. We prioritize paying the artists. We try to be advocates for local artists. Our festival program is roughly a third local, a third national, a third international. We try to provide opportunities for the local artists for their work to be seen. We want to create a new body of writing about all this work because there’s a lack of interesting writing on performance. When we can, we do the residency program, which is customizable to the artists’ needs. Also, connecting the artists to other curators and presenters around the world that might be interested in their work, helping them think through artistic or logistic challenges, trying to contextualize what they do; those are all other ways that we serve artists directly. From a bigger picture, what we try to do is create a connection between our city and the artists we’ve been presenting historically in a way that is more immediate and meaningful. We take this position of the arts that is not separate from life. The exchange of ideas, culture making and culture sharing that runs and threads through all our cities and communities is very exciting. Then again, I didn’t want to force any of our artists to make pieces about a certain subject. We as an organization can engage with our various communities wherever it’s needed or wherever that makes sense. But I also want to hold space for artists to follow their whims and their curiosity, wherever that leads. Whether that’s a much more esoteric or formal exploration, we want to honor that. I’m a believer in the role of art as a way to explore the mysterious, the unknown, and create these things that are perhaps foreign or hard to understand. To me, that’s such a gift. I love encountering things that I don’t fully understand, that are perhaps not instantly available, but they provide a space to creatively engage. BF: In terms of creating archives of these ephemeral works, most of the producers or curators of live art are so busy producing that they just don’t have the time or funds to make a catalog. How do you deal with the archive question? RB: It’s something that we have been concerned about and interested in for a long time. We started working with the Performance Practice program at UT [University of Texas at Austin]. We invite students there to write about this work. Now we have just brought on two new curators to create a much more robust system. It will largely be an online collection of writings, interviews, and podcasts. We’ll be generating a lot of these, but we’ll also invite other thinkers, scholars, and artists to participate. Some of this writing will be in a more critical approach, while others will be for a broader public and for audience engagement.

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Our newspapers have basically just stopped writing about this; our local, daily paper got rid of their only arts writer. Our weekly paper still has a few arts writers on staff and they cover what we’re doing, but this general dearth of writing on performance is very harmful to the field. For one, the public record of the work feels inadequate; and two, the public conversation often does not feel like an interesting one, stuck between whether this show is good or bad. For the art form to thrive we need a more robust space for critical dialogue about the work as well. We’ve also been talking with other institutions such as universities, art centers, and festivals, about teaming up on this. As the newspapers are losing more staff, we think that there might be something that we need to find ourselves. It’s not about reviews; it’s about creating these different angles and lenses into the work and into the writing about the work. BF: I saw in your website this all-female motorcycle club. What’s that piece about? Is that a part of the festival? RB: It was a piece by Guadalupe Maravilla. He’s from El Salvador but he lives in Virginia. He comes from a visual art practice, from sculpture. He has Mayan heritage. He creates these fantastic public rituals. He did a couple of site visits in Austin. Austin is a very liberal city, it’s also the state capital. In the middle of the city is our state legislature, which is very conservative. Right in the middle of that, there are these big ugly parking garages owned by the state, and he identified one of these as the site for where he wants to do his public ritual. In the middle of it was this courtyard-atrium; it was overgrown and looked like a Mayan ruin. He invited this motorcycle club

Figure 4.4  Shaboom, Fusebox Opening Ceremonies 2017@ Festival Hub Source: © Christopher Shea.

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from San Antonio, all females, to drive up to be a part of this, to create a motorcycle orchestra. Then he worked with eight young Latina women dressed in their Quinceañera dresses, and they came out of this 50ft long inf latable alligator. They came out of its mouth with their brightest dresses and started doing this traditional dancing while there’s a motorcycle club orchestra. There were also two Grammy award-winning throat singers that were laying a sonic foundation across. The audience was lined up all around on three levels of this parking garage, and he was conducting all of these. There was a call and response with the audience; when he cued us, there was screaming and yelling. It was a public shouting down ritual around immigration policies. BF: When was this? RB: This was part of our festival in April [2017]. It just lasted about 20 minutes. It was like this crazy, beautiful, weird fever dream in the middle of the afternoon, in the belly of the political beast. BF: So now that all your tickets are free, do you have a problem with getting sold out, or with people reserving and not showing up? RB: Exactly, that’s been a lot of our work. We created this campaign called “Respect the Reservation,” which has been really successful. Basically, if you make a reservation and f lake out on it without letting us know, we give you a warning. We send you a nice note the next day saying “Sorry we missed you. Here are the other things you have a reservation for. Let us know if you’re not going to make it.” If you do it again, then we cancel the rest of your reservations and you lose your ability to make reservations for that festival; next year, clean slate. We’ve had about a 97% success rate with this. People take it very seriously because you can text, email, or call us to cancel. It’s really about creating a culture of respect. BF: And will you keep it free? RB: I think so. We’ll keep it free as long as it makes sense. We’ve seen a big increase in first-time festival goers. On average, people go to about twice as many things now that it’s free. BF: And you’re still able to finance it. RB: Yes. It has changed a bit. But for the most part, we’ve been able to find that money elsewhere, and we felt that the upside was worth it. But if that stops being the case, then we’ll just have another transparent conversation with our audiences about these issues. To me, part of what makes a festival a festival is seeing multiple things. We wanted to encourage that, especially since most of the general public does not know who these artists are. Making the festival free has encouraged them to take a chance on some artists, and that is what I love about the festival. BF: What would you say is the future of this focus on hybridity in contemporary performance? RB: I definitely feel that hybridity is the present and the future. It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario where that is not the case. These kind of non-­ binary, f luid systems are where we’re headed as a culture. Certainly, as a

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curator, the projects and artists that I’m interested in are naturally swimming in those waters. Also, it is very interesting to think about assembling our festival in that way too, with these different partners and stakeholders with different experiences and vantage points. But I don’t want to dilute or lose perspective. For me, that’s the tricky part: how do you preserve that but also get at something more hybrid, f luid, and plural? Liveness continues to be of great interest, and it’s needed right now, perhaps more than ever. There is a real opportunity, and this is where we, as an organization, are going.

5 To be a critic of our own practice Interview with Philip Bither

Our interview with Philip took place via Skype in March of 2018. I [Bertie] had met Philip in person on previous occasions. In particular, he had participated in a roundtable on contemporary curating practices convened by Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) years prior that I had attended. At the time, thinking “outside the box” in relation to season programming—both literally and figuratively—was not the norm, especially in the United States. Our conversation with Philip spanned his career navigating institutions, artists’ needs, and developing publics. Bertie Ferdman: How would you describe what you do? Philip Bither: I shape a multi-disciplinary annual program of performing arts works that ref lects leading directions in contemporary live art and their intersections with the current practice in visual arts. I am also actively engaged in the generative process with artists around the creation of new work. I see those things as somewhat separate, constructing a season while also functioning as a creative partner and active supporter of artists in the process. I keep an eye on the best ways a major institution like the Walker can support artists, offer new opportunities that might have field-wide impacts, and create models that others can look to. I think I may have been inf luenced by listening to Katalin Trencsényi speak about “Institutional Dramaturgy.”1 I hadn’t really thought about it in that way before, but an institution is made up of both its history and its current program. One of the reasons that the Walker is pursuing an interdisciplinary notion so assertively is because we need to follow the lead of the artists and not end up allowing the institution to fully dictate the direction artists need to go. We allow artists to transfer their creative capacities into new disciplines in significant ways. We are well set up for that, but sometimes the historic lines between disciplines and departments have kept us from really fulfilling that mission as fully as we could. BF: Before getting to the Walker and how it has historically enabled artists to shift from one discipline to another, can we step back and look at some of the inf luences that have shaped you in your trajectory leading to the Walker?

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PB: As a contemporary and experimental music fan through my high school and college years, I had the luck to land at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the early 1980s as they were just starting the Next Wave Festival. The inf luence of working with Harvey Lichtenstein and Joe Melillo taught me so much, including their willingness to take risks and put everything on the line for the art they believed in. My first deep involvement in art was through punk, experimental rock, and free jazz scenes. The elements of improvisation, the balance between chaos and structure, the essential nature of the individual creative voice combined with an outsider aesthetic, and the sheer joy of creation … All those things I carried from these forms. My first years in New York in the early to mid 80s, I got a deep education in the postmodern and downtown dance and performance scenes, not just because that was what BAM was doing, but because I wanted to get a sense of who was doing what. In that large institutional setting, I felt artists needed an advocate. Not that BAM was anti-artists, but sometimes I felt like I was watching artists get churned up in the gears of a major institution that had its eyes heavily on ticket sales and on forwarding the work out to an audience. I was learning about building relationships and how institutions can actually care for artists, and not just for their current work but their histories and placement within the cultural landscape. That felt very important and instructive. My final project with BAM was bringing the national New Music of America Festival, that I sat on the board of, and embedded it as a central part of the Next Wave Festival in 1989. I forged a collaboration with 12 new music spaces all over New York City at a time when BAM wasn’t accustomed to presenting work outside of its own theaters. But that taught me a lot of lessons around collaboration, around the power of a collective coming together and making a bigger mark. After BAM I got this job at the Flynn Center in Vermont as the Artistic Director of the whole program, including the jazz festival they had, but I also brought a lot of contemporary dance and theater people that I had worked with in New York. I met with new people there that Flynn had never worked with or known about. They had not presented Bread and Puppet Theatre, Steve Paxton or Eric Bass and his Sandglass Theatre for instance, so I invited all those artists. My time in Vermont tested how the vanguard ideas of these artists could register and be embraced by this relatively small city in Northern New England. When the Walker called, I had been following their work as a fan since the BAM days when we had done a few projects together. John Killacky and Kathy Halbreich encouraged me to think about coming, even though I was enjoying my time at the Flynn.2 Since I have been here, it has been a tremendous pleasure to have a platform that is entirely committed to vanguard work and to artists who are attempting to push the boundaries of the forms they are working in. I am proud of the more than 150 commissions we have made, besides other complex projects such as building and opening the

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William and Nadine McGuire Theater. We worked with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, and it opened in 2005. Since then it has served as an important laboratory pushing the development of new work and hosting final stage production residencies. The Walker had an amazing history of producing and presenting contemporary dance and performance but mostly off site, and I retained that commitment of producing site-specifically with partners in different spaces, but we finally had a primary theatrical home right at the Walker that could be a visible base. Peter Eckersall: The Walker is famous internationally for establishing a performing arts role quite early on in its institutional life. Coming in 1997, with the background that you have just described in contemporary music and dance, and all your knowledge of fermentation of something new in the 1980s, how did you think about the role of the performing arts curator when you came in? What was your initial vision or relationship to that term? PB: When I was asked to program music at BAM—and I do still think of it as a programmatic role—Harvey used the term “curator,” even though he rejected it for his own role when people had written about him or asked him if that’s what he considered himself in interviews. I think Harvey pulled the term “curator” from the Walker, and that was even before the Walker called the Director of Performing Arts “a Curator.” It is funny that I was given that title, because all it meant at the time was that I was a selector and supporter of a handful of key music projects each year, and that distinguished me from being, say, Artistic Director or even Director of Next Wave. My role was, specifically, to curate a 4-event music program as part of a 12- or 15-event Next Wave Festival. I had never worked in a museum setting and I thought the term was interesting, but I did not spend a lot of time thinking “What did that really mean?” until I landed at the Walker. I then realized the hierarchies that existed in the art world around curation and how bold it was for Kathy Halbreich, during John Killacky’s time, to change his title from Director of Performing Arts to Curator, and then Senior Curator, of Performing Arts. BF: Was this title change helpful? Did it clarify your job description? PB: It comes with some baggage and some responsibilities. With the exception of dramaturgy, curation is probably one of the most contested or confused terms. It is used casually now out in the world, but the definition that I look to in curation at the Walker is somewhat different than how my colleagues in the visual arts might use it. I have learned greatly from them and from both directors I have worked under—Kathy Halbreich and Olga Viso.3 During my time Kathy became more and more a fan of contemporary performance, and she too understood the impact of the concepts by artists like Ralph Lemon and Sarah Michelson, who I brought to the Walker. I specify them in particular because when Kathy went to MoMA, those were the artists that she invited there, before MoMA even established

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a performance program. The legacy of the Walker, spreading from Martin Friedman’s era out, is that the curators would get some training here, then go around nationally, inspired by that multi-disciplinary commitment to risk-taking in contemporary art across disciplines. Walker had its impact even in New York, at MoMA and elsewhere; Adam Weinberg was a graduate of the Walker, running the education department here.4 According to legend, Martin Friedman had a map on his wall where all of the ex-Walker fellows and assistant curators went on to work around the country. Nigel Redden was running the Lincoln Center Festival until 2017, and he had my job before I got here. Killacky went on to do great things and he is now up at the Flynn now, oddly enough. I felt a little intimidated to land in a museum setting in those first few years because my focus had been so much about the now and the future. My obligation at the Flynn and at BAM was to pick the best, most interesting artists, support them fully, and find audiences for them. At Walker, a whole other range of concerns appeared: scholarly, interpretive, archival, playing a leadership role, foregrounding how institutions can function and how art can be supported. I had to grow into these roles while I was here. I also wanted to do the most number of projects, support the biggest seasons, produce the largest and most ambitious work possible, so I pushed the institution quite a bit around resources and production support for projects, probably beyond what we may have been allocated had I not advocated so fully. But I look back to Harvey Lichtenstein, who pulled off all these huge things that seemed crazy but were really rewarding not just for the institution but for the artists and the audiences as well.

Figure 5.1  Ralph Lemon’s Scaffold Room in rehearsal at the Walker Art Center 2014. 

74  Interview with Philip Bither

PE: When you arrived in 1997, the notion of a performing arts curator was still quite new, and since then we have had the performative turn, the social turn… In your experience, what is the meaning of “performing arts curator?” How has your relationship to the term changed over time? PB: Walker has long been looked up to for having done performing arts curation and for its multi-disciplinarity. Even decades ago, there was collaborative work around some really interesting exhibitions, such as “Tokyo: Form and Spirit” (1986), “Arte Povera: Zero to Infinity” (2001), and “In the Spirit of Fluxus (1992)” among others. When I got here, John [Killacky] had this idea that we should do an exhibition of some key artists who have been important to Walker’s history. I took it from the first idea stage to the full production, resulting in “Art Performs Life” exhibition in 1998. It focused on the work of Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, and Bill T. Jones. I also knew that I couldn’t mount a whole season and curate that exhibition, so I suggested to Kathy Halbreich that we should identify a team of curators and I would be the overarching producer of the live aspect of each of these artists. We got Kellie Jones to curate Bill’s section, Siri Engberg, who is still a close colleague here, to do Meredith’s, and Philippe Vergne to do Merce’s. We all worked as a team, which was quite collaborative and also unusual for the museum world. It still informs me. I think I bring this from the performing arts world, which is so collaborative in the way dance companies and devised theater ensembles work. This sense of collaborativeness, groups of people having to work and negotiate things together, is a big part of what I bring to curation and to the institutional practice here. After we did the exhibition “Art Informs Life” successfully, we moved on to doing large-scale exhibitions on dance and performance artists such as Eiko & Koma (2010), Trisha Brown, Ralph Lemon (2014), Jason Moran (2018), and, of course, the huge Cunningham exhibition Common Time (2017). The institution has embraced with more gusto the notion of not only having a great performing arts program but also situating performance and liveness equally at the core of exhibition practices along with painting, sculptures, installation. It was the right time to forward that. BF: Walker Art Center has a series of articles on performativity. Shannon Jackson had one on how the live arts and performance is going to change the museum, not just in the abstract sense or in the way it sees performance, but literally in terms of the staff it hires, the budget allocations, the arrangement of space for backstage areas.5 Have you seen such changes in the institution since you have been there? PB: Yes, although not enough. Certainly, the Walker’s Board and Kathy’s commitment to building the McGuire Theater, with f ly space, dressing rooms and showers, a 40’x65’ stage, a comfortable, spacious green room and state of the art tech booth was significant.

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BF: One little side to this question is that when we interviewed Ana Janevski, she did say that MoMA presents these performances, and people have this feeling that they have a very large budget, but within the institution they are still at the lower end of the totem pole in terms of presenting live performance… PB: Yes, I have seen changes around our identity, what we foreground to the public, and even what gets green lighted to happen in the gallery spaces. That is a radical shift from before. In my first years here I would have to fight tooth and nail to get a week or two between exhibitions in the gallery to be able to mount a performance. Now it is more welcome in the exhibition schedule, and I can work it out with a very different timetable. The exhibition program is generally shaped three to five years in advance, and my program is a year or two, while the film and media program is three months to six months. These temporal differences sometimes stand in the way of active collaboration, but some of the exhibitions I mentioned to you would not have been embraced in another era. I should credit both Kathy and Olga Viso, our last director who just stepped down a few months ago, as being really interested in performance and seeing that as an area where the Walker can make a mark in its field. Performance is central to the life blood of the Walker, but it does not necessarily translate into greater resources or bigger staff. Of course, these are hard decisions for any director, and sometimes there is not a full understanding of what it takes to support the creation and development of new work, or how complex, expensive, and challenging it is to bring full companies here from Japan, Africa, or Latin America. The economics are so different between the visual art world and performing art organizations. Performing arts theaters and festivals tend to be not as well off financially as visual arts museums and visual art field as a whole, and the way the revenue f lows is just very different. Our board is made up of corporate leaders and large individual donors, who are often also collectors and thus think of object-based culture in a very different way than they do of ephemeral culture. I think that is changing and we are working on it, but it is not balanced out yet. BF: You wrote about the relationship between collecting versus commissioning, which has to do with the economic models and resources between visual and performing arts.6 Even though performance is regarded as ephemeral, institutions still collect the legacies of performance, such as a video recording. The visual arts institutions have much richer archives, and a significant critical engagement with the archival work in ways that performing arts do not have. Can you tell us about how you see this difference between commissioning and collecting, maybe drawing from the example of Ralph Lemon? PB: I mentioned in that article that you reference that there are many different approaches, and it is still a work in progress how contemporary art museums are grappling with collecting ephemeral forms and time-based

76  Interview with Philip Bither

Figure 5.2  I nstallation view of Merce Cunningham, Common Time at the Walker Art Center, 2017. 

works. We purposely have not settled on one track. I have been very pleased with the openness at the Walker to the collecting side, thinking in non-­ traditional ways about time-based work. Of course, our first collecting in performance was related to objects, and that went all the way back to Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Yoko Ono. Those were the objects that sometimes came out of performances, and we tried to tell the story a bit through didactics or from occasional reperformances. The first collecting piece out of the performing arts world that we took on during my years was Jasper Jones’ set for Walkaround Time [Merce Cunningham, 1968], in 2004. It was a beautiful theatrical set that functioned as a great installation. Kathy Halbreich worked directly with Jasper, Merce, and Merce’s company around this idea that while the artist may not have designed this as a visual art piece for gallery settings, we now value it as our most important and beautiful art pieces in our collection, not just as ephemera or a remnant of a performance. That set the stage for us to collect other things, including drawings by Trisha Brown including the live art drawing “It’s a Draw/Live Feed” (2002) that we collected immediately upon the opening exhibition I worked on with Peter Eleey.7 We collected Ralph Lemon’s “Meditation” (2010), the film that he did with Jim Findlay that was a part of “How Do You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?” (2010). We realized at that moment that a big part of our job could be helping educate artists who do not come out of the visual art world about how to value and define their work in a market sense for their conversations with visual art museums, galleries and collectors. We saw the converse happening as well, with visual artists increasingly wanting to not just create live art as a one-time experience, through their

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own body or another’s body in a gallery space, but to put on theatrical work. We felt we could provide some training and mentorship to artists who wanted to take on the creation of theatrical experience in a theater setting. After all these earlier projects, we got a wonderful grant from the Mellon Foundation three years ago around interdisciplinary practice. The idea was to select a range of artists who have already proven some capacity or interest in crossing disciplinary boundaries, to amp that up and support it across the institution so that artists have their work represented in gallery settings, on stage, and sometimes in public settings, which often leads to our continued collection.8 We are in conversation with Maria Hassabi right now about the commission we did, and maybe collecting a movement work from her. The solo that we commissioned from her, called “Staging” (2017), brings up all kinds of interesting questions: What will happen 50 years from now if Maria is no longer here? How does “Staging” need to be cared for by whomever is going to perform that work? We have explored all these different avenues, including archival collections. We have an archival collection here that isn’t primarily a visual art collection. When we are commissioning something from a performing artist, we always ask to get a copy of the script, score, or other ephemera that is otherwise not considered fine artwork, for our archive collection. Institutions rely on artists to push them forward and to provoke changes in the practice. With Ralph, we had had a 19-year-history before we went into the Scaffold Room project.9 He charged me with a hard question: “I’m going to build this mobile stage and it can go in any community I want, why do I need the Walker anymore?” He formally asked me this in writing and requested me to respond, which was a great practice. He then integrated our responses back and forth in developing the Scaffold Room project. Ralph had questions about the art world’s impact on live performance, so he had this unorthodox proposal for us to collect an aspect of Scaffold Room but not to own it or to be the only one who had it, to not put any restrictions around the number of editions. We got some discretionary money from the director to collect the Minneapolis version of Scaffold Room, and the collection would consist of the memories of those that participated, witnessed, were involved with it, which was heavily documented through hundreds of hours of video. Any city that wanted to do Scaffold Room could collect their own version. It was an intentional provocation to upend the art market and subvert the notion of the artwork as something you keep within your own collection and not bring it out and show very often. To be a critic of our own practice on this, we did not fully f lesh out that provocative proposition. My colleague curator in the visual arts department who we worked on this with departed the Walker soon after the project, so we have all the materials and we did some interesting writing about it, but we did not quite take it to the point where we created an amalgam of all these videos, voice recordings, and elements of memories. We still plan to go back to that material and shape it all as an archival practice, since it is considered a piece we collected now. We are even in conversation with Ralph about

78  Interview with Philip Bither

Figure 5.3  a–b Maria Hassabi: STAGING, 2017.  Installation view at the Walker Art Center, 2017. 

working over years in the future for a new iteration of the project ten years after its premiere. PE: You called it a score in your essay. Is that your term, or is that something that came out of the project? PB: It came out of Ralph’s recommendation. The score has the parts that have not all been… BF: …written! PB: Yes. We may need an arranger to come in and work with me and Ralph on this! It takes an enormous commitment of time, thought, and care, which is what we are supposed to do curatorially. Just the sheer issue of time is one of the tensions that many of my performing arts colleagues, especially those who put on seasons or festivals, run into. Curators of exhibitions are given two or three years to develop a show, possibly with one or two other

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Figure 5.4  Performance of Merce Cunningham’s Events, 2017, in Perlman Gallery, as part of Merce Cunningham: Common Time at the Walker Art Center.

exhibitions at different stages in the works, but not a 25-event season and an interpretive work on the side every year. When you add it all up it becomes impossible without a lot of extra staffing! PE: The next questions are about dramaturgy. We understand dramaturgy as a critical process that is a parallel or a corollary to curatorship. The difference is that dramaturgs work much more directly during an artistic process rather than arranging the elements of an artistic process after they have happened. But there are also very strong parallels between them in terms of creating a focus on a set of ideas, creating a research space for artistic production to operate within, for channeling particular themes and events toward audiences, as well as writing about them afterward, which you have addressed so nicely. I am wondering whether you are interested in the conversations around dramaturgy in particular. Is it something that your work comes into contact with, when you work with Eiko & Koma, for example? Or do you collaborate with dramaturgs? PB: Yes, we would be in meetings together with Ralph’s dramaturg, Katherine Profeta. I would be bringing the institutional voice, not in a restrictive way but more as another vantage point for being grounded here in the Twin Cities and in this institution. Katherine would do the much harder and more focused work of taking it every step of the way. The closest relationship to dramaturgy that I have is with the commissioned projects. I try to be present at key moments in the development of the work to see where the artist is at, what challenges they are facing, questions they are dealing with. I am closer to a dramaturg in the sense that I am offering guidance and feedback based on what lead I am taking from the artist as to where their needs most exist, whether I

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see that a work is lacking understanding of historical precedent or knowledge of this community, where the work is going to land first. The challenge is to avoid thinking comparatively with the other projects we have done over the years and to take each project on its own merits, while having direct conversations with the artist about what they are making and why they are making it. While these functions are along dramaturgical lines, my role is not consistent in the way trained dramaturgs tend to be. In fact, for a Mellon Foundation Dance commissioning and production residency grant we received several years ago, I suggested this idea for us to hire or encourage the lead choreographer of a project to hire a dramaturg. I let the artist define what that meant or who it would be, but it had to be an outside eye. It had to be someone who both the artist and I thought would bring a different vantage point than they would normally get in the studio with their circle of colleagues or other dance makers. It was an effort to graft that theatrical practice onto dance creation. PE: Another point of our inquiry is not so much the dramaturg but dramaturgy. Dramaturgical thinking is common now when people are putting together festivals. It is acknowledged that curating a season is in fact making the contribution to and framing of the art implicit or explicit. Now the trend is to make that more visible, to create pathways through a season, to create contexts for conversation between works. Is that something that you relate to? PB: Yes, I definitely think along those lines. We have created portraits of artists that show multiple sides of an artist’s practice and links with their collaborators in one concentrated setting, which creates a greater understanding of an artist. We have the Out There Festival, which consists of a month of experimental theater practices.10 We select a distinct array of approaches to experimental theater and performance making today. We try to apply a thematic and find theoretical threads between the artists. There have been other threads that we have been interested in exploring in a given season that do not necessarily define the entire season thematically, but it will be a thread that I can carry forth through a number of linked pieces. Over-defining a thematic can make an interesting case for the public, and give the media, colleagues, and scholars the chance to consciously make the thematic connections. But its downside is that it restricts the selection of the work to fit a theme. I go back and forth, to be honest. I enjoy when I get to do it more, but at other times I like the freedom to be able to honor the proposition each artist is making. So it’s a tension I have. Sometimes I learn from my visual art colleagues and sometimes I push back with them about how important the curatorial voice is in, say, a group exhibition. Does the curator’s vantage point and ideas outweigh the artists’ own work? I try to be humble about my role in the creation of the work. That is evolving with me, too, because at times it is useful for artists to be given a context and a frame. We did that through the commissions for the Cunningham exhibition.11 They were made by a series of dance makers that were working in abstract, formalist ways of our time, but were not drawing directly from Cunningham choreographic techniques.

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I thought that showing their work was a way to make a statement about Cunningham’s broad impact. What was interesting, though, was that many of the artists pushed back and said they do not consider their work having much to do with Cunningham. But once they realized the frame was there, they actually dug in and looked back at his collaborative models, at his use of “chance operations,” the distributed frame he created on stage, and the use of sound and music created separately and not consciously connected to the choreography. There were many more links between Beth Gill, Maria Hassabi, Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Riener, and Cunningham than those artists were willing to acknowledge themselves. It was the frame that gave them some of those links. PE: Could you speak about your experience of using media? Walker has been associated with performance that is connected to media. Intermediality is not only a key word of its history but also one of the aims of the institution. PB: I sometimes think that we could use a new media specialist. We had an active new media department run by Steve Dietz, but it did not continue after losing funding. Projection, video, media, and social media elements are in many if not most of the performance and dance works we present. I have seen an exciting development in the way that media is integrated more seamlessly and less distractingly into new performance practices. Sometimes those projects involve our media department. We recently changed the name of our film program to “Moving Image” to acknowledge the blurred lines between video art in galleries, media art integrated into performance, and film showing. For instance, we invited a company called “Berlin” from Brussels to “stage” a documentary film on Chernobyl.12 I got our film program on board because the work spoke as much to current directions in expanding the notions of cinema as it did to theatrical performance. We have done a lot of intermedia collaboration like these between film and music over the years. We now commission a local music ensemble annually, usually out of the electronic or avant-rock scenes here in Minneapolis, to create a new score for one of the films from our collection and produce it outdoors with audiences sitting on our hill. We have done it for five years now, and 3,000 people turn up. Still, I would say, the departments mostly function independently of each other and there have sometimes been moments when I thought “we should have done that together.” PE: You have raised some interesting points, obviously there is an intermediality that you are driving here, but it is also interesting that the old barriers seem to come back. It points to a larger problem of learning how to work in an interdisciplinary way. PB: A major takeaway of this Mellon Initiative we have received is that the process of interdisciplinarity is based on colleagueship. Before it was a bit arbitrary: if we got along with somebody and had shared interests with a visual art curator, we might said “Let’s do this exhibition together.” With Mellon, we have a bi-weekly meeting with three visual art curators, three people from my staff, and two fellows that the grant allowed us to have—one who is positioned in visual arts and the other is in performing arts. Their job

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is to keep us connected and to translate things that we may not understand with each other. We just produced an exhibition and a new performance by the French video artist Laure Prouvost.13 We had a team who produced the exhibition, and another team who produced the theatrical performance, and we had a large crossover between those teams. That was something we never did before and we are learning from each other through these constructive processes. BF: How much do you think dramaturgical thinking is changing the more traditional institutions, if at all? I am thinking about things that you bring up from your own curatorial approach, not just the collaborative interdisciplinarity but the way that you have incorporated archival research, critical scholarship, audience engagement, and looking at the work beyond seasonal concerns. Do you think there is a shift? PB: I do—I see those shifts more in the realm of the social and the interpretive, not so much in relation to the predominance of the text. At least in the producing theater that happens here in the Twin Cities, they are still starting with the well-made, well-written play. The theater world, for a range of reasons, is slow to take up cultural, societal, and artistic changes. There are economic structures in putting out a season in producing theaters, and decisions driven by the box-office. The fact that the Walker has a large endowment buys me a lot of freedom to be able to fully implement the vision of this place. If we were under much stricter box-office constraints, we would not be able to take the same kind of risks programmatically or encourage artists to develop brand-new forms. I have theater colleagues locally who come to my programs and express their desire for breaking out of the structures that they have to work with to do more of this kind of work. I feel that it is slowly changing. I don’t know if you followed Future Leaders Initiative14? It was a gathering of presenters from the producing theater world and curators from the contemporary performing arts world. They were holding annual meetings where people shared approaches, trying to break down these barriers between the producing theater’s approach to artists and theater, and the contemporary art centers’ interest in more devised, non-linear, and post-dramatic work. Those meetings tended to happen at festivals and some very good conversations came out of them. They have helped move the needle a little bit, but people tend to revert back to colleagues that they regularly work with and trust. BF: It sounds like they have to change the economic models in order for the aesthetics and the programming to shift. PB: Yes. Architecture restricts it quite a bit as well, the danger of theater buildings built with millions of dollars is that people can’t just close them up. That’s why it is always disappointing to see a brand new multi-theater complex come online, because they can feel outmoded before they even open. PE: What are you working on now?

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Figure 5.5  M  eg Stuart & Jompet Kuswidananto/Damaged Goods: Celestial Sorrow, 2019, Walker Art Center.

The things I am most immersed in at the current moment are a few of these interdisciplinary projects I am in the middle of. The jazz composer and pianist Jason Moran is mounting his first museum exhibition at the Walker, which consists of these jazz shrines.15 On the foreground, as part of the idea of multiple platforms for the same artist, I’m producing a brand-new stage concert evening, a theatrical performance piece that Jason is doing with the video artists Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch. In addition, Jason is going to activate the in-gallery shrines every month or two as part of our Sound Horizon Series, where we integrate experimental music into gallery settings. The following year I am bringing Meg Stuart from Europe to do her first fullf ledged installation and performance piece Celestial Sorrow in collaboration with the Indonesian visual artist Jompet Kuswidananto.16 In the first week of that two week residency, I will also show a refracted portrait of her solo and duo works to ref lect the multiple sides of her oeuvre.17 The installation in the gallery is remarkable. I just went to Brussels to see the stage version of Celestial Sorrow; I think in a gallery framing, with a different temporal iteration, it is going to be really interesting, too. We are also doing a big new piece with Sarah Michelson in the Fall, which came out of the Cunningham commission. She poses interesting challenges around architecture and the relationship to curatorial interpretation. The visual art world is coming to appreciate time-based work and ephemerality around performance. Objects are not as dominant in the visual art world as they were in another era. These developments allow new conversations at this moment.

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Notes 1 Bither is referring to the book launch event for Trencsényi’s Dramaturgy in the Making that took place at The Graduate Center, CUNY and was organized by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center on May 18, 2017. https://thesegalcenter.org/ event/dramaturgy-in-the-making-with-katalin-trencsenyi-peter-eckersall-­ bertie-ferdman/. 2 John Killacky was the director and curator of the Performing Arts department at the Walker Art Center between 1988 and 1997, and Kathy Halbreich was the director of the Walker Art Center between 1991 and 2007. 3 Martin Friedman was the director of the Walker Art Center from 1961 to 1990. 4 Adam Weinberg is Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art since 2003. 5 Commissioned in 2014, the collection of essays in On Performativity can be found here: https://walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/. 6 Article can be found here: http://intermsofperformance.site/keywords/ collecting/philip-bither. 7 Curator and producer at Creative Time, Walker Art Center, MoMA PS1. Bither refers to the 2008 exhibition entitled “So that the Audience Does Not Know Whether I have Stopped Dancing.” 8 See https://walkerart.org/interdisciplinary-initiative-at-the-walker-2016-2020. 9 See: https://walkerart.org/calendar/2014/ralph-lemon-scaffold-room. 10 See https://walkerart.org/calendar/2020/series/out-there-2020. 11 See https://walkerart.org/calendar/2017/common-time. 12 See https://walkerart.org/calendar/2019/berlin-zvizdal-chernobyl-so-far-so-close. 13 See: https://walkerart.org/calendar/2017/laure-prouvost. 14 The Future Leaders Initiative (now called “Director’s Circle”) with The Theatre Communications Group that was supported by Doris Duke Foundation and Mellon Foundation. 15 See: https://walkerart.org/calendar/2018/jason-moran. 16 See: https://walkerart.org/calendar/2019/meg-stuart-jompet-kuswidanantodamaged-goods-celestial-sorrow/. 17 See: https://walkerart.org/calendar/2019/meg-stuart-an-evening-of-solo-works.

6 What is the DNA behind this? Interview with Lili Chopra

We interviewed Lili at her midtown office at the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), New York on December 5th, 2017. Peter Eckersall: From 2006 to 2018 Lili was the Executive Vice President and Artistic Director of FIAF, where she was founder and co-curator of the Crossing the Line festival. In 2018, Lili was appointed Executive Director of Artistic Programs at LMCC. How do you describe what you do? Lili Chopra: What I do essentially is serve artists. My role at FIAF (French Institute Alliance Française) as Artistic Director is to create the context for current practices to be presented in New York. The way in which I do this, is to devise festivals that present artists from France, and around the world, who may not yet have been presented in New York. At the same time, I support New York based artists through commissions and connections to potential presenters in different contexts within Europe. PE: We’ve organized this around a number of areas: first is a discussion of festivals; second is the question of curatorship; and the third is, broadly, that of exhibition displays. But before I go into these three sections, could I just ask you to speak a little bit about your background. You were previously at New York Live Arts, and you have done two masters in Cultural Production: one in Arts Management and one in Performance Studies. What do you think prepared you for this kind of work LC: Growing up in Paris really shaped my view on how to consider the role artists play as catalysts for social change. I grew up in the eighties living next to the Théâtre de la Ville, which was the center for contemporary dance and, also other forms, but dance was the form that I was most excited by. I did my first internship there when I was 14; so I was nourished by the opportunity I had to see a lot of seminal works. I also spent a lot of time at the Festival d’Avignon, where one of the directors Alain Crombecque was a mentor to me. He also headed up the Festival D’Automne in Paris, and I did my second internship there when I was 17. In the cultural environment in which I grew up, there was an acknowledgment of the critical role artists play in our society, as well as the importance of the platforms created to foster real dialogue. This was evident if you look at how art institutions were funded. During this era, when Jack Lang was Minister of Culture in France, there

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was an imperative to make sure art could be presented in the most accessible way possible. The notion of the arts as a public service is something that has always been very important to me. I also worked for another festival of contemporary dance in Tours run by Daniel Larrieu. This was right at the time that Boris Charmatz was creating A Bras-le-corps (1993), his first work, and Emmanuelle Huynh had just created Múa (1994). This shaped my desire to work in the arts. I wanted to support the work that was being created, but I also wanted to bring these voices, these new ways of thinking, to a broader audience. I had the opportunity to come to New York when I was doing a master’s degree in Performance Studies, with my thesis on Breakdancing. My interest in this started while I was working at the venue La Villette, in Paris. They were presenting the first Rencontres des Cultures Urbaines, and I saw a new generation of youth, from diverse backgrounds, evolving the codes of street dance for the stage. Suddenly so many theaters in France were presenting these newly formed hip-hop companies such as Käfig or Accrorap on their main stages. I could see how it opened up the dialogue between cultural institutions and a much more diverse constituency of young people of color. It had an incredibly positive impact – creating wider social engagement and dialogue. I came to New York, based at NYU to write this thesis, to study the origin of breakdancing in the Bronx, and I never left. It was not a formal decision to leave Paris, it was just how life happens sometimes. I then worked for an independent artist, Julia Mandle. She had a company called J Mandle Performance and her work was being performed within the museum context. We developed a number of projects for the New Museum, Cooper-Hewitt and the Storefront for Arts and Architecture. From there, I went to work at Dance Theater Workshop… PE: …which became New York Live Arts… LC: …which became New York Live Arts. I worked there during its massive re-building project led by David White, a very important figure, especially in the downtown dance world. He had created all these incredible networks and new ways of thinking and supporting contemporary artists. It was really inspiring to understand what it meant to support artists here, which was obviously totally different from France. Also, it started out as this very small black box theater above a garage; so, we went into renovation and opened the new space. Soon after, I left to do my Master’s at Colombia. Eleven years ago, I started working here, at FIAF, where I have had the opportunity to think about what role this institution could play in New York. When I came, it was mostly known as a place to learn French. It had a very good film program that had been running for a very long time, but for the rest, it was not really on the map as a cultural center. Although we wanted to change this, our budget was incredibly tight. Also in New York, in order to exist, your presence has to be loud and clear. What I proposed instead of presenting a yearlong season was to create two festivals: one in the fall and one in the spring. The fall festival became Crossing the Line, the first of which

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was one year after I arrived. This gave me the possibility to present contemporary artists from France and from New York that could not easily fit into the categories that institutions defined. We knew, that there was a growing desire from artists not to be labeled within particular disciplines. PE: Before we talk about Crossing the Line, I’d like to ask you to ref lect a little on the fact that you came to the arts as a producer and a curator. In places like New York, where there is not a highly evolved infrastructure for funding, often those who become producers move into the area after a career as an artist. But even from your teenage years, you had the idea that this was something you really wanted to do. Could you speak about what you thought the job was? Also, as you operate between two very distinctive performance cultures, could you ref lect on the intercultural dimension of your work? LC: It was always very clear to me that artists and their work is my real oxygen. I have always seen my life to be dedicated to the work of artists. I use my skills and all my creative capacities to do the best job I can by finding ways in which work can be presented, finding the right contexts and creating the right frameworks for presentation. I try to be creative in developing frameworks. The sense of just being there for the artists is crucial, as opposed to starting a conversation with: “Okay, this is the framework by which we can present you, or this is the framework by which we are working, and can you fit into it?” It always needs to start with listening to what the needs are. PE: That’s an enormously challenging approach to bring to a New York context. LC: Yes, but it’s absolutely essential. It’s such a challenge if you don’t feel valued for what you are doing. Very few artists here make a living from their art. I want to say to artists “Okay, it’s tough, but you matter,” to show them that what they are doing is critical. I don’t think that we say that as often as we should to artists here in the way that we do in France. There, if you say, “I’m a choreographer,” “I’m a theater director,” it takes guts and pride because you know that it is such a highly regarded position in French society. Whereas here, there is not the same value for artists. It means that you always wonder where your next paycheck will come from. I think that this is a big difference between the two countries. BF: Can you speak about how Crossing the Line opened a space for the artists that you brought to New York, some of which really broke boundaries and crossed disciplines. You started Crossing the Line in a pivotal year, where there was already a lot of writing on cross-disciplinarity and social engagement in the arts. You founded the festival and then you brought in curators, is that right? LC: Yes, I founded the festival in 2007 co-curating the first edition with Lizzie Simon. Then Simon Dove came on board for the second edition and remained and we invited Gideon Lester to join us in 2011. BF: Can you talk a little bit about the motivation for the festival, and how it has evolved?

88  Interview with Lili Chopra

LC: Initially, we wanted to present the most current artistic practices, ones that would create a dialogue between France and New York. At FIAF, it was very important that the French artists did not have the feeling that they were being presented as part of a little French bubble in New York. I really wanted to make sure that being presented within the context of the festival meant that you were part of New York’s artistic scene. So from the get go, it was produced by FIAF but presented in partnership with many other institutions. It was necessary to bring all the various resources together as FIAF was not really a destination yet. By partnering with other institutions, it gave the festival real momentum. It was also important for me to play a role in support of New York-based artists. I wanted to be able to commission their work, and to create either formally or informally, a connection with French presenters; which could make it possible for the artists to present their work in France and more broadly in Europe. In France there is much more resources that are made available to produce new work. This means we are often in conversations to bring some of these resources to New York-based artists. It is important for French artists to be presented in New York, but it’s not essential for them to create new work here. However, for New York-based artists to suddenly have these French resources can be immensely beneficial. What happened in the past to artists like Merce Cunningham, Bob Wilson or Trisha Brown still happens today; They had support and recognition in France, and when they came back to New York, many doors were wide open for them. PE: As you said, you have brought in Simon Dove and Gideon Lester as co-curators. Was that a pragmatic decision or was collaboration part of your initial curatorial vision for the festival? LC: That’s my approach to life: I want to experience other conversations, with curators, with other institutions in terms of what they bring to the table, the ideas they have, the projects that they want to see developed, the artists they champion. It has been a dream to work with Simon and Gideon, such incredibly generous and visionary curators. And we invited so many curatorial voices into the festival, Adrian Heathfield, André Lepecki, Omar Berrada, just to name a few. PE: One of the interesting things about Crossing the Line for me – an Australian who has come to New York – is that it’s somewhat like a European-­ style festival in the way that it is often treated as a wider experience around a set of issues, or problems, or themes that need to be addressed – like the one that you did with Adrian Heathfield about vibrant matter and ecology.1 How do you arrive at the decision on the theme of a festival? How do you come into that sort of relationship with an idea? LC: I know what you are asking with the question, but we always said that there was never going to be “a theme.” There will always be a new focus, but it shouldn’t take over the entire festival. We are always excited to create something that we have never done before, so that we are not repeating

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ourselves, and this means that we look at each edition from a very open, clear space where anything can take place. It is important to have this sense of freedom For instance, I heard the term urban agriculture for the first time about ten years ago. At the time I thought: this is amazing! I had never realized that it was a movement led by a number of institutions of which artists were a huge part. It seemed right to really explore the term, to open it up, to involve the idea in the same way that, when we started the festival Simon had said: “I ­really want to have chefs … I want the culinary aspect to be part of what it is that we’re presenting.” Of course, this raised so many questions: why do we have chefs? Why would we have food as part of the festival? And a few years later, everyone was bringing in chefs because it became clear that the creativity and the way in which chefs engage with their work is very similar to the ways in which artists create. This is what we do with our immense freedom, it allows us to embrace what is happening now. And to answer more directly your question, Adrian Heathfield’s program was an amazing gift to the festival. He thought Crossing the Line was the right place and context to bring together a series he was developing with André Lepecki, Afterlives, The Persistence of Performance in 2015. MoMA came in as a partner and with much care and attention, we brought together these incredible minds. These conversations were quite extraordinary. BF: Following up on this, a question related to the festival and its dramaturgy. How do you maintain contemporariness? You have alluded to it, but I am curious how it goes further than bringing in artists of the contemporary moment. How do you as festival dramaturgs and as festival curators think of frameworks, not necessarily new, to maintain the vibrancy of the festival every year? LC: It’s interesting, because as I see it, our role is always to be transparent: not to give the festival such a strong framework that it has one identity. Initially, we were very involved with transdisciplinary work in New York, and we felt that it was important to address this, even with the press. The New York Times would call us every single edition and ask, “Who should we send for this: a dance critic? A theater critic?” So, we had a conversation with the editors at The New York Times to question their need for labels/sections. Their answer was, “that’s what our readership wants.” PE: Do you think that situation has improved throughout the years of the festival? LC: After that conversation, almost all of the following articles that reviewed the festival were a “Critic’s Notebook!” PE: They are still unsure… LC: How are they going to review the film of Nature of Theater of Oklahoma as a theater critic is for us an interesting question. What is of interest to us right now is to look for the artists that we feel are really pushing the forms; to the shows that are really the most relevant in the contemporary field of practices in today’s world. We have to find how they relate to this world, and how we can create, for each of the works, the right

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connections, the right context. Then we assess how all the individual experiences lead up to the notion of the festival as a whole. I often wonder, what is the DNA behind this? If anything, it has to do with the desire for generosity, the desire to bring these works in the most careful way to New York and to its audiences. PE: The commitment that you have to the artistic process, and supporting the process of the artists, has created a very distinctive model for this festival. A good example, I think, is when you produced Romeo Castellucci in Federal Hall. This was a place where most arts organizations in New York would not even venture or begin to undertake the work and negotiation to actually get the permits and the permissions. So, in a sense, this festival has a very strong practice, a dramaturgical practice of negotiation. LC: It also goes back to a commitment to the artists, and I am not so sure how unique we are, as everyone is rolling up their sleeves here … There is the spirit to “make it happen” to “make it work,” even though everything seems so hostile for contemporary performance today. If it’s not in producing, then it’s about raising funds, or it’s about developing an audience. Strangely, it’s so tough to continue doing what we’re doing in New York, so we often all wonder: is it worth it? But there is an amazing commitment and people are really working hard. I feel everyone is doing their part, but the reality is that we’re losing ground. But then to answer your question about Castellucci: it was so very critical for us to finally present his work to New York for the first time and indeed it almost didn’t happen because of permits. PE: It was a revelation to see the work in that space. LC: It was such a gift being able to present Castellucci to New York at a time when American democracy was truly being challenged. The presentation happened a month before the presidential elections. The venue of Federal Hall, in which the presentation happened, was the birthplace of American democracy, right next to it is a Trump building. Presenting Castellucci’s Julius Caesar at that time and in that context was indeed truly powerful. BF: I would like to follow up with you on the discussion about context. I look at your programming of Faustin Linyekula for example, and see how he was here for such a long time, and how he interacted with so many different kinds of demographics. There were some free performances and there were some very expensive performances.2 That must have an impact on the kinds of audiences who come to see the show. LC: Yes, that was always part of the conversation with Faustin. We had invited him a few times in the context of the festival, and this time, he was coming after just having spent a whole year as the artist in residence in the city of Lisbon. It was after having this experience that the conversation with Faustin went: I’d love to spend time in New York; I’d love to be able to really meet with different communities; I’d love to really get a better sense of New York; I’d love to be able to embrace the city in a different way.

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This is something that more and more artists are actually saying – because the economic model of how they have to tour their work often means, one week here, one week there. It’s not quite as nurturing and as fulfilling as they want, and it makes it difficult to really create that connection with audience members and communities. We tried to create this kind of positive context for Faustin. He was already involved in a conversation with the MET Museum, whose commission was an invitation for him to look at the African artifacts from their collection. We were in touch with the MET to make sure that we could actually partner to bring the project with that focus around Faustin, and then, for him to also bring his company to New York with In Search of Dinozord, which is the work we presented in partnership with NYU Skirball Center. He also spent two weeks working with the dancers from It’s Showtime! NYC, the former subway dancers who really had, up until then, very little opportunity to engage or learn from other choreographers or artists. They created a piece that was presented in the streets of the South Bronx, and then at Weeksville, the heritage space built around the first free African American community settlers in Brooklyn. It was incredibly moving. PE: As we’re moving into a discussion around more general questions of festival curatorship and festivals, I want to ask two related questions. You mentioned the press, and how you have to be more conservative in your programming; this relates not just to the festival you run, but also in general. If you could speak a little about the kinds of pressures that you experience as a curator or dramaturg, and as a festival director in contemporary American society. And then, the second question is the other side of that coin: What kind of things do festivals and arts curators need to do? You have answered this in terms of the discussion you had about arts working with community, but I’m very interested in the problem created when festivals are under pressure to be, in a sense, all things to all people. LC: I have never felt that I had to censor myself within the context of the festival; and I never felt I had to say “no” because our constituency would not agree to what we had proposed. We are provocative in the way in which we think about artists, their place in the world, and the support they need. But it’s not about provocation, it’s not a festival of provocation. We have presented Steven Cohen, and we’ve presented artists that are pretty out there in terms of their own personal practice. Because of the journey and the seriousness in which these artists are presenting their work we always feel very confident about what it means aesthetically and artistically. I don’t feel like there’s any pressure at this moment from the organization or from the city for us to not be able to present certain types of work. I feel we’ve been able to carve out this very special place for Crossing the Line within the organization, where people know that if it’s not their cup of tea they don’t have to show up. Where we’ve been challenged in the past has been around the question of nationality: why is FIAF, whose mission is to promote French and francophone culture, able to present and produce an international festival?

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I think there are moments – and we are certainly in one of them right now – in which we need to be incredibly careful. I mean that in the sense that we have to approach with empathy what’s happening in the world right now, what’s happening in the country right now, and what’s happening in our cities around questions of cultural appropriation or around questions of identity. I think that there needs to be a strong awareness of finding the right time for raw provocation, because now is not the right time for it. Now is the time to carefully create an environment where conversations can happen, where we need to be very, very sensitive to our context. PE: Why is this so at this time? In broader philosophical terms, when is the time for raw provocation as opposed to empathy? LC: Because I think right now we need to pause and listen and learn. We need to create a space for dialogue. We need greater understanding of what are the powers at play and how they manifest in our world right now. Artists are agents of social change. As curators, as organizations how are we helping that happen? PE: I have noticed that people have started to question the role of arts festivals. In your view, what are the things that don’t need to be done again at the festival level? What should we not be replicating or repeating? I’m not specifically talking about Crossing the Line, which plays an extremely important role in the ecology here; but if you look at the broader context of festivals in Europe, which have been such a driver of the contemporary performance practice and interdisciplinary practice that you’ve described, there is now a sense, in some quarters, that these festivals have had their day – that we need a new kind of model for producing work. Do you have any comments about this view? LC: I totally agree with that view. There are all these festivals happening, but for the artists, going from one festival to the next, leads to the question of how enriching or how sustainable that is. You can also draw a parallel between the visual art world and the art fairs. For us as professionals it’s great, because you can get to see six shows in a day, and you’re doing your work but are we doing it for ourselves? Are people really interested in seeing so many shows? Perhaps it would be more interesting to slow down and look at how we are supporting the work; supporting less work and having more time to reach out to the different communities. I’m much more inclined to that approach. There was a point with Crossing the Line that we thought it might be a good idea to become biennial, to have more time, more space, more resources. But then we realized that the funding system doesn’t work like that. If it’s not on that year, they’re not going to fund you; the resources stay the same. We also listened to the artists, who were saying: “we actually need you guys to be there to present us.” Like I said, I think it’s very valuable to look at how we can down-scale, and how we can better support artists, because even with everything I’ve said, I still feel like we are not able to raise the funds necessary to create new works.

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PE: This is an intensification of a problem that you have described really nicely. There’s the problem of artists themselves internalizing the logic of the festival, so that everybody speaks in terms of making a work for a networked set of producers. There’s the problem that festivals can sometimes pick fashionable products, for example, “next year it’ll be South America.” And there’s the problem that then these artists are picked up, and sometimes discarded, leaving them very confused. So, trying to mitigate the intensification of cultural products seems to be very important. What are some of the strategies that you are thinking about in terms of taking the festival forward in order to do that? Of course, you’re supporting artists, but do you have any specific solutions? LC: From a very practical standpoint, we’ve never grown the festival in terms of the number of projects and productions we present each year; but I have grown the budget. Which means that we can support each of the initiatives better. The question of the festival creating a sense of commodification of the work is real and that is why for me it is so important to nurture and support artists within a very local context. How can deep and meaningful roots be created within various communities when the work is presented? How as a festival do we connect the artists to the public, and how do we communicate around the work to create real engagement which can, in turn, generate sustained support? BF: This goes back to what you were saying earlier around the support for the artists. In this respect you are actually widening the network and supporting them by asking relevant questions: What is the role of arts in society? Why do we need a festival? Who are the audiences? Who’s accessing this? LC: And how do we do it differently? How do we keep on evolving the model? I feel very excited about the opportunity to grow and to think about different ways of engaging, which might be more along the idea of us being that bridge. We know how to work with artists, but larger than that, how do we then create new ways of connecting? For us it was essential from the get go to work in partnership with all kinds of cultural organizations around the city from non-profit to commercial spaces from traditional venues to outdoor public spaces, having NY as a canvas where all could be activated in various ways. We never felt we needed to have the exclusivity of the presentation of an artist or a premiere but instead how can we work together, create strong partnerships so the work can resonate in different ways and within various communities. This is what is interesting to us, to amplify, to support, to connect with a great sense of care and attention. In so many of the projects that we are developing, we are not saying, here’s our program and who is going to buy it? What we are instead asking is what are the needs and how to integrate the work within the social fabric.

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BF: What are you thinking about now in terms of where the festival is headed? LC: What I think is exciting for the festival now, is that it has been able to create a real identity for itself, in terms of recognition. We weren’t an institution that was well-known for having any strong credentials in contemporary and performing arts in New York, but we have been able to create this platform over the years so that people have a relationship with us, whether a positive or negative one. As a festival, we exist in the cultural landscape. How do we best serve artistic practices in a more radical way? The notion of provocation is interesting but it’s not for me. In Japan I ate fresh wasabi for the first time. This was the real wasabi, grated wasabi, and I ate it and thought, “what is that green paste that I have been eating all these years thinking it was wasabi?” Having been raised in France and experiencing the model that we have there, which of course, has its f laws – but it is a model that can exist because that society embraces artists enough to support them financially, so that they can just be artists, I am attempting to bring that essence here, to be able to say: “Okay, even if it’s just a few artists, we are going to support them in a radical way.” I am drawn to Anna Deavere Smith’s “radical hospitality” when I think about the festival. This is what inspires me the most right now. If I were to have a minimum of credibility, visibility, support, or acknowledgment of what I’ve done all these years, I would want to use it as leverage to develop some of these ideas, so that artists can live in New York and do their work, so that they can feel supported and feel valued, so that they can have a space and not have to worry every month about how they’re going to pay the rent. It’s like that… very practical.

Notes 1 See: http://archive.fiaf.org/crossingtheline/2015/heathfield-lepecki.shtml. 2 See: https://crossingthelinefestival.org/2017/artists/faustin-linyekula/.

7 The object of my inquiry Interview with Gurur Ertem

Our in-person interview with Gurur took place at The Graduate Center, CUNY in Peter’s office. We took advantage of the fact that Gurur was in town. For almost a decade, Gurur co-curated the iDANS International Festival of Contemporary Dance and Performance in Istanbul, bringing highly acclaimed experimental choreographers to audiences in Turkey. Given the country’s political climate, as this interview documents, Gurur has since moved on to other pursuits. Along with Sandra Noeth, she co-edited the book Bodies of Evidence: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics (Passagen Publishers, 2018). Bertie Ferdman: How would you describe what you do? Gurur Ertem: It comes from a personal urge. I was part of a collective of self-made dancers who were working on a project-based basis. There was no international programming of dance in Turkey, so we decided to start the iDANS Festival. I didn’t call myself a curator originally; I felt more like a festival programmer. I didn’t even realize that what I did had a title or anything. But gradually, after 2008 or 2009, musicological terms started to gain appeal, especially in German speaking countries, with terms such as Tanzkuratorin or dance curator. I had been interviewed for some projects such as a Tanzkuratorin, but I still didn’t call myself that, nor did I call myself a dramaturg. It’s almost as if this professional position came into existence out of its own accord, and those who were interested took up the position and the title. It was also true that at times the title existed as a justification for international networking. There were European programs for instance, that financed co-productions of consortia that involved partners from at least three different countries. As an example, in one project with Ibrahim Quraishi, they invited me to participate in order to have a Turkish dramaturg alongside a choreographer of Persian origin and a Dutch lighting designer. It was like a novelty approach to include a Turkish dramaturg, but of course, these were people I already knew, whose work I appreciated, and with whom I was very happy to work. It is often the institutional dynamics that inf luence how you frame what you do. I would not necessarily have had a term for what I did. I wrote about this in my dissertation: that dramaturgy can exist within a performance without necessarily having to have a dramaturg in a professional

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position. When I researched the academic work around this subject, I realized that dramaturgy itself had become an academic inquiry in its own right. More than half of all publications on dramaturgy have been written in the past five years, and most have come out as academic articles. It seems to me that academic inquiry inf luences how people frame what they do, and vice versa, academics take their research from practicing dramaturgs. Marianne Van Kerkhoven’s 1994 issue of Theatreschrift was very inf luential in introducing the concept of ‘new dramaturgy’ within a dance context. The term ‘new dramaturgy’ came out of the ‘post-dramatic turn’; a term that Hans Thies-Lehmann had introduced to describe a genre of theater that had been developing since the 1980s. The ‘new wave’ of new dramaturgy could be traced to the hybrid performances experiments in Belgium and the Netherlands. The first wave of hybrid theater was in the 1980s, but the second wave, coupled with a strong resurgence of dramaturgy and particularly ‘new dramaturgy’ within the dance realm, gained traction in the 1990s. In my research I looked into the terms dramaturgy and dramaturg to see when they began to be used in the theater credits of European choreographers. I found that collaborators were credited as ‘choreographer’s assistants’ in companies such as Ultima Vez, but that the term ‘choreographer’s assistant’ had become ‘dramaturg’ within a few years, and this was around the mid-1990s. To go back to how I would describe what I do; I could say that I am a ‘non-fiction storyteller.’ This term can cover many roles: curating could be interpreted that way, dramaturgy could be interpreted that way, so could sociological research, or ethnographic research, as could the practice of dance historians. I think we are all non-fiction storytellers in a way. Susan Manning considers the dramaturg as a collaborator in the meaning-­making process. I also see meaning-making as part of non-fictional storytelling. I probably don’t need the title of dramaturgy or a curator because I pursue my own research interests and curiosity. Therefore, if I feel like I can say something more effectively through writing, I will write, and if I feel that I can better say it by instigating an art program – like curating a festival – I will do that. Recently, I have found this a useful formula to explain what I do, because I’ve been writing about so many different things, many of which have a personal urgency. My latest text, Towards a Sociology of Hope,1 looks at associations between different storytelling movements, but particularly at the rise of storytelling in Turkish history. The rise of storytelling in Turkey is very interesting – the politicians who are jailed are turning into storytellers. I find that I resonate with those who are trying to regain and redefine hope from despair, and from the gutter. BF: It sounds as if you have many different hats, one of which is being an academic. You finished a Masters in Performance Studies at NYU, then completed your PhD in Sociology at the New School, and in between all this, went to Turkey and started iDANS Festival. Can you walk us through how you decided to found the festival with Aydin Silier. How did this idea come about and how did it develop?

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GE: Yes, Aydin Silier was then my partner in life and crime. To start, I went to Robert College/High School, an American high school in Istanbul. We were reading Shakespeare in middle school and drama was a required class – the drama teachers were very good, and we also did a lot of extracurricular theater. So I had already developed an interest in the performing arts by the time I left high school. I was looking for somewhere other than a college that had a very traditional academic discipline, but I also wanted to study anthropology. Intuitively, I felt that Bennington College in the US was the best place to do that. I had my first modern dance class there, in bare feet and parallel! I don’t think I knew exactly what was going on, but I found it very interesting. Nevertheless, coming from a large city, I wasn’t sure that being in a very small town and in a very small college was right for me, so I went back to Istanbul to study sociology. It was there that I began looking for people to dance with. Someone recommended a Swiss lady called Christine Brodbeck who was giving modern Jazz classes, almost for free. Many of the dancers I met who were taking classes there then are now internationally known choreographers. I met Aydin Silier, my partner at iDANS in these dance classes. Beklan Algan and Ayla Algan, who established Theatre Research Laboratories (TAL) within the City Theatre of Istanbul in 1996 began hosting these classes. As was Mustafa Kaplan, the choreographer and the co-founder of Taldans company, who was working there part-time while also making choreographies for children and for the City Theatre. He had come to choreography from an engineering background and he invited some of us to work with him saying, I want to work with some people who are like you; enthusiastic, selfmade, but not from a ballet or conservatory style education. I have a place at the City Theatre, so I can offer to teach you classes in return for some project development together. We started doing very eclectic daily classes with Mustafa and I danced in his very early pieces. They were very physical works, like the work of Elizabeth Streb or the pieces Mehmet Sander was doing at the time. It was really a collective sharing environment and we were creating pieces together. After my undergraduate studies I wanted to go to Performance Studies at NYU although I didn’t quite get what that department was about yet. There were not many dance studies scholars around at the time; André Lepecki was just about to finish his Ph.D.; Barbara Browning was there, but dance scholarship was mostly done through dance/ethnography and dance/anthropology. After my Masters, I went back to Istanbul where I wanted to continue with the self-organized collective. To be able to start a company though, you have to have a status; a not-for-profit status. Since we wanted to do international productions and touring, this kind of status would be a good idea. Fortunately, this coincided with the time Turkey had candidature for

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European Union membership, so we could become partners with what used to be called the Culture Program. There were programs like Culture Program 2000 and Culture Program 2007, which later became the Creative Europe Program. In this new format, we turned the place in which we held our daily classes into the Çatı Association; but that had its limitations. In order to be able to sustain the place and afford the rent, we were giving classes to the general public. This soon became a sort of an imperative instead of something that we desired per se. Ayşe Orhon, who was among the collective, went to the Amsterdam School of New Dance Development (as it used to be called at that time), followed soon after by two other choreographers, Sevi Algan and Talin Büyükkürkciyan. They had decided to pursue dance more professionally. Filiz Sızanlı and Mustafa Kaplan partnered up and became known as Taldans. Filiz also went to study in ex.e.r.ce, Mathilde Monnier’s initiative in Montpellier. Dancers were moving around and becoming internationalized. I went back to the US to get my PhD in Sociology at the New School, and at that time, Aydın Silier, established the agency Bimeras to support the international touring and presentation of Turkish choreographers such as Taldans and Aydın Teker.2 The first iDANS Festival – which we like to call Festival Zero – launched with a marathon program in April 2006. At the same time the IETM Network plenary meeting was being held in Istanbul. Usually, wherever IETMN meetings are held, there is a local showcase program. Given the hybridity and internationalism in dance, it didn’t make sense for us to present only works from Turkey or Istanbul for that program. But we had a limited budget, limited time, limited venue spaces, and a small technical team; so thought we could include a program with artists from neighboring countries such as Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece, and Iran. This became the festival Istanbul ­ReConnect – Edition Zero. We felt that there was a lack of risk-taking in live-art programs that could speak to more heterogeneous audiences. The Istanbul Cultural Foundation’s Theatre Festival used to program dance with big names, like Mark Morris or Pina Bausch, which appealed to a more homogenous audience, both economically and in terms of aesthetic and taste. They made safe choices that they could always invite their sponsors to. We, however, didn’t know if any audience would show up to our shows, so we developed a more varied program with additional activities. I remember the work of Juan Dominguez (All Good Spies are My Age, 2002) raised some questions, but generally, even though they didn’t have too many reference points to these works, people were open. Many people liked the challenge of an encounter with things they didn’t even know existed. Peter Eckersall: It’s interesting that iDANS Festival was developing the notion of ‘expanded choreography,’ which is reminiscent of the idea of ‘expanded dramaturgy,’ as it blurred the boundary between choreography and visual arts. The festival is well-known for pioneering this kind of hybrid

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Figure 7.1  Rimini Protokoll Radio Muezzin Source: ©Claudia Wiens.

work between performance and visuality. Could you talk a little bit more about the theoretical leanings that were involved, and provide some practical examples? Is ‘expanded choreography’ a term that you came up with? GE: Mårten Spångberg uses the term a lot, and I think he got it from ‘expanded architecture.’ PE: And there is also the term ‘expanded dramaturgy’ which comes from Marianne Van Kerkhoven. GE: Yes, definitely. I believe its roots are in the so-called Flemish dance wave. The notion of wave however, is being challenged by the dance sociologists Rudi Laermans and Pascal Gielen. They consider that it was not actually a wave, but a handful of choreographers. Aesthetically speaking, in the late 1980s till the early 1990s, there were experimental works coming from Jan Fabre, Wim Vandekeybus, and Needcompany. At the same time, there was the ‘critical turn’ within French dance, represented mostly by such paradigmatic figures as Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy. These two developments, the Flemish dance wave and the critical turn of French dance, inf luenced a lot of the ensuing aesthetics. My dissertation investigates how and why the developments in Flanders and France became paradigmatic of what is happening in European dance nowadays. I question if the aesthetics and discourse that have been appropriated and disseminated throughout the EU networks in dance and theater imply a homogenization within the field. The dance made in Europe became European contemporary dance. It’s legitimate to ask whether this implies a colonialism of sorts, an aesthetic colonialism, perhaps. Because during the encounters with the East European choreographers at the onset of the EU’s first enlargement, some programmers from Western Europe considered some choreographers’ works as ‘too passé.’

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While in fact, there is a paradox here – the works were either too passé or they were not Serbian or Turkish enough. I remember being at the ‘Istanbuldanse’ program at the French Cultural Institute in Istanbul in 2004, which presented works by both French choreographers, such as Emmanuel Huynh, Rachid Ouramdane, and Christian Rizzo, and Turkish artists, including Aydın Teker, Mustafa Kaplan, Filiz Sızanlı, and Tuğçe Tuna. I was chatting about Kaplan and Sızanlı’s Sek Sek (2002) with a dance journalist from the magazine Mouvement, who said: “We could have seen this piece in France.” It was very interesting for me to observe the dilemmas that arise from curiosity and good intentions in such an eclectic and international field. PE: These paradoxical tendencies were also a result of what was happening at the time, mid-2005/2006, when dance producers and curators were moving to Istanbul. I’m wondering whether your festival sought to address this kind of paradox, or interrupt it, or perhaps found a way to function that was in dialogue with the Flemish and German hegemony. This invention of the dramaturg with the promise of plurality, difference, and awareness on the one hand, and the formal rearrangement of festivals and pathways for production and training on the other, how did your festival negotiate these paradoxes? GE: Yes, there was a very big hype about Istanbul in general that coincided with the rise of the ‘Turkish model’ in the Middle East – politically speaking. The ‘Muslim-but-democratic’ formula was actually the manner by which Turkey could integrate into the neoliberal market. Cihan Tuğal has a great book on that subject entitled The Fall of the Turkish Model,3 although, I don’t think the Turkish model failed, because it seems, in fact, to be spreading. Initially, the fascination of Western arts organizations toward the East – arising from the European enlargement project after 1989 – was through Eastern Europe. This was partly motivated by genuine curiosity and partly, because in order to apply to networks and corporate funding, there was a need to find partners from Eastern Europe. There were of course also curators who did their research well and invited people on individual merit, not simply because they needed somebody from the MENA region or from the Middle East. After Turkey became an EU candidate, there was an economic upsurge in the country. I think the initial phase of the AKP ( Justice and Development Party) government was also considered a positive time for many. There were a lot of EU accession measures that were included within the realms of justice and the pervasive corruption scandals of the 1990s seemed, all of a sudden, to end. With this political uplift in the background, Istanbul became very interesting, also as a center of the arts. Of course, a festival of our scale cannot contribute alone to the branding of Istanbul, but it did help generate curiosity about what was happening in Istanbul. In my position, I was following a lot of festivals and watching a lot of work from abroad, so perhaps I was one of the first people who had a more thematic orientation toward dance programming. I formulated a set of ‘through

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lines’ as itineraries with which to navigate the programs. Instead of getting lost among the unrelated elements of individual works, I was looking for how different pieces could speak to one another. This entails, as I said earlier, finding a non-fictional form of storytelling, that could then be passed on to the spectator as a navigational tool. Perhaps it was a combination of these elements that created a hype in Europe about our festival; this was very interesting for us. BF: I am interested in the thematics: can you speak to this as a dramaturg? One of the themes of the festival was on ‘labor’ and the role of the creative artist. How did you negotiate these themes with the artists, and with the programming? GE: It emerged from the works. I connected some of the dots among the pieces that I had seen that were related to the ongoing debates and discussions in the broader fields of art, culture, and society. I didn’t think, “Let’s pick this theme for this year,” but I was feeling around for the tendencies, inclinations, and curiosities in the air. There were always similarities and resonances to find between artists in their interests and in their work. PE: This was also a period where festivals were becoming thematized. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, arts festivals did not necessarily feel that they needed to have a theme, whereas now, they try once again to be all things to all people. But the period of time in which you were working is fascinating to me. The inf luence of the dramaturgical focus in programming comes into the festival, leading then to the themed festival, or as you put it, “the festival as a form of nonfiction storytelling.” Was your festival part of that trend? GE: Yes, possibly. I’m not aware of theater or performing arts festivals that were organized around a theoretical or curatorial framework. But of course, it does coincide with the ‘biennialization’ of everything, as the biennials were the festivals with a theme. This goes hand-in-hand with the emergence of the curator as an authorial figure, and the emergence, since the mid-90s, of the choreographer as an auteur. PE: Were you bridging a relationship to the visual arts through a thematic approach? GE: Yes, but it was not intentionally or necessarily addressing visual arts in particular, or trying to make a claim for dance within it. The narratives and histories of contemporary art exclude dance and theater, and each time there is a convergence their contemporaneity is discovered anew. We are not necessarily asking the visual arts world to look at the ‘interesting stuff happening here,’ but we did have a lot of visual arts people as audiences, and I think those people were also at the margins of the arts world. Perhaps the margins of the dance and the arts world was where our festival resided. PE: This festival ran for seven years. Was there a point at which the festival reached a certain coherence, where the theme, the works, the context, and the audience came together in a way that made a lot of sense? And were there other points for the festival that didn’t quite have the same kind of resonance?

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GE: That’s a great question. We did have times when, even without prior planning, things resonated and came together in an almost uncanny way. There were all sorts of surprises, as we had many events happening around the festival itself. The fourth edition in 2010 entitled The New CosmopoliDANS, centered on the issue of cosmopolitanism. It also offered a critical perspective to Istanbul’s position as the cultural capital of Europe in that same year. There were some other events that we didn’t have control over and that were quite revealing: like when one of our exhibitions got attacked as it was being installed. It was a public space work by the Danish visual artist Rosan Bosch (Free Zone Istanbul, 2010), which was based on earlier visits and research that she had done in Istanbul. She had created temporary zones, installing very simple signs that were scattered around the busiest ports on each side of Istanbul. They were nice signs like ‘hugging zone,’ ‘dancing zone,’ ‘breastfeeding zone.’ There was one sign that had the symbols of the religions: Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and the head of Ataturk founder of the Turkish Republic. PE: The secular religion? GE: Yes. Just as our tech team was installing the signs, there was the meeting of the youth section of the CHP (Republican People’s Party), the secular party founded by Ataturk himself. They saw the sign of Ataturk and immediately wanted to destroy it – to them it was insulting Ataturk – but by that act, they actually confirmed the suggested comparisons with secular religion. This created a lot of discussion and debate around the festival. Some signs at the port of Uskudar also disappeared. In the news this was publicized as vandalism and theft of the artwork, but as it turned out, the police had taken them. They panicked after the news came out and the signs reappeared somewhere else overnight. These kinds of episodes around the festival were making the thematic explicit in a different way. BF: I think the things happening outside the festival is a good segue as to how the festival came to an end during the Gezi uprisings in June 2013. Can you talk about your decision to end the festival in relation to the surrounding political context? GE: Around the time Gezi erupted, we were doing a major co-production with Emio Greco/PC Scholten from Amsterdam and Biriken, an interdisciplinary theater collective from Istanbul. It was to be based on a play written by Özen Yula called Addio alla Fine, which means ‘farewell to the end.’ The performance was devised as a farewell to the huge monstrous city that Istanbul had become and was to take place on a boat with the text of Addio alla Fine spoken aloud. It was co-funded by the Netherlands and planned way ahead of the Gezi uprisings, but as the protests and police violence escalated, Emio Greco didn’t want to put his dancers at risk. In the circumstances, the performance also became redundant; it seemed absurd to advertise to take people on a boat in order to experience things in a script that were already happening in real time.

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But Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker wanted to come. It was not originally programmed during the time of Gezi but she was bringing Rosas Danst Rosas and was to dance in it herself. De Keersemaeker wanted to show solidarity with what was happening, and she said, “I’m going to go to Taksim and stand like the Standing Man.” BF: You mean the Standing Man, the dancer who became viral. GE: Yes, the non-violent protest of Erdem Gündüz at Taksim Square. He’s a choreographer and a former student of mine at the Mimar Sinan University dance department. He’s also from the Çatı Association Collective that I mentioned earlier. BF: So, the Standing Man was not pre-choreographed? GE: No. BF: And Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker wanted to see that? GE: She wanted to go because everybody was going to stand at the square with carnations that day. If I remember correctly, there was going to be a press release. So, we went, and although I had been traumatized by the violence of the previous days, I was walking around with her and hoping that nothing would happen; it would have opened up diplomatic problems with the Belgian Embassy who had funded the project if something had happened to her! We finally left Taksim just half an hour before her performance. I really admired her attitude. It was really a great performance, and we had made it free of charge, in solidarity with the people, but it had hardly finished when the audience rushed outside. We found out then that the police had been attacking people at Taksim Square again. It was very stressful for all of us. Nevertheless, Gezi was a life-transforming event for many people in Turkey. My curiosity now is to see whether it transformed the way people approach making theater or art – I would be surprised if it hadn’t. But then, I’m also a bit disappointed to see that it did not teach people to question why they are doing what they are doing. I feel that artists are still so much in their bubble, they are still just asking the questions they asked before. BF: You mention in one of your writings that there are some cultural institutions that do not question their complicity with government politics, even while they keep complaining about these politics. GE: Exactly, that bothers me very much. Another major difficulty, and a reason why we stopped organizing iDANS, was that we had to go through so many unnecessary hoops when approaching dance and theater venues for performances that required a big stage. The person responsible for the cultural affairs of the municipality of Istanbul was an ex-policeman, who had no idea, training, or expertise. He didn’t understand what we were talking about! PE: They have been put there because they are antithetical to the arts. GE: Exactly! Most people who are appointed to the cultural venues, like the great Cemal Reşit Rey concert hall, have no idea to whom they are granting or refusing the space. Usually, when we collaborate with the

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artists we invite, they are able to get funding for travel from their respective countries. To be able to get that funding though, they need to apply a year in advance with all the necessary dates and performance venues; but we could not get confirmation from the venues until two weeks before the performance! This put us in a state of limbo, which was stressful and sickening. We were afraid for our health, so we decided to take a break from this stress. PE: There is a philosophical and political problem here. Your work in the beginning was informed by a very cosmopolitan outlook, and yet, the current tensions and pressures on artistic practice are working precisely against such cosmopolitanism. What are some of the survival strategies or tactics that are useful to you in the current environment? GE: Well, we’re not working as a festival anymore, but I can tell you a bit about how we dealt with some of these conf licts in the past. For instance, many people were surprised that we managed to have two naked men doing a performance. To accomplish this, we had to be very careful about our PR; we made sure not to sensationalize performances that involved a lot of nudity. That was a tactic. PE: Which performances were these? GE: Pieter Ampe and Guilherme Garrido’s Still Standing You, presented in iDANS 2010 is an example. Biriken’s piece Lick but Don’t Swallow also 2010, is another one. This last piece was scheduled to be performed at a small theater, but the fundamentalist religious newspaper, Yeni Akit, targeted the piece. They had probably read about the play, which involves an angel who returns to the world as a porn star, somewhere. I am not even sure if angels exist in Islam, but clearly, they couldn’t tolerate the idea. It is not unprecedented in Turkey, that people or artworks are attacked on the grounds of religious sensitivity; the burning of the intellectuals and poets residing at Hotel Madımak in 1994 being a drastic example. The threat from Yeni Akit was quite open, so they canceled the piece and closed the venue for a few days. When we programmed the piece later, we went ahead without announcing its name, but called it instead “a surprise new piece by Biriken.” There were some phone calls to our office, to inquire if it was the cancelled work – the media likes to have sensational information – but we managed to totally avoid that. Another controversial piece was Radio Muezzin (2008), by Rimini Protokoll, that we invited for the 2012 festival. It is a documentary theater piece about, and performed by, professional muezzins (the prayer-callers) from Egypt. It was also one of the more strategic performances we had programmed that would be inclusive to audiences who would otherwise never go to the theater. We did receive some phone calls, asking, “Will there be a recitation of the Qur’an and dance? Is that what we are coming to see?” Programming this piece also showed us the importance of having alternative scenarios. We needed to imagine what could go wrong, and what different responses might be, and for this, we needed a very smart PR strategy that didn’t advertise relentlessly but relied on a subtler tactic.

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Figure 7.2  Rosas danst Rosas Source: ©Jean-Luc Tanghe.

PE: You deal with political problems by using very sensible tactics. What you are doing suggests a curatorial purpose that involves going underground to avoid sensationalism, but still enables certain kinds of artistic practice. Could we also call this a curatorial strategy, or dramaturgy? In these very difficult times, can we think about ways in which the arts can both operate in a safe environment and still encourage creativity and critical ref lection? GE: Well, if we continued doing iDANS, we would have more problems now, since the pressure against opposition, as well as the price of opposition has increased. You might be put in jail and they can confiscate your property. We knew exactly what was going to happen after the coup attempt of July 15, 2016. As it unfolded, it was used as an excuse to rule the country by executive decree. Many people in academia were fired because they had been signatories for peace against the Turkish military’s involvement in the Kurdish regions of southeastern Turkey. As it is now, the provosts of universities are appointed directly by Tayyip Erdoğan. This is made possible by another executive decree. If one criticizes these actions in media or online one might be hunted down. People have actually been jailed for tweeting their disagreements. Inevitably, we are more careful and cautious now. PE: What is your artistic or curatorial practice like now in Turkey? GE: I don’t have an artistic practice now in Turkey. I would say that I have withdrawn. There were a lot of people who debated whether they should stay or leave the country. Some felt openly threatened, so they left through the help of organizations like ‘scholars at risk’ and ‘artists at risk.’ Some choreographers went to Berlin, and some academics to Europe or America. We were left in limbo. Personally, I felt this almost irrational urge to stay and bear witness to what was happening. I think these are sociologically very interesting

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times in Turkey. Somebody has to document, analyze, research, and write; we have to bear witness to be able to tell the story. I have this personal urge to withdraw, and to bear witness, to make what is happening the object of my inquiry. As I have retreated more into research and writing on my own, I have found that other people have been doing the same. Selahattin Demirtaş, the jailed leader of the Kurdish party HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party) is writing short stories in prison; Ece Temelkuran, a former columnist who is on a blacklist now, has moved to Croatia and had been writing about hope and the importance of writing as an act of bearing witness. We withdrew in different places and to different practices – artistic, political, academic, or otherwise. But there is something that connects us through art; art in the understanding of poiesis, of transforming trauma into a tangible form. The symbolic is being rediscovered … I guess. On the other hand, the Istanbul Biennial and the Istanbul Theatre Festival are still going to happen, but it’s almost as if they are happening in a different country. Their program engages in the pain of others but doesn’t touch on any of the issues here in Turkey. There is a lot of commentary for instance, on the Syrian refugees living in Turkey. Istanbul Biennial’s latest theme was Good Neighbor: living with your neighbors. One day as I entered the building where my office is located, I overheard an exchange between two men. One was telling the other that he had had dinner with Sedat Peker, and the other guy said, “Oh, you should have sent him my greetings.” This Sedat Peker is a mafia leader, a convicted criminal, one that had threatened the academics who signed the peace declaration by saying “We are going to bathe in your blood.” So, I think, “Hmmm, it would be interesting if the biennial theme of Good Neighbor had addressed the question of having to live with neighbors who want to bathe in your blood.” They don’t really touch on topics like that because they are financed by the Koç Foundation, one of the main arms manufacturers in Turkey. Big businesses like theirs are still cooperating with Erdoğan, unfortunately. PE: Hope for you is the future, I guess, and I very much appreciate this identification of the poetic. This also comes back to the discussion around aesthetics versus material culture, or the innate/intrinsic possibility of an aesthetic form. Why this word ‘hope?’ Because you could say ‘peace’ – Baz Kershaw once wrote about “the pathologies of hope.” It’s a thing we have to have, but it’s also that we hope for hope, a thing we always know.4 GE: I realized that there was actually a lot of literature on hope when I was writing on this topic. In regard to the social sciences, political theory, and sociology, there is always a striving for clarification through close description and analysis of the darkness of the times. But for me, hope is precisely the fact that good and evil are not binaries. There has also been a lot of literature written on the social and psychological experiments done after the Second World War, which were intended to help us understand how something like

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Auschwitz could have happened. As the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments showed, or Hannah Arendt’s concept “banality of evil” would reveal, it’s not necessarily the intrinsic personal traits of people but certain conditions coming together that creates the circumstances. Zimbardo himself is now involved in this heroic imagination project; heroism is as banal as evil and the same person could be perpetrating either.5 Not only is it a personality trait to have an authoritarian personality, but it is also part of the politicians’ manipulative inducement of latent proclivities, what Freud would call the ‘illusion,’ and what we might call ‘wishful thinking.’ This explains, for example, why people in the US were in denial of the fact that Trump could be elected. Whereas for us, looking at it from Turkey, it seemed very plausible. Illusion and wishful thinking, the belief, the desire to believe in lies; people do know some things are lies. There was this huge lie circulating during the Gezi protests: allegedly, ten topless men with leather pants harassed a woman in a headscarf near the busiest port of Istanbul. Anyone who knows Istanbul would know that this is such a blatant lie. I don’t think Erdoğan supporters even believed that lie, but they wanted to believe it. Here again, is the Freudian concept of illusion as wishful thinking equal to thinking that Trump is just a clown who cannot be elected. PE: The people who voted for Trump are generally the ones who voted against their best interests. He will take away their health insurance and any job security they might have, but they hope that he is not going to do that. GE: Exactly! Likewise, Erdoğan actually said on news media that he had declared the state of emergency for the sake of businesses; so that the workers could not go on strike. He said that – it’s recorded in history! So, going back to ‘why hope?’ I think we are very good at describing darkness. We even complement one another on our knowledge of how dark it really is. But people who are actually paying the highest price, like the Kurdish party, whose co-chairs are in jail, are more hopeful than we are; they at least know which side of history they are on. It’s a type of Benjaminian understanding of history and redemption; the oppressed knows that redemption might come about some day. In the meantime, I think, we should do the best we can without ever succumbing to the illusion that we are the good ones and they are the evil ones; it can turn very quickly from one to the other. PE: Returning to the question of curatorship or dramaturgy, or of framing events in certain ways in which the artistic practice intersects with the cultural practice – how do you view your curatorial work from the perspective of the current climate? GE: I could say this: one of the reasons that we stopped producing the festival, was to have a period of incubation – to look for the appropriate format that speaks to the urgencies of the present, which may not necessarily be to

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make everything thematic, or to try and include politically active work. As it is now, I can only say that I haven’t found that form yet. That’s why the festival is still not happening. I’m more interested in the whys than the whats; the tools to make things are there, but having the why has become more important to me. The tool and the form have to be able to be answerable to the why, and I still don’t have them.

Notes 1 Gurur Ertem (2018) Towards a Sociology of Hope: Radical Politics, Art and Social Hope, conference “Art in Revolution: The Challenges of Art in Situations of Political Repression,” ARIA Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, University of Antwerp, Belgium. 2 Since this publication, and after a decade of co-organizing the iDANS International Festival of Contemporary Dance and Performance as well as assisting numerous local artists from Turkey for their international touring and co-­ productions, Bimeras launched its new research center and activities titled ‘Amor Mundi.’ Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on the difficulty of loving the world as it is, with all the evil, suffering, and political atrocities, and the potentials to do so through the arts and humanities, it aims to support, facilitate, and disseminate research and debate that cut across humanities, humanistic social sciences, and the arts. With the input and insights of an international board of advisors and scholars, Amor Mundi will: – support and facilitate new research based on two-year thematic clusters – organize a weekly summer seminar each July led by top scholars in their respective fields – host writing residencies and retreats – offer fellowships for outstanding researchers 3 Cihan Tuğal (2016) The Fall of the Turkish Model: How the Arab Uprisings Brought Down Islamic Liberalism, London: Verso. 4 Baz Kershaw (1998) Pathologies of Hope in Drama and Theatre, Research in Drama Education. The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 3:1, 67–83. 5 See Heroic Imagination Project, www.heroicimagination.org/.

8 We don’t travel with headlights but we leave tiny traces Interview with Fernando José García Barros

I interviewed Fernando in a small conference room at the hotel where we stayed as part of the 10th edition of the International Festival of Performing Arts of Bahia (FIAC Bahia) in Brazil, on October 2017. Both of us had been invited by Rita Aquino (also interviewed in this book alongside FIAC curator Felipe Assis) to participate in the Seminar on Curatorship and Mediation in Performing Arts, an educational component to the festival. Fernando had traveled from his home base in Cochabamba, Bolivia to speak about the art center he had founded there, el mARTadero. The interview took place in Spanish. Bertie Ferdman: How would you describe what you do? Fernando Garcia: I refer to my work with the mARTadero project as a form of “energizing heritage.” It is for me a way of re-taking remnants from the past, celebrating these and putting them in play with the present, in order to strategize toward the future. As an educator, as a curator, as an architect and as director of the cultural project mARTadero, I see my work as this, with finding traces from the past that in some way are marking the present, in order to project the futures that we want to realize. It is a strategic vision of relating between three moments, and for me that is what culture is. BF: Ok, so that is your philosophy, and how do you… FG: Land it? BF: Yes. FG: We do it concretely through the mARTadero. The neighborhood where our project is located is a very important historical area in Cochabamba, but at the same time one that was for many years degraded, abandoned even by the local government. It is however a very important landmark area because it is where the defense, during the city’s independence, was led by a group of women. The men had been massacred in battle, and a group of women with their children climbed a hill and defended the city until death. They lost but it was very emblematic for the independence of all of South America. From Argentina, General Belgrano commented things like: “South America will be free because the women of Cochabamba wanted it that way.” They call them the heroines of the hill. For us, to take that and say, well, they had to fight an armed struggle against external meddling, but what is interesting now is to think that the heroines of today can fight with art and technology. The local board was led for the first

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time by a woman; other collectives, associations of women artists within the mARTadero were formed. We adapted to their reality—because they work from home—and adapted to the impact of what they had suffered, personal issues or violence against gender, etc. Taking into account this historical inf luence, we created a concept that was “today’s heroines” and KUSKA was formed, a creative artisanal association of women.1 In Quechua, kuska means both “together” and “at the same time.” They began doing small mosaics, and today are working on public plazas, interventions in public places with mosaics. They are hired by other cities like Sucre and La Paz to do this, and here in Cochabamba they have intervened in four public places, contributing toward urban futures. In their case it has to do with the visibility of women and specifically the woman as a creative entity. They have discovered themselves as artists and have generated jobs for themselves and others. They have combined artistic expression with their identity as women as an outlet to join past, present, and futures, combining art and heritage as a way of life. They write their history in relation to their city. The act of creating is the pretext to be in relation with the world, at least that’s how I see it. The beauty of this is that when they arrived to mARTadero they said that they wanted to do something creative, but they did not see themselves as “artists.” Each individual—all of us—are a special form of artist. We have to find our concept. At mARTadero we understand art as another form of knowledge. We try to chase this and find how each person fits into a creative process of contributing to the community. BF: The women who formed KUSKA came to you, so mARTadero must be an open space where they felt comfortable coming and saying that they wanted to do something but needed help figuring out how? FG: They were bringing their children to the space. There is a workshop at mARTadero where kids learn how to create in free form. Seeing how their children could do this and develop artistically, they started getting a bit jealous and realized they also wanted to create. They overcame the barrier of shame, what typically limits us, and they committed their time. In fact, last year they won the national prize for urban arts intervention.

Figure 8.1  Courtesy of proyecto mARTadero

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BF: mARTadero functioned like a catalyst for them to create something that is theirs. FG: For us mARTadero is about generating spaces. What we mean is that where there is no space, we generate it. We generate a space to rethink the past, celebrate the present and project the future. Those are the three lines of inquiry that I was telling you about. That’s really how we conceive the space and that is how it functions. For example, the group of young dancers that use hip-hop … they are interested in breakdancing, but since they’ve been at mARTadero they have also begun revisiting traditional dances from Bolivia. They have been mixing these strong inf luences in a way that projects them toward the future. Their work has to do at once with the surrounding neighborhood and a logic of care as it relates to the body. Almost all of the units of mARTadero function this way, taking elements from Bolivia’s strong cultural tradition, celebrating them, which for us is a key theme for constructing and strengthening community. We say that when there is fiesta there is social health (salud social), so celebrating that we are alive, it’s not nothing. We have the opportunity of making the present felt, but it would not be complete if we were also not projecting a future we desire. BF: This aligns with the creation of space—one a physical space and another a metaphorical one—which you seem to be alluding to, in relation to community and art. Can you expand on this notion? Also, can you tell me a little about the history of the mARTadero? How did the idea come about? In particular I am interested in the actual physical space you imagined—which is completely unlike a typical white box gallery and opens toward the outside, and metaphorically in the sense that it belongs to the people. How did you open it? You seem to have inverted the conventional art model. FG: The advantage has to do with the current moment. We are developing distinct experiences that are locally contextualized or site-specific, and often something that although isolated from the international panorama, is relevant. We are not living in an era of change, but in a change of era. In international art circles, this is definitely becoming more and more noticeable as an institutional logic that is more relational, more contextual. Cultural heritage must be energized, but this also has to do with memory, it has to do with archives, it has to do not only with governmental and ecclesiastical heritage, which is the heritage of power, but instead with the new heritages that even UNESCO is opening up and recognizing as such. Oral heritage is about all the immaterial culture, which is much more interesting. I simplify it by saying, in reality, heritage as such doesn’t really matter, neither art, what matters is life. What can it bring to life? The mARTadero stems from a productive space. It was active during 70 years, an old slaughterhouse that closes in 1992 because the same neighbors that were children or grandchildren of those who worked there, didn’t want it there because there were too many rats, because the bulls would

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escape, because it smelled bad, because the neighboring areas smelled like meat, blood. All of this leads to some sort of social change, so they ask for it to be freed— the space—and they began to think that the ideal would be to transform it into a cultural and athletic center, which is not a bad thing as a starting off idea, but it’s also quite common. What to do with abandoned industrial sites? Typically, let’s see, a museum… a cultural center… etc. To me, as an architect, that makes me a little bit uneasy because sometimes we fail to really comprehend what a cultural center is nowadays. To create such a space, we have to create “spacers” also, no? Managers and people that are able to understand contemporary complex social interactions. It is not enough to say that a site is currently “available,” and its transformation happens automatically. BF: You don’t see it as a given. FG: I think we have to be a little bit more complex and understand cultural spaces nowadays as multi-functional and multi-layered places, each with very distinct and local logics, that are in permanent construction. I’ve known many places that were set to become cultural centers that never really became that because these places needed another type of focus and another type of management. In the case of this slaughterhouse, the matadero, it was vacated in 1992 and for 12 years there was nothing there. The site was abandoned, and it degraded, and that’s a whole other subject, because what is not actualized becomes degraded, very clearly, we need to inject life, soul, to animate things. This is for me where the function of contemporary cultural management is going. One aspect is the socio-cultural animation (animación socio cultural) which is where the notion of giving the space a soul comes from. Not only to give it, but also to rescue and understand what kind of soul it already has: what is the context? its memory? Another aspect is the managing. When we

Figure 8.2  Courtesy of proyecto mARTadero

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speak about management, we are already projecting toward a future. For me these are key spaces that should exist in each neighborhood or town, in each community, but they have to have an open concept. From where do we come from? And now I can connect to your white-box question. We come from preconceptions, where we had to either explain or show art, in very aseptic places, that are definitely marked by modernism, due to certain logic of modernity overcome by the fall of certainties, and above all an eruption of reality in all fierceness. Today the white boxes look like places without a soul. They followed the logic of their time. And history comes to us like that, as if universal, where everything that is emotional has to be set aside, but no one really identifies with that. In the case of the slaughterhouse, the initial discussion was amongst some artists that were coming to the biennales who didn’t identify with it, and I include myself here. We were from a different generation. It’s true that for me, the logic of an exhibition without a soul has always been disturbing, almost like a metaphysical disruption. BF: As if art were separated from life! FG: Exactly. This kind of equipment, old slaughterhouses, old factories … have their own soul There is a very beautiful charter from UNESCO that is called the Nizhny Tagil Charter for the Industrial Heritage, which states that, precisely in those sites that had a specific social function and were in production, when they closed they generated emotional as well as psychological damage for the surrounding community, so they have to be put back to provide a social function, to lift the mood of the surrounding population again. BF: The notion of industrial site, its relation to art, and its importance for the community reminds me of Armand Gatti. He was a French director, journalist, and playwright, very politically engaged, who after WWII, wrote a play about a factory. Gatti insisted that he could not put its main character in a theater since it was too bourgeois, so he could therefore not stage this play there. FG: I think this is key and the truth is that the twentieth century holds a history to the confrontation from the avant-gardes, against established orders that could not reach the people. We come to understand what is not enough, even though we don’t necessarily know where we are headed. That’s why I love the motorcycle metaphor—the Spanish painter Miquel Barceló, who did the dome of the United Nations in Geneva, would tell this very simple anecdote. Since he lives in Mali, a bit isolated from the international art circuit, he explains that he was leaving one day to go for a walk after a workday. It was night-time, dark, and he was walking on a sidewalk when all of a sudden, he hears the sound of a motorcycle approaching (in crescendo), so loud that it made him jump from the street. Soon, laying on the dusty f loor, he notices a little red light moving away from behind the motorcycle that he never got to see. He stayed to savor the moment in which he understood, and said, those are us artists—and I would extend to managers—we don’t travel with

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headlights but we leave tiny traces, tiny rear lights, that mark some possible trajectory, just like that. I think that is where it’s going: cultural management, creative production, and contemporary art are discovering new spaces, new relational forms, new raw material for creation, and what is left is the logical consequence of this evolution of human consciousness. I for one feel it this way, if I see the twentieth century and all the work, even in transgressive and expanded art theaters, and this has to do with the concept of space. How space spills, how in the end, society has susceptible spaces that can be staged, multiplied, with different scales and different logics. BF: I’m curious about the 12 years you mentioned before. How the slaughterhouse was empty for so long and how it became, or transformed, into mARTadero? FG: In 2004 we began hosting a biennale for contemporary art, which two years earlier we had done in a palace in the middle of the city, in a more conventional place, in the traditional sense. The truth is that it didn’t work there, and we were quite frustrated. Two years later we artists got together and said, let’s go for a non-conventional space. There were many: an old train station, an engine factory, the slaughterhouse, etc. We decided on the slaughterhouse because it was the most potent metaphor, a place where death could transform into life. It went from a place of constriction to a place of openness; instead of closing in, it was spilling out. All these things seem to me right now a very correct way of working, which is why I emphasize the “hyper,” “poli,” “pluri,” “trans.” These are simple prefixes, but they help us to rethink. For example, placed together, curating with trans will suddenly give you a different concept of where else it is going, and where else we have to go. BF: You are a visual artist and architect by training. Do you view the mARTadero project as an extension of your art? FG: Yes. A lot of us, because we come from the artworld, and have felt a little I don’t know if you would call it sadness because there is no sadness in this but a lot of liveness that keeps generating itself, but yes in terms of abandoning our creative process. We later began to realize that generating these new spaces had a lot to do with conceiving work of art, except from a different perspective. It’s not a work of art that you can exhibit at a biennale, or that you can display at gallery or print in a catalogue; it’s more complex. It’s about understanding the relationship of art to life. Because the truth, the obvious, is often not so obvious, and we begin to understand logics little by little… I see levels of transgression in the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, Duchamp, and the truth is that they are looking to vitalize art, to critique academic art, bourgeois art has a lot to do with a sort of ankylosis in art. Resistance to this seems logical. More than being reactive, we try to be proactive and, better, creative.

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BF: I’m also thinking about the Situationist International, who wanted to experience everyday life differently, and this is like what you are saying and doing, living art, living it… FG: This is clear, the thing is that it has to be very interrelated with a series of considerations that have to do with context, time, where we live, location… in reality art always had to do with that. What happens is that when you find a comfortable common place, because in the end, you think, many of the things from the contemporary visual or theater world are coming from a comfortable place, and it’s been done and tested, but it’s not working. They fail to have an essence. It’s harder to forge new paths or ways of working. BF: How do you engage with performance at the mARTadero? FG: Since we are located in a neighborhood that was financially abandoned by the local government, we had to work collectively to give it another energy, to establish other debates. Many urban artists came for residencies at the time of the urban arts biennale but also in other times of the year. They began working with neighbors, with varying groups and painting abandoned or unused surfaces throughout the town. With time, this began to transform into about 60 murals that are all around the area of the mARTadero. It’s also become a sort of tourist attraction. There are even special bicycle tours to enjoy them! It’s really a cross between very macro-contextual themes with very local neighborhood themes. The sum of all of this is a sort of panorama of the contemporary world. That is one notion of the performative, which includes its relational components. Another one can be for example Sabina Simon. She is a Catalan artist who was working on a project called “Imaginary Fasting.” She is a visual artist, so the project is about renouncing the senses and particularly the sense of sight. Of all the places she knew where she has

Figure 8.3  Courtesy of proyecto mARTadero

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traveled—and she has traveled a lot—she decided that Cochabamba and the mARTadero were going to be the final venue for this project. She came here and plastered her face, including her eyes, for 40 days, in total resignation to the world of images. But she went through her everyday life as normal. She had a residency, would come down, hang out, talk to the kids from the neighborhood, photograph events, she would paint and write, because she could still type, and would narrate her dreams. Her residency became a sort of performative presence here. It transformed into an inter-relational element with the neighborhood which spurred much curiosity. She listened in a different way to people’s stories and would process them differently. BF: I heard that John Malpede and his company Los Angeles Poverty Department [LAPD] came for a residence to develop their piece Agents and Assets2? FG: Yes, they came, actually a few years ago into the mARTadero project, in 2009. They also performed at The Plaza Principal—an outdoor public space—along with other places in Bolivia, including in La Paz. When we initiated the space in 2005, and had that biennale I was talking about, we decided instead to make it into an alternative space and found out the neighbors had wanted to transform it into a cultural space, so it was the perfect conjunction of redefining what it could become. After we officially began the project in 2005, we received the unanimous concession of the space for 30 years from the municipal council. Somehow, many people had heard of them, and suggested we give them a residency collaborating with Wiler Vidaurre, their producer in Bolivia. BF: Earlier, you described the mARTadero as a space that invites the trans, the multi and the inter, one that is generating a diverse artistic community. How do you bring diverse publics to the space and how do you engage them? It seems as though you at the mARTadero have conceptualized the public [of art] differently. You’ve generated publics who create, who make, a more f luid form of who and what a public could be. Can you speak more to this?

Figure 8.4  Courtesy of proyecto mARTadero

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FG: Exactly, there is no one “desired” public, but publics plural, all very different, that come to the space and make it theirs. I like to speak of multivocalities, which refers to the notion that these spaces want to say and do very different things for different people, depending on their reality, their way of understanding the world. For many, the space is simply a place where they can do something that interests them, Parkour let’s say, but once they are inside, they realize that what they are working on can have a richer potential if they get involved with hip-hop, or with contemporary dance. A project that is now up at the mARTadero is one that brings together different groups working with the body. They take elements from hip-hop, parkour, contemporary dance, all in urban space, involving residents, neighbors, all as part of the ongoing project. When you asked me how we generated the performance by LAPD, we are basing ourselves on mode because it’s so contextual, so related to the concrete moment that all of a sudden it does not work in half a year and in another location. The mode is something you have to create in each situation, it’s not only site-specific, it’s moment-specific. BF: Context specific? FG: Yes, but context is a bit limited actually. I like to think, and this I borrow from Quechua, from “Pachamama”—the concept pacha is world and implies time and space simultaneously. For me context is too temporal and sometimes we forget that combination… One anecdote that is very simple but illustrates this: the Guaraní, who were nomads, would move looking for Yvy Mara He’y, the land without evil. They would get to a place, and as a community, would need to feel that that was indeed the place, if not they would keep on walking. Even if they stayed, they knew it could be temporary. In life, it’s teaching us that “progress” is a little similar to this. We need to have the capacity for change, to leave, to let go, to travel, to maintain the journey always. It’s quite a strong concept because what today can perhaps be your “land without evil,” could stop being so and you have to be able to acknowledge it, you have to realize it and know when it’s time to leave, from a space or from a moment or from a person, because your growth is already being hampered. For me this does not have to do with a logic of detachment from neo-liberal descarnalizacion, but with an extremely human process, a distinct form of living. BF: Much of the work you’ve mentioned thus far is related to social practice, where it’s not the individual artist creating some genius work or product, but instead generates a human relational aesthetic. FG: Yes, it’s a challenge because there are other forms of understanding what the role of a museum space should be. For example, I am a professor of museology and I don’t work anymore with the idea of “a museum” but instead with museum-like medium-devices, which means any element that helps us to celebrate the present and project the future. It could be a park, a plaza, a public square, any place in the city but that is not a contained space.

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Figure 8.5  Courtesy of proyecto mARTadero

The very idea of a medium-device is quite contemporary because it’s something that allows for movement. Art did not quite satisfy me for a long time because there was a lot of fetishism. I was really involved and even won the National Award in Contemporary Art for Installation, but since it’s contextual, the installations were contextual art. The idea is—how far can context go? And what is (the) context? It’s like these questions keep getting more amplified for me, I keep drawing from them. I love the concept of multi-belonging, because it extends to where you want. We are a membrane where there is permanent osmosis from outside in and from inside out. We are that, multi-belonging beings. Depending on where we place the focus, and the most interesting focus is the one that can encompass all these spheres of belonging within one work. BF: In some sense it no longer matters if you are going to make a performance, or an action, or a painting. These are mixed, based on concepts, which as you say, are larger, or more comprehensive. FG: And it would have to do with what is the most adequate medium-­ device in each case. One moment it could be a performance, in another an art object that has some ability to summarize the provocation in question, and in another, an installation… BF: In the beginning of our conversation I asked you “What do you do?” and you said that you unite the past, present, and future. Today, in this moment, with 12 years of mARTadero’s existence, what do you foresee for its future? FG: Right now, we are limited by our own inherited mental structures. We are thus trying to identify what is limiting us from our way of thinking. For example, how we project the site economically speaking, working with f luxonomy and with more contemporary concepts that for us have been

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intuitive. We are rebuilding mARTadero’s economic system with f luxonomy, from how we sustain ourselves financially to how we move forward. We are building organizational structures that are based on self-management. We don’t have an adequate word for it yet, but let’s just say it’s a more anarchist organizational style where the responsibility and self-reliance prevail over any hierarchical structure. A work completed should meet objectives, not a schedule. It was and still remains a risk, but me as Artistic Director I don’t find out about 90% of the things that happen at the mARTadero. We have common criteria and a horizontal organizational structure. I can of course find out via our website, like anyone, and I am in charge of certain tasks and the rest of the team in charge of other specific ones. We have meetings once a week and we talk about where each of us if going in terms of projects. At the mARTadero, there is no one single director or direction; there are multiple visions that are interlocking. It’s like a metaphor for the world, there are risks involved. We are in a period of risk; it’s a new phase of creation, or of what we call “creaction” (creacción). It is a phase of creative re-action; it’s going to involve a lot of things, to rethink who we are, to rethink relational structures in art and art management. mARTadero is a space where we do, we make—it’s more of a do-tank than a think-tank.

Notes 1 For more information on KUSKA, see: www.lostiempos.com/doble-click/ cultura/20180910/kuska-empoderamiento-mujer-traves-del-arte. 2 Agents and Assets is a residency performance project conceived and created by LAPD, which “seeks to give voice to the people whose communities have been most devastated by drugs and counterproductive drug policies.” In Bolivia, the performance’s main theme was the hypocritical battle against coca, in the form of a trial. See: www.lapovertydept.org/projects/agents-assets-2/.

9 The complexity of various registers Interview with Judy Hussie-Taylor

We interviewed Judy in December of 2017 in a cozy café in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. She had returned from a performance festival in Budapest late the night before, and was generous to meet with us, given that she was a bit jet lagged. I had first met Judy three years prior at the International Symposium on Performing Arts Curation titled “Envisioning the Practice,” held in Montreal in 2014 and organized by Dena Davida and Jane Gabriels. Judy had given one of the keynotes. Her collaborative, generative, and inclusive curatorial practice has greatly inf luenced our thinking for this book. Bertie Ferdman: Let’s start by describing what you do. Judy Hussie-Taylor: I am the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Danspace Project. I do all of the artistic, administrative, and fundraising oversight for Danspace Project. I manage a staff of six to seven people in addition to the front of the house and box office staff. Danspace Project leases 35 weeks a year from the Saint Mark’s Church, so we don’t own our venue. Every hour that we are in that space is in our lease, so it presents some interesting challenges. Danspace Project was founded officially in 1974. The program has grown over the years, especially under Laurie Uprichard, my predecessor, who did a lot of international work and expanded the programming to be between 28 and 35 weeks a year. We primarily commission new dance works, about 18 new works per year. The commissioning structure for contemporary dance in New York City is very different from the commissioning structures for theater or dance nationally. We do not pay for the entire production but give money for the artists to make their work, which they do not have to account for in any way. That helps them fundraise for their production. I have increased the number of technical and production residencies because it is a very difficult space to work in. BF: You’ve implemented a number of significant changes to Danspace since you began working there. Can you talk to some of these and how they came about? JHT: Walking into an organization, what I like to do is to look at the underlying structure analytically and ask, “What are the things I can change

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that will not upset the working structure?” Danspace was functioning well on a very small budget with very few staff. I didn’t want to change things for the sake of change. I wanted to change things with some reasoning. Throughout its history, Danspace Project has a very particular place in the dance ecosystem in New York, nationally and internationally. Since I felt the responsibility of that history, I put more time into the development of work. What we do is to be an incubator. We give people their first time to test things, or to try something new if they are established choreographers. That was one of my concerns; to have quality over quantity, which is something many organizations deal with. My second focus came from an overriding observation over the years about the lack of context for contemporary dance in the US. I worked at a dance festival in Colorado where I met a lot of artists such as Ralph Lemon. The way these choreographers and artists worked inf luenced the way I worked curatorially and organizationally. With Ralph, we often talked about the lack of publication in our field. While I was working at a small museum, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and at the University of Colorado in the Department of Arts and Arts History, I was looking at the ways in which the different disciplines of visual arts and poetry consider documentation and history. Since I had been interested in these ideas around curatorial interventions before I got to Danspace, that was something that we could begin to address inside the contemporary and experimental dance context. So I decided to create the Platform Project. The simple components of that would be taking multiple weeks, inviting a guest artist or choreographer to curate, and publishing “catalogues” for the Platform. We were contextualizing events as exhibitions that unfold over time, so I was trying to bring in the exhibition-thinking to the time-based form. They were intentionally not “themed festivals.” I was seeking another way of framing the multiplicity of events, which led me to take those 30 weeks and break them down. I thought, very simplistically, that I could have four guest curators and spend a lot of time with them. I could charge them with curating and give them the exact budget and resources I would use for four weeks of programming. That was the original premise, and I chose four artists with whom I have had many conversations about challenging the status quo of dance presenting as it exists in New York City. Peter Eckersall: How would you define the “status quo of dance” in New York City? JHT: I would say it is the one-week run, maybe two-week run, which would include three to four nights of performance. I think that’s the standard. BF: Before coming to Danspace, you worked at the Colorado Dance Festival and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. How did these inf luence you? JHT: The Colorado Dance Festival was a huge inf luence and an important festival in Boulder, Colorado, which ran from 1980 until 2001 due to

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lack of funding in Colorado. It was founded by a remarkable person named Marda Kirn, who basically founded this festival in her car! There is a legendary dance critic, Deborah Jowitt, with whom Marda met while studying dance writing at American Dance Festival in the early 80s. One day Deborah says, You know, there are all these great young dance artists and choreographers in New York, but they have nowhere to perform; why don’t you start a festival out in Colorado and they can come out there, try their work, and come back to New York? That planted the seed for Marda. Marda would convince people like Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, Molissa Fenley to come out West and stay at a little cabin in Chautauqua near the foothills.” Meanwhile, I was studying at the Naropa Institute. I was taking poetry courses; I thought I wanted to write or make films about artists. Marda hired me to be the publicist… and I was terrible at it. She was pretty hard on me and rigorous; she would take my press releases and say, “this is not good enough, go watch the tape again.” I learned on the job, but she also realized that I had known about dance because I studied modern dance in Philadelphia and followed contemporary dance. We ended up having a friendship and she asked me to come back again. She made me Programming and Marketing Director, which I did not know how to do and was just terrified. She said, “I’ll teach you,” and she did. I think there were almost 60 workshops and classes during the summer. She taught me how to look at the venues and how to talk to artists with very different styles. In the early 1990s Marda developed an ambitious idea called “Dances of the Spirit,” which was looking at the relationship of dance and the environment through the perspectives of five worldviews: Asian/Asian-American, Native American, African/African-American, Latino/Latina, and European/European-­A merican. We worked on that for three years. She wanted to involve local communities in the project, so we did a lot of grassroots organizing and gatherings in Boulder and Denver. Those three years working with her, I learned a lot and in depth, she was hugely inf luential. When she wanted to retire, I designed another three-year project called “Let’s Dance Together! The Americas,” looking at the relationship between the social dances of the Americas and concert dance. We also paired dancers with scholars. For example, when we worked with West African dance and musical forms we brought together Rennie Harris, a hip-hop choreographer, with dance historian Brenda Dixon Gottschild. PE: Were these mainly workshop-based activities with the community or were they curated performances?

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Figure 9.1  Eiko Otake with Paul Chan’s sculptures, An Evening with Paul Chan & Claudia La Rocco (part of Platform 2016: A Body in Places), Danspace ­Project, 2016. 

JHT: All of it: performances, workshops, events… In a way, that is the way my brain has stayed wired. I thought I could keep things simple, but I just can’t! The constellations and connections start immediately. BF: How do you go from that to something like Platform? How do you bring all that contextualization, community activism, and cultural environment together? JHT: There is no direct correlation; I never try to repeat anything from the surface design. I always have to take it to the underlying questions of a given situation: “Where am I? What is this situation? Who is here? What or who is missing? What’s not or who’s not here?” It really comes down to starting with the basic elements of your given situation. Maybe some other things come into play, like the way you invite people in, but those are the things you take with you. For example, Marda worked together with these incredible cross-group of activists from the Lakota community and Arapahoe community and asked them what kind of programming they wanted. With the Platform, I try to tell people what resources they have to work with early on in the process. PE: You mentioned that New York has particular challenges, some of which are obviously around space, time, and the lack of funding. I am also interested in the problematic of legacy—because Danspace has a particular set of legacies—alongside the possibility of change. When you came to Danspace, how did you balance the need for change with the sense of belonging to a particular generation of artists, legacy, and history? JHT: Right, but in order to change things, you have to love the thing you are changing. It is a respect issue; legacy is not about nostalgia or repeating

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the past. It is about the spirit of what was founded here and how I can tap into that to make it new. PE: How would you define that spirit, and how do you negotiate it with the need to expand access to others beyond a privileged generation or group of artists? And secondly, as a curator or dramaturg, how do you actually work in that environment to make the connections that you make? JHT: I think about this a lot and there is not one answer. One of the things I was looking at was who has been here and who feels this ownership, which actually ends up being a lot of people who do not present there. Then I thought about who does not have access. How can I bring these artists into a generative friction? Danspace has been perceived as a venue for mostly postmodern dance coming out of White European Americans, the particular tradition linked to Judson Dance Theater and Grand Union. The founders were Larry Fagin, a poet; Barbara Dilley, who was in Merce Cunningham’s company and part of the Grand Union, and one of the founders of Naropa University, and the choreographer Mary Overlie. When you go into a history or a legacy, you can explode the certain assumptions if you look at it closely: “A poet and Barbara Dilley were the founding curators? That is odd.” Then, I might take that to bring back the conversation between poets and dancers. I look into some seed or hint from the past and tease out some contemporary iteration. I probably did not please everyone who felt that Danspace was their home. Curation is an act of omission more than anything, since you are making choices. Historicizing is, in a way, quite painful, often violent. I felt committed to looking at the work of artists of color, of the LGBTQ community, and women with more intention. I was also thinking about different dance forms. In the nineties, I knew choreographers and dancers who studied directly with Willi Ninja, the voguing icon and one of the fathers of the House of Ninja. They were studying with him and incorporating voguing into their choreographic postmodern work. When I came to New York in 2008, I thought of Trajal Harrell, who was also working with that history in a more conceptual way in his Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at Judson Church [2010]. He proposes an impossible history, as the title of the work reveals. Cori Olinghouse was studying with Archie Burnett, also one of the founding fathers of the House of Ninja, who was also working on her own choreography. I proposed to her to curate an evening which included her sources and teachers and she invited Archie Burnett from the House of Ninja. I was interested in teasing out these references because they had fed into so many people’s work. That was an example of bringing forms, ideas, and different artists of different generations together. PE: So in a way, you suggested that they make a work about it. JHT: Or at least put them side by side.

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Figure 9.2  Javier Madrid and Archie Burnett, Elements of Vogue (part of an evening created by Cori Olinghouse during Platform 2011: Body Madness), 2011, Danspace Project.

BF: Another example is the Platform curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Will Rawls on AIDS [Lost & Found, 2016]. They were referencing some of the pieces from the eighties. JHT: [Shows the catalogue of Lost & Found1] BF: Do you have a print of every Platform? A print version? JHT: Yes. BF: And you have an online journal? JHT: Yes. BF: But the online journal is not for the Platform; it is just an issue that you do yearly. JHT: It is more f lexible and has different content. I started with the print catalogues for every Platform and had discussions with the curators about whether we should have the publication available for audiences when we open the Platform or whether we should have a catalogue as documentation. They all said they wanted them ready when people walked in the door. In a way, the print catalogue is its own Platform; it exists on its own and is not simply a documentation. The online journal came much later. We were thinking about how to get some feedback for an exhibition that unfolds over time. Then we asked some people to write about their experiences. So it originated as a feedback mechanism, but then turned into a writer-response program that has taken various forms. They are not reviews; they can respond from their own background and perspective. PE: They are beautifully designed. Do you also invite designers for this?

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JHT: Yes. It is very important that that was taken into consideration as well since it needs resources. BF: Did you ask Ishmael to bring in Will Rawls, who was younger, or was that his decision? How did that intergenerational collaboration come about? JHT: Ishmael did not want to curate alone, so he said, “How about someone younger?” and we both thought of Will Rawls. But bringing different generations together has always been on my mind. I wanted, whenever possible, to put artists in a direct conversation, but not necessarily in a mentorship situation because I do not think mentorships always produce what they promise. This is why I like the word “curator,” because then they become working partners in a respectful relationship. BF: Is that something that occurs at multiple Platforms? JHT: In some way, although it is always different. Maybe that is where we get to the dramaturgical aspect. That is something I look for, but I do not insist on. PE: I very much like the idea that dramaturgy is a way of putting people in conversation with one another. Is dramaturgy a term that is meaningful to you in your daily work, or one that you use specifically? JHT: It comes up. The first curator I invited to curate was Ralph Lemon because of the long relationship I have had with him. I asked him how he could take his artistic research and turn that into curatorial research. I suggested we invite an editor for his [Danspace] book.2 Of course, he wanted to bring Katherine Profeta, his dramaturg for over 20 years. What Katherine brought was her skills as a dramaturg. I became convinced that every small contemporary dance organization or theater should have a dramaturg on staff. PE: What did Katherine’s perspective bring into the room?

Figure 9.3  Ralph Lemon, An All Day Event. The End (part of Platform 2012: Parallels), 2012, Danspace Project.

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JHT: The first thing she brought into the room was her years of experience of working with Ralph. They trust each other; she has written about this collaboration.3 The second thing was that she tracked everything; she attended all the meetings and many rehearsals, took fastidious notes, and became the editor of the [Danspace] book. Ralph decided to ask every artist the same four questions, which was great but also a bit odd because they were really different people. The answers were all over the place, but Katherine, having been there and having had conversations with the artists on what they were after, created a format in the publication that contained the complexity. PE: She was able to organize the complexity of the project in a way that was helpful to the publication, but was also helpful to the concept of the project itself. JHT: Yes. That was the first Platform [in 2010] and a lot of people missed it, but I immediately saw the potential in that. PE: Was this the first time in the United States that a project of this kind had been done, where you had such a strong relationship between the collective presentation of ideas through practice, followed by its ref lection and extension in the form of a publication? JHT: So much is lost to our theater and dance history. I imagine someone has done something similar at some point, but I do not know of any recent examples. PE: It is a strong idea to combine the curatorial relationship, presentational relationship, artistic process, and then ref lection. JHT: Right, and actually that was the idea I had at the start, that it would activate a series of relationships. Seeing Ralph’s amazing conversations with other younger choreographers off to the side, I wondered “what if we just took that and made it part of the Platform?” I have not kept that as a conscious thread although I think the way that we function as a curatorial team is in and of itself dramaturgical, with everyone holding different bits and pieces of questions. I am working on a Platform with choreographer Reggie Wilson, who says that the Platform serves a very important dramaturgical function for the field. The themes develop by the organic and ongoing conversation I am having with the curators. For instance, Ishmael just kept talking about this artist friend he had lost, John Bernd, and he found his box of letters and zines. He mentioned that in three conversations in a row, and at some point it had occurred to me that we were already talking about a Platform about HIV/AIDS. BF: Not a show? JHT: Not a show. It was not where I was going, but it was just so urgent. I tried to listen to that, because that is the only way I have worked in this field. PE: Where did the name “Platform” come from? JHT: I used to teach a beginner class on writing about art in the University of Colorado. I filled in for my visual artist friends and ended up staying there for a few years as an adjunct. Since the students were not art majors or dance majors, I was trying to figure out a way to get them to think creatively about

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writing, so I started an assignment called Community Curating. I  broke them into teams and taught them how to brainstorm around conceiving of ­curatorial projects within a framework, with prompts like “you have no budget, you can use any artist in history, and I want you to really think about breaking through the walls.” Another inspiration was from the mid-2000s, when I became interested in what Hans Ulrich Obrist was doing at the Serpentine Gallery with the 24-hour interview marathon,4 and when Okwui Envezor had just become the first non-European curator of Documenta. “Platform” is his term; I was so struck by the idea of platforms that, first of all, decentralized the main event, in Kassel, and inaugurated it 18 months in advance. He had platforms in different parts of the world, like Delhi and Brazil. He also invited a team to work with him. All of those components, both politically and by their generative nature, were very important to my thinking. These experiments from a decade before inf luenced my conception of the Platforms. Their politics is embedded in their design. They also require changing the way we think about time curatorially. Inside the Platforms, I talk to the curators about time from the beginning: If we are going to break down the status quo, then we have to revisit the way we are using time. If you have this week and every hour is in the lease, how would you want to use that? One curator might say: “Well, let’s use Monday night for this, and Tuesday night for that, and let’s take all day Saturday to do performances.” Ralph made a ten-hour marathon, or with Eiko, nothing started at 8 PM. BF: Given that each Platform is curated by a different artist or artists, how do you negotiate your role within that? JHT One of my roles as the artistic director of the Platform is to pose generative questions along the way during the two-year process. I often find myself restating the curator’s original questions in order to think of them as a curatorial inquiry. They are not going to be answered necessarily, but they are informative, they keep opening up other questions. Sometimes in the process of making concrete choices, such as inviting performers, I ask whether we are addressing the curatorial question. Are all the questions still relevant? Do those questions relate to what or who is being overlooked? With Lost and Found, we did a lot of that. Will and Ishmael spent a lot of time to get clear about [where to focus and decided] not to try to cover all dance but rather focus on a certain aesthetic from mostly downtown New York, PS122, Danspace Project, and the Kitchen. I kept asking, “What about so and so?” They finally pushed back and said, “No, we’re not going to be able to include that artist.” It is important for me to ask questions in order to keep clarifying. PE: I am interested in the term “relational curating,” whether that has any meaning for you at the moment or whether there is a connection with relational aesthetics.5

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Figure 9.4  Variations on Themes from Lost & Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd, directed by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Miguel Gutierrez (part of Platform 2016: Lost & Found), Danspace Project, 2016. 

JHT: I always knew that I was activating relations and networks. After the first three or four Platforms, I felt power in this. It was an absolutely dynamic, living, breathing event that was created—both in private, in the creation process of the Platform, and in the unfolding of the actual event itself. So, when I read a particular quote from a text Nicolas Bourriaud wrote after Relational Aesthetics (2002), I thought of it as a funny coincidence. I had a colleague years ago who said, “I’m so pissed off about ‘relational aesthetics,’ because isn’t that what we all do in the performing arts?” But we have not articulated what that is except saying “We collaborate. We all pitch-in in the theater.” Have we really unpacked what that collaboration is? I do think there is something powerful about looking at what it is that we do, what we take for granted, examine it, and make that strange. People in theater do do this. PE: Yes, especially dramaturgs who look at things from different perspectives. You’ve been talking a lot about the relations that you have with other artists, those very important moments in the early 2000s around relational aesthetics, curatorship, and Enwezor’s experiments with Documenta. They are part of a movement toward creating a stronger relationship between performing arts and social practice broadly. JHT: I would say that what I am interested in is the complexity of various registers. I make sure the Platform does not get stuck in one kind of form, that is, just lectures and talks or just performances. PE: So, the curatorial role is very much to make sure that there is a relationship between these different practices, that they coexist and one does not disappear into the other in the process. Let’s shift gears a little here. You have

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used the word “status quo” quite a few times. What is the status quo you are upending? I come back to it because we talk about these circles and relations of power generally, and we can upend one status quo but not another. Can you imagine this project making bigger circles and relations to larger problematics around status quo? Or do we not need to do that? JHT: I do not know the answer to that. I don’t want the big institutions to disappear. I love going to a big museum as much as I like to challenge the status quo. I worry about throwing everything away, because then what are we left with? What I am calling for is to question how we use our buildings, our platforms, our resources, rather than to start over. When a small organization is running out of money, I hear people say: “Well, maybe its day is done,” but there were hundreds of artists who contributed to that organization! That is what I met at Danspace. I am not against that legacy, what I am saying is you cannot just sit on it. You have to enlighten it, activate it, question and provoke it. That is what my job is.

Notes 1 Ishmael Houston-Jones, Will Rawls, and Jaime Shearn Coan (eds), Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/ AIDS, Then and Now (New York: Danspace Project, 2016). 2 Ralph Lemon’s Danspace Platform and book/catalogue are entitled I Get Lost. 3 See Katherine Profeta, Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). 4 Art critic, historian, curator, and director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, Obrist organized a full-day, non-stop marathon of interviews with artists, writers, scientists, and historians over 28–29 July 2006 at the Serpentine Pavilion designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, which was followed by two other marathons in the consecutive years. Also see Serpentine Gallery 24-Hour Interview Marathon: London, 2006. 5 French art critic, theoretician, and curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s term describes those art practices that create and make use of human relations and socialities as their aesthetic end point.

10 Will the f lirting continue? Interview with Ana Janevski

This interview took place in the staff offices at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC in October 2017. Ana was the first person we interviewed for this project. There have been a number of significant changes to MoMA and Ana’s career since this interview occurred. Ana curated the pivotal and award-­w inning exhibit Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done, which ran from September 2018 to February 2019 and featured live reenactments of past performances. In October 2019, MoMA opened its new building with expanded galleries and spaces for performance. Peter Eckersall: Your current title at MoMA is Associate Curator in the Media and Performance Art Department where you have been working actively on the performance program since 2011. Can you say what you did before coming to MoMA? Ana Janevski: I worked at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw from 2007 to 2011. The museum was housed in a temporary venue that was an ex-furniture shop in a typical socialist block of f lats in the center of Warsaw. Together when we started, we were a staff of six people. We had the opportunity to start the institution from scratch, and when you start something from scratch, you also have the opportunity to invent new models and to shape things in a certain way. I think it has changed now, but at the time we decided not to use the word “curator” or curatorial department and to think more in terms of research, education, and production. It stemmed from this idealist vision of a cultural worker, being affiliated with a state-funded museum, which was at the time, one of the first museums of modern art in the country that was about to be built. We were asking ourselves: “What is our social responsibility? What do we want to do? What do we stand for?” So, we thought it was important to expand curatorial discourse and we wanted to avoid certain curatorial definitions as “mediator,” or “catalyzer” and so on, and to reinvent what that could be. I curated the opening exhibition of the museum—As soon as I open my eyes I see a film: Experimental Film and Art in former Yugoslavia in the Sixties and Seventies. In Yugoslavia, experimental film was connected to visual art in the sixties and seventies with disciplines intertwined enabled by the structures of culture of production in the country producing an

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avant-garde in film and in visual arts. In terms of my relation to performance, at the time there were no disciplinary divisions, the practice of many contemporary artists comprises performance, and historically Fluxus art in the 60s and 70s were also rooted in performance. I co-­organized with Pierre Bal-Blanc, at the time the director of Contemporary Arts Center in Brétigny in Paris and one of the Documenta XIV, “The Living Currency – La Monnaie Vivante,” inspired by Pierre Klossowski’s theory of the body as currency exchange. It was a performance exhibition for five hours with different works on the stage—­subverting the time and space framework of an exhibition because you could see many performances happening on the stage simultaneously, but it was really impossible to embrace it all together. There were performances from Roman Ondák, Santiago Sierra, Teresa Margolles, Franz Erhard Walther, and many different artists dealing with performance—particularly those using the body as a tool. We presented the project in one of the biggest theaters in Warsaw (theaters in Poland have a very important and rich tradition, and, unlike in the United States, they are where most of the budget and subsidies go in comparison to contemporary art). The project created a lot of controversy and it was clear that there was a lot of theoretical vocabulary missing in relation to performance so together with Joanna Warsza we organized a series of lectures, The Performative Turn. Shortly after that I received the invitation from MoMA and Sabine Breitwieser at the time chief curator of the department. Working in the Department of Media and Performance has been very special, it is the youngest and smallest department in the museum. It started in 2006 as the department of media and then became the Department of Media and Performance in 2009. There was this sense of starting something new, similar to how I was working in Warsaw—of course it’s a different context, on a different scale, yet there was some similarity. I work very closely with artists and engage in discussions with them. Every performance is so different, and usually happens in different spaces. There are less conventions and codes with performances in museums than with exhibitions in museums. So, there’s not really so much to deconstruct; there is something more to build. When I arrived, I felt openness and a sense of possibility similar to how I felt in Warsaw. PE: Could you share your ref lections on the fact that you have arrived in this job at a time when there has been a very strong interest in performance in the gallery context? Major galleries are investing in new infrastructure to provide for this, and there’s a lot of theoretical work developed and inf luenced by Claire Bishop, Adrian Heathfield, and André Lepecki’s works. The performative turn itself is a turn that comes from performance studies, relating to both its sociological formation but also in response to postdramatic theater. We could say that performance has always been associated with an art history context, but there is something quite particular about this moment in

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Figure 10.1  Judson Dance Theatre, The Work is Never Done, 2018. 

contemporary galleries and their interest in performance. Do you agree that this moment is specific, or, in terms of its timing, what does today’s fascination for performance in a gallery context mean? AJ: When I came to New York in 2011, the main topic was “dance in the museum.” With the hype of “performance art” in the museum, with Marina Abramovic, the Guggenheim show a few years earlier, and then the “Artist is Present,” it felt somehow over. I’ve been to so many conferences where those things were discussed; I organized some of them. From the inside however, you have the feeling that you are striving for those things, to make them happen. Sometimes museums play on the spectacularity of the living presence, but the reality of the institution is that they are not always equipped or there is not such an interest as it might appear from the outside. How to include time-based art or process-based art in the collection and into the programming, it’s a challenging task. I know this from talking to my colleague Catherine Wood, who is also curating performance at Tate. She’s almost been through a fight, and I know that Stuart Comer, who is now running the Media and Performance Art department at MoMA, was a film curator at Tate and had this same fight. I think there is this kind of (maybe institutional) conf lict, between the presence of the live, the affective impact that it can have, and the reality of how to put it on. I organized a conference with my colleague Cosmin Costinas, who is running Para/Site Art Space in Hong Kong, which we called “The New Performance Turn: Its Histories and its Institutions: Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive?” One of the participants, Georg Schollhammer, started his lecture showing an image from Sex and the City, from an episode in which they mimic one of the Marina Abramovic performances [House with Ocean View]. He said, “Well, we can say it started from here.”

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André Lepecki, in the book Dance [Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art, 2012], gives reasons why dance is so popular: for its ephemerality, precarity, liveness, the presence of the body, and so on. We have an extensive amount of writing on what performance means in our neoliberal world, in terms of the double meaning of performance and the performative skills that we have to have on a daily basis, and in terms of the idea of the immaterial. The Whitney has opened a performance space, the Tate opened the Tanks, and MoMA is now working on designated space as well. But these initiatives are still part of dominant institutions. You have institutions that have been doing it longer but have less visibility. I think there is something about the scale that changes the meaning of things. It’s much more difficult to be experimental at MoMA than to be experimental at another smaller institution because it is almost as if the scale doesn’t allow it. I’ve mentioned Pierre Bal-Blanc working with the exhibition of “time.” We know that Tino Sehgal made the step from conceptual dance into visual art, knowing exactly how to use all the modes of production and conceptual codes, adapting them to this environment in terms of commodity, asking how to commodify the immaterial work. As much as he is a contested figure, he is still a leader in the field in that way. I can name at least three choreographers who managed to respond to the coordinates of the exhibition in terms of space and time (Claire Bishop also talks about that): Maria Hassabi, Xavier Le Roy, and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. I am also very curious to see what will be the next move: are we going to work more with theater people, are there some new ideas to be explored? Because when you talk to artists, they get inspired by possibilities they encounter in the galleries and museums. Or will they go back to theater and continue as they did and that will be all? Or will the f lirting continue?

Figure 10.2  Trajal Harrell, The Practice, 2014.

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PE: Do you relate at all to the term dramaturg or dramaturgy? You have talked about the conf lict with the dramaturg of the theater house, which was perhaps stemming from an anxiety about this new kind of activity taking place in the building. But as somebody who works within a curatorial practice on live performance, does dramaturgy come into your thinking at all? AJ: Yes, a lot. Although it would be very pretentious of me to say that I have been one, I do think about dramaturgy. Many people I am in contact with work as dramaturgs, such as Eda Čufer, Bojana Cvejić, Ana Vujanović, Noémie Solomon. If you move from production and get more involved in the process of the work, then there is this element of dramaturgy that you are immediately a part of. I call it “playing dirty” because your hands are being somewhere but you don’t want to be someone like a bricklayer or whatever you are trying to adopt. I think it’s important to be inspired and open to know about other ways of working. I’m someone who doesn’t believe really in curating studies, for example; I had never taken any kind of classes. Because it is exactly about the way in which you look, in an inspiring way. There is this idea of curator, but you can also form it yourself so that it is not only about the curator’s figure but about people that might be inf luential in your way of thinking. Bertie Ferdman: This is a good segue way to go into context because a lot of what dramaturgy has to deal with is creating a context for an event, asking questions like “Who’s the audience? How long is the event? Who’s coming? What time? What are the elements of the institutional framework around the work?” How do you think about creating the context for specific works? Does that change depending on the artists and the events that you are commissioning? How do you create a context for each work? AJ: There is still no performance space here at MoMA.1 The [Marron] Atrium is not a space for performance; it’s a specific public space that has been used for performance, but artists worked in so many different spaces and galleries. There were a few places that worked well, but since they are used for sculptures, we could not get them permanently. So there is already this problem of space and time, whether the artists are comfortable with opening hours and with the f low of the public. Most of the performances have a beginning and an end. I think that Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s piece [Work/Travail/Arbeid, presented at MoMA in 2017] was very good in understanding that: the public had the choice of sitting and watching, or moving around, or being distracted and moving on. In that sense, she’s very deliberately breaking the conventions of theater. She adapted her theater piece “Vortex” to the time and space of an art institution. She was able to embrace the f low of the general public, during the opening hours of the museum when the visitors can get surprised and decide to stay, and there is also part of the public who would come for that event in particular. I’m against imposing artists a requirement to fill the whole day only because the museum is open all day. It is a proposal and some of them can react to that, but it’s fine if some of them don’t.

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Figure 10.3  Jerome Bel, Artist’s Choice: Jérôme Bel/MoMA Dance Company, 2016. 

I read somewhere that, around when Boris Charmatz was invited to Tate, two scholars from London discovered that the average attention span in front of a painting is 15 seconds, while performances happen to have more than a few minutes. For [the first installment of ] Musée de la Danse [2013, entitled “20 Dancers for the XX Century,” a project conceived] by Boris Charmatz, there were 20 dancers all over the museum performing solos. We were so criticized by critics and scholars in dance and art fields because of the conditions of light and acoustics. However, because I spent a lot of time in the galleries, I got the impression that the general public was more at ease with those aspects. With Musée de la Danse, Boris’ ref lection was on the history of dance as an archive. How do you then transmit the knowledge? Is a dancer’s body an archive or not? There is this institutional element of two museums, the department of Media and Performance and Musée de la Danse. It felt like an exchange of what we can do together. How can we change our experience for this idea of a more ephemeral institution or an institution that can happen everywhere: Musée de la Danse and a very monolithic institution such as MoMA that is also working with performance and dance? I learned a lot from that experience and so did the museum. How those dancing works react to the gallery space, the relationship to spectatorship, and so on. It was also the first time that the Musée de la Danse performed in such a big institution. BF: One of the performances that I was really struck by was the staging of a rehearsal… AJ: By Trajal Harrell? BF: Yes. It was called “The Practice” [2014]. AJ: That was part of his two-year commission residency for In one step are a thousand animals and it was completely new and experimental. When we

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Figure 10.4  Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Work/Travail/Arbeid, MoMA 2017.

started to talk, I asked him “How do you work? What’s your process of working?” He described to me how he works with “islands” and the performers. I thought it was great and encouraged him to start the residency with that. He called it a practice, to claim that it’s not a rehearsal, nor a performance. Over two years he worked in different spaces of the museum and with different formats. His last piece, the commissioned piece, the culmination of the residency [“In the Mood for Frankie,” 2016], took place at 10 and 11:30 in the evening, in a corridor, it felt very underground for what the museum. The residency was very process based, very generative to the extent that Trajal developed three pieces: “The Practice,” “The Return of La Argentina” and “In the Mood for Frankie.” His project at the Barbican was based on this residency and I think it’s important to develop the support of museum as interlocutor. PE: It’s interesting to me that the museum has become a space where artists are willing to share their process. That’s very rare to see the process in a theater context. For instance, Xavier Le Roy’s piece [Retrospective] at MoMA PS1 [2015] was a kind of extended meditation on his process. AJ: Yes, but it was a retrospective. PE: It was a retrospective, but we got insights into how the work is made. Trajal Harrell’s work also falls into that category. A couple of years ago at the Whitney Biennale, Richard Maxwell did a work where he staged a rehearsal for a play that he wrote specifically for that event. It was like a working day at the theater; the actors came and started at 10 AM and finished at 6 PM. They basically did a rehearsal in the way that they always do rehearsals. We could consider this dramaturgically, given that there are variables in a gallery that one can’t control. You don’t have acoustic purity, you don’t have

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good lighting, you don’t have good sound—although Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker was an exception because they had an exceptional sound designer. In other words, there is a space that is open and porous. Considering these leads us to a more open-ended, process-based kind of work. BF: Holding on to the question of the audience and whether you can predict what the audience is going to do, how do you see your role in connection with the artist and the museum audience? AJ: For sure, it’s something I take into consideration when we start discussions with the artists; where, and how, and for whom… MoMA sometimes can be difficult in terms of whom you are addressing, particularly when things are happening during the day, as there are so many people visiting the museum. When I was in Warsaw, the audience was a huge concern, we were constantly thinking about whom we were addressing, how we addressed them, how we made them engaged. BF: Do you see your role in any way as a mediator? I’m thinking about the dramaturg’s role in the theater, in helping artists to make sure that the work translates in a way or is accessible and contextualized for the audience. Do you see similarities with your role? AJ: Yes, I’m the one who writes all the didactic material, and work very closely with the artists to think about the space and the f low of the audience. BF: Going back to intentionality, do you think that this interest in dance and live performance is motivated by the aim to engage the audience for longer durations, or to draw them to the museum and have them see other works? AJ: I don’t think that museums like MoMA need live events to bring more audiences. Definitely not. There is average three million people visiting MoMA over a year. Performance is definitely part of the art historical narrative, I worked a lot on the collection, on acquisitions and proposing works from artists that haven’t been in the collection, and not only from Eastern Europe but also from Latin America and Asia. And African American artists as well. I have invited some artists who had never performed in MoMA, including Yvonne Rainer, who’d never performed in MoMA before 2015 and bringing works by Simone Forti dance Constructions in the collection. PE: There was an evening symposium, where there were a series of curators from major American institutions. I was interested in their language. One of them in particular, I think Carlos Basualdo [curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art], said: “The purpose of this for me is that it brings new audiences to the galleries…” AJ: Yes, but that’s different: new audiences versus more audience. For me, bringing performance to the museum is also a way of democratization, because I don’t think that lots of people would have the opportunity to see Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, for such reasons as theater ticket price. BF: A way to make performance more accessible to a wider audience, even though it circulates differently.

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AJ: I believe there is an educational purpose here. I wouldn’t underestimate the audience members who would come in the evening on purpose to see the performance. For instance, Yvonne Rainer performed at MoMA for the first time two years ago [The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move?, 2015], and Simone Forti made a comeback four years ago, after her performances in the garden back in the 1970s and 1980s. Those are the kind of things that are not really there to attract new audiences. You’re putting things in place in a certain way because that’s where they should happen, considering the history in which they began performing, with those performances in the galleries. That said, I remember Simone Forti performing News Animations [presented at MoMA in 2013] the first time, in the galleries of the fourth f loor, with Carl Andre and Bruce Nauumann in two adjacent rooms. She didn’t like it so much; it was too many people and she felt very confused, so the second time she preferred to perform in the after-hours. Yvonne Rainer said there was no way she could perform during the day, which is interesting because th ey have this history of performing in galleries. Yvonne Rainer was very demanding in fact: “I need frontal, I need light, I need seating, I like clarity…” It became an evening event, but I still think the context brought something different than theater. It was the same performance she did at The Kitchen, but it was very different. Namely the MoMA performance incorporated Rousseau’s “Sleeping Gypsy” from the Museum’s collection that has fascinated Rainer since her arrival in New York in 1956. Every day at 5:30 for four days in a row, the art handlers would remove the painting from the wall and the painting would be a part of the performance. PE: I was really struck by the difference with Maria Hassabi’s work here at MoMA [PLASTIC, 2016] that took place all over the building, to what she did in The Kitchen with her 90-minute piece [STAGED, 2016]. AJ: Yes, they were not the same piece, but they have a close aesthetic form… Another similar piece of hers was in the context of River to River Festival’s programming, at a public space. It was downtown, in front of the New York Stock Exchange. It worked so well outside. I think PLASTIC worked so well in MoMA for similar reasons, precisely because in the beginning the public felt very scared of the piece, in a way that gave more tension to the work and added something to the architecture. It is an instance where you have the audience bringing something to the piece that you could not have anywhere else. BF: How do you deal with ephemera? Do you work with a team? How do you assist in the collaborative effort of mounting the performance? AJ: This museum is super-efficient in organizing exhibitions; it’s like an exhibition machine! A good number of people are involved, from exhibition designer to light engineer to art handlers. Whatever you can imagine that are there for the objects, it’s there for performances, too. What you call mise-enscène in theater, we call “display” in visual arts. When we work with foreign

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exhibitions or performance exhibitions, we always work with exhibition designers, because you need someone who can tell you how to space things, where to put a speaker, whether to turn the light on or off. They also come into the picture when the artists want to change something for the context. BF: It’s what we would call a Technical Director in theater context. AJ: Yes, but in a gallery, it’s called Exhibition Designer. But, for example, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has her own team, which then worked closely with our AV person. For lights, we had to hire someone from the outside, just to give us an idea of what to do. It’s the same person we worked with for Boris Charmatz, and it was the same principle they used for his work. In terms of sound, although MoMA has an excellent AV team, they usually work with displays, film screenings, video installations and the like. In that sense, we are using the tools for the exhibition, but changing it a bit for performance. It is also interesting how performance shapes the infrastructure of the museum. Now we have a performance producer, I think Tate does, too. When I started, I was just doing those things on my own—and it was crazy. I  remember Ralph Lemon telling me “What you have just done is called ‘stage managing’.” PE: To conclude our conversation, what is good curatorial practice in relation to live art? What do you see as the future of this concentration on live performance in gallery spaces? AJ: Well, the answer to the first question is maybe not very original, but I do think that you learn simply by working with artists. That’s how I learned the most. If you have the opportunity to work with good artists who are very devoted, and interested in thinking about the space, time, audience, what it means to be in this context, you can learn a lot. After all, it’s an invitation. If it’s an existing piece, then it is more about thinking of the piece in this context, like in the case of Boris Charmatz or Jérôme Bel, it’s lots of listening but also reciprocating artists’ demands. It’s a collaboration, really; they expect arguments and exchange. We don’t do catalogues, but we still have brochures, wall texts, publicity materials that we produce. We are trying to enrich the presentation of the work, so it’s a collaboration in that way. As to the future, I am curious about it. I don’t think I’m able to foresee it yet. I know that MoMA will open a new performance space in 2019. It will be in the middle between a black box and a white cube. It’s more of a personal note, but I curated my first performance here at MoMA on April 7th five years ago, so I feel like with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker I’m closing a cycle. I’m very eager to just observe what is happening now and see whether museums can be active in commissioning performance or not. It is counter-intuitive to the operation of the museum, so it remains to be seen.

11 How can one employ strategies from theater as curatorial strategies? Interview with Florian Malzacher

We interviewed Florian Malzacher in November 2019 via Skype. In January of 2020, we met for coffee when Florian came to New York for the Under the Radar festival. We had been reading Florian’s publications: his edited collection Empty Stages, Crowded Flats. Performativity as Curatorial Strategy (2017) was especially relevant to developing our thinking in this book. Florian’s work on political theater, performing knowledge, and activism has been inf luential and inspiring to many people. Peter Eckersall: How do you describe what you do? Could you ref lect on how your work as a dramaturg and curator has changed over time? Florian Malzacher: A lot of my view on working in and with theater has been formed during my studies at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies at the University of Giessen in the second half of the 1990s. It was the first place in Germany to try to merge theory and practice in the field of theater and to put a strong focus on experimental, non-dramatic theater forms. Today this time is considered the golden years of the Institute – my fellow students were for example the members of Showcase Beat Le Mot (SCBLM), Rimini Protokoll, Gob Squad, She She Pop… But paradoxically the dominant feeling then was quite the opposite: that we were there too late, that we had missed Giessen’s highpoint. Former students like René Pollesch, professors like Hans-Thies Lehmann were long gone and there seemed to be no clear destination anymore. So we worked, made performances, studied, critiqued each other heavily, but it felt a bit like we were stranded in an indistinct town in the middle of nowhere. But in fact, this feeling of a void might have been the best thing that could have happened to us. It gave room to a lot of our own ideas – and it also changed my own way of working. Because from the beginning, we were never trained to be one thing. You don’t graduate from Giessen as a theater director, curator, dramaturg, or even a theater scholar. You learn lots of bits and pieces that do not make sense if you just put them all together. I became a theater critic and had the opportunity to work with newspapers and magazines, like Frankfurter Rundschau and Theater Heute, without ever having been trained in journalism or criticism. The same with curating. After finishing studies in 2000, a group of us founded a curators’ collective called “Unfriendly Takeover” in Frankfurt.1 I think I had

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never read anything about curating. In retrospect I do not even know why we called ourselves “curators” at a time when no one in theater did. But anyway: we considered ourselves curators and for five years we organized quite a few no- and low-budget projects that soon became a relevant part of Frankfurt’s subculture. The idea to consider ourselves a collective came out of Giessen, where most students at that time would rather work in groups than as solo directors. Also, from the very beginning our idea of curating was very performative. Eventually I stopped being a critic because you cannot be involved with artistic creations while at the same time writing negative reviews of other artists, especially in Germany where theater critics were still expected to be strictly objective and detached – you should not even talk to the artists that you write about. So, when I got an offer to join Veronica Kaup-Hasler for steirischer herbst festival in Graz/Austria as a co-programmer, I changed sides.2 From one day to the next, I was co-curating a festival. I had never looked much into festivals until then. I had visited Kunstenfestivaldesarts and others, but while Veronica was an experienced festival maker it was not a specific interest of mine. In a Giessen way of thinking that was also an advantage: I thought a festival needed to have a clear narration, a dramaturgy of different intensities, a strong overlap of artistic genres, a magazine with articles that were not only about the festival’s productions but on related topics. I just believed that’s how it was done – but actually only very few festivals were on a similar path. So, one could say that for quite a while I and many others from Giessen were carried by the belief that, since we didn’t have too much practical knowledge of anything, we actually could do everything. Bertie Ferdman: Was that arrogance or naivety? FM: Both! The fact that we did not know about a lot of things often made us believe that we invented them. I explored the possibilities of the job by doing it. What does it mean to write about performances? How can you use the immediacy of daily newspapers for a different kind of discourse? What does it mean to be a dramaturg in a non-dramatic production? What is it to curate in theater? And what are the specific relations of all these jobs to the artistic work itself, where does it overlap, where does it need distance? More and more, I became interested in experimenting with what it could mean to curate programs that would be more precise than whole festivals. What if you do a conference where everybody has to walk while the lecturers are speaking? What would it do to the discourse? What does duration do with an audience? Or programming “too much”? How to play with narration and dramaturgy? We just tried out things. I was beginning to understand what it could mean to curate in the field of theater, performance, and choreography, where the conditions are different from visual arts. How can one employ but also co-invent strategies, forms, and concepts from theater, dance, and performance as curatorial strategies? One of the most important shifts for me came with a project titled “Truth is Concrete.”3 We started thinking about this in 2011–2012, the time of the

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uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, and Spain… Suddenly conversations with artists shifted. You could not meet with an artist in Cairo and seriously say: “Can we have the world premiere of your new project?” while people were demonstrating and risking their freedom or health. We decided to dedicate an edition of steirischer herbst to the question of the relationship between art and politics, but we also wanted to suspend the normal way of how we do a festival. “Truth is Concrete” was a marathon and a camp focusing on artistic strategies in politics and political strategies in art. It lasted for one week, day and night, 160 hours without any break. We invited around 200 artists, activists, and theorists from all over the world, as well as 100 students and young ­professionals – and of course the general local but also international public. We tried to invent a format that would push the limits of the festival, make it more radical but also more vulnerable – and that would be useful to the many politically engaged artists all over the world. We also tried to see what would come out of negotiating art, curating, and activism in such proximity. It was quite an experiment and a defining moment for my practice and understanding of my work until today. Of course this was a topic that at the same time was taken on by a few others, for example the Berlin Biennale 2012 that was directed by Artur Żmijewski and co-curated by Joanna Warsza, who at that time became my partner – so there was obviously an exchange of ideas and a lot of shared research.4 BF: That seems to be an example of where dramaturgy and curating merged completely. FM: I’m not totally happy with the term “curating” since it is so much linked to the visual arts. I started using it myself in order to challenge the

Figure 11.1  “Truth is Concrete” at steirischer herbst Source: © Wolfgang Silveri.

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Figure 11.2  “Truth is Concrete” at steirischer herbst Source: © Wolfgang Silveri.

idea of what programming could be. And I chose this term also because, from a German perspective, a dramaturg holds a very specific position in theater, very much linked to drama. Both terms might create misunderstandings – but at least the term curator was the bigger provocation within the system of theater. Still, the concept of the dramaturg also has something in its favor, since it is about creating a dramaturgy for an event, to think dramaturgically about curation and programming, an idea that for example Beatrice von Bismarck has put forward.5 PE: Can I ask about the mechanics of the “Truth is Concrete” event? You started out your festival program by providing contexts for conversation and information, so that when you entered a festival you no longer just saw performances, but attended talks, or read a magazine. There were multiple sources of artistic practice and discourse being mixed into what was on a stage or on display. I think this structure is very inf luential. I am thinking of the visual art critic Boris Groys, who says that art is now about communicating some kind of informative perspective to a viewer or group of spectators.6 I am also interested in some of the provocations or challenges that this structure poses to the previously established cultural economy around artistic productions and festivals. When you program a durational festival over one week, what kind of pressures does that put on the technical apparatus, the artistic infrastructure, the system of programming artists who rely on three- or four-nights-presentation in order to keep their companies running? FM: “Truth is Concrete” is still quite unique in the international scene, also because the festival had the means – both financial but also in terms of the team – to take on such a mammoth project. We really wanted to take the risk. By then we had worked for seven years in Graz, so there was also

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a strong relationship with the audiences and the team. As you described it, the aim was to contextualize works differently and to rethink the relationship between artistic disciplines themselves but also between art and theory, art and activism. And: our take was very much coming from the perspective of theater and its specific competence in bringing people together in a certain frame of time and space. It is maybe important to mention that steirischer herbst is one of the few truly multi-disciplinary festivals out there, and this since about 50 years. But we were the first people coming mainly from theater to program it. BF: You have a lot of books that you worked on with artists, and you have published around performativity and theatricality. Can you speak to the critical perspectives you bring to discourse, or the artists that inf luence how you think about curating situations? Peter mentioned Groys, for example, and I am thinking of Shannon Jackson.7 Who else informs your work? FM: Of course, I am inf luenced by them and many others – directly or indirectly. In recent years though, I have become increasingly interested in political theories. For instance, Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonism and agonistic spheres for me resonates very well with the potential of theater as a political space; a place where conf lict can be enacted.8 Even the most conventional theater is doing that: from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to psychological drama where the conf lict is contained within one person – this is what theater is about. What does it mean to create agonistic spheres within the context of curating theater? In fact, this discourse was maybe more inf luential for me than most straightforward theater or curating theories. Even though curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist had an inf luence on my thinking about curating, I was never too interested in reading theoretical stuff about curating itself.9 In the end it was often more about learning from artistic practices than from colleagues. For example I collaborated a few times with the Dutch artist Jonas Staal,10 who creates political assemblies and summits as part of his artistic work, but also many others. BF: Since you are talking about assemblies – when we interviewed Gurur Ertem, she also talked about Chantal Mouffe as a big inf luence, and how they had to stop the iDANS Festival after 2013 because of what was going on in Turkey.11 In terms of assemblies and creating situations that bring conf lict to bare, it seems like you are playing with the concept of the audience and the modes of spectatorship. Is that a concern when you are conceptualizing and shaping your events? FM: For me the main competence of theater lies in the creation of temporary communities within a specific frame. In this regard, I am less interested in spectators, but more in participants or at least witnesses. We are all “in” something with our different positions and perspectives. Not everything has to be participatory in a literal way. But the space of togetherness is the main feature of theater. This offers the opportunity to create situations that are real and symbolic, that allow one to be inside and outside at the same time. I think theater is an amazing paradoxical machine that can contribute to political

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action and theory precisely by being neither real politics nor not politics. It is not an assembly like Occupy Wall Street because it does not believe in the authenticity and the immersiveness of its situational assembly. It challenges us at the same time to be part of and to ref lect on this participation. BF: I think we are getting to the kernel of how dramaturgy is not taught in the United States. Dramaturgy is only related to separate, contained events. Conceptualizing the dramaturgy of the event as real or not real, in a Brechtian way, is not taught here and we almost never explore it. PE: Dramaturgy is often taught in relation to the perception of a market driven demand for a text-based model of dramaturgy. I think curatorial practice is more advanced on this account. The United States is a different context also because of the inf luence of US-perspectives on race that have been coming into curatorial practices and dramaturgical practices right now. Florian, your work has been inspiring particularly in the way you have engaged with political theories. Could you ref lect on how you have created those conversations with people like Mouffe? I have been reading the work of Jodi Dean, and I am always struck by her resistance to artistic practice as a meaningful contribution to political activity.12 On the one hand we have somebody like Mouffe who has much embraced the relationship of politics to artistic practice, on the other hand important contemporary political theorists sit ambiguously in relation to artistic practice. How do you address these conf licts within the political sphere and bring them into your artistic practice? FM: Indeed, one could say that part of my work is trying to argue against the idea of autonomy of art and against the strange concept that art is only political when it is not political, as it is very popular within the art world. My conversations on these topics are rather with people that believe in a political potential of art. In this regard Chantal Mouffe has always been very open to my – if you wish – misuse of her political theory as a curatorial concept. Other political theorists I had the privilege of having rather regular conversations with would be Oliver Marchart and Boris Buden (both of whom were part of a kind of advisory board we created for the Impulse Theater Festival, which I directed from 2013–2017). Oliver’s concept of pre-enactment was quite inspiring for us when working on Impulse.13 For him, artistic practice enables political thinking and artistic works can be pre-enactments of future political events. I guess I am very Brechtian in many ways. For me artistic work is part of the world I live in – and the world is part of the artistic work. And, yes, I do instrumentalize art once in a while – as most people do: When one is in love or sad, reading poetry is meant to be helpful for oneself. You use this love poetry for your own purpose, what else would you do with it? In this line of thought, I simply don’t understand why art and politics have to be separated – especially in the world we are living in right now. Yes, art and politics are not the same. But, as I said, I believe that theater has the strange ability to be politics and not politics at the same time. It doesn’t need to decide, it can be both. That is an unresolvable paradox – and there is a lot to be gained from it.

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BF: I just finished reading Hito Steyerl’s Duty Free Art,14 where she talks about the circularity of how art cannot get out of itself. She tries to amplify what is real so that people can see this awful subjectivity we are living in, where it is complete surveillance and hyper-realism, where we no longer know what is being controlled. In a way it is like what you are saying about the inside/outside situation of theater. However, she is very pessimistic, saying that art can never get away from its own institutionality, its own vicious cycle, although she is talking about visual art. Perhaps in theater there is more hope for community building or inclusive audiences, since the economies of the visual art market are totally different. FM: Maybe this again leads us to the specificity of theater: Hito Steyerl is very much talking about what she can show to people, how she in her work can represent the world – from all I know of her, it seems that she is not very interested in negotiating the relationship with the audience, in trying out different forms of participation. Additionally, the system of the visual art world with its hegemonic attitude and extreme proximity to the market is still very different from the kind of theater I am interested in. So maybe we are still in a privileged situation. Not outside of the capitalist system, but slightly closer to the fringes. BF: Yes, she is trying to use her art to unveil what’s really going on, in the same way that you were talking about theater’s real-and-not-real structure, even though she is interested in the critical aspect of this. FM: The limits of criticality is something that Hito Steyerl is of course very much aware of. In this regard, political theater for me is not only about criticality but also about offering hope that there can be alternatives. It is about making proposals, about the possibility of art creating pre-enactments, to reference Oliver Marchart again, who took the term from the Israeli choreographers of Public Movement. A recent project Jonas Staal and I were developing was called “Training for the Future” – and one of the guiding ideas was that it should offer propositions rather than mere critique – being affirmative while at the same time not forgetting critical thinking. Again, one of the paradoxical possibilities of theater. PE: I always look for how the work of dramaturgy can be taken into social, political, visual, and performative practices, which I call “expanded dramaturgy,” and I am captivated by the term “performative curating” that you used in one of your publications.15 You talk about it as putting the social and relational aspect of art at the center of curating strategy. I wonder how it diverges from the relational aesthetics argument. From what I read I see this process as being more interactive in the political sense. FM: Well, while relational aesthetics were stressing the social aspect of art, this was mostly very much limited to a certain group of people, to a certain section of society, to a certain set of human relations, and it stayed very much within the field of the arts. It was more concerned with aesthetics than with ethics. The concept of performative curating stresses the two strands of the meaning of the term performative. As Shannon Jackson explained, the word on

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the one-hand underlines Austin’s, Butler’s and others’ notion of the reality-­ changing capacities of cultural utterances. On the other hand, it has also a more colloquial meaning, which refers to works and situations that are theater-­like but not theater.16 While Jackson dismisses the latter as too literal, for me the appeal of the concept of performativity lies exactly in this double ­meaning. The reality-changing capacity as well as the use of techniques, methods, strategies, and tactics of the performing arts. When we talk about theater as ­assembly – a form that I am especially interested in – and then think of Judith Butler’s book on assembly and Occupy it becomes clear.17 While Butler is less interested in the theatricality of the movement, she still talks about the importance of bodies coming together enacting the phrase “We the People.” I would add that there are other very theatrical aspects of OWS, the human mic for example. At the same time, it was performative in the sense of reality-­changing: it created a different way of being just by doing it. Occupy was less about the demands being put out, and more about the fact that as soon as you lived it, you were changing your own reality as well as the reality outside. It might sound pretentious to talk about translating this to theater or to curating. But still: when in the case of “Truth is Concrete” there is an audience together for 160 hours, their collectiveness changes – by spending time with each other, by being bodies next to bodies, by being bored or angry, by negotiating space and experiences, etc. All these are means of curating and making theater and performance, but we often do not put enough focus on this. PE: What are the implications of performative curating for artistic practice? How will the presentation of performance practice or various types of festivals have to change ultimately? How should they change? FM: There seems to be a fear that the role of the curator becomes too important, that she or he has too much inf luence on the artistic work. But first of all, production in theater, dance, performance is comparably slow and already always a process of negotiation – the concept of commissioning for example is quite different from that within visual arts. For me curating means that vice versa the artist is getting into a conversation that shapes the context. It is about being able to think together. What I propose might imply giving up the power inherent to the notion of an autonomous artwork, but at the same time it is about gaining power by co-creating, curating together the context and the relations to other artists and artistic works. Ideally it is an exchange for developing something together. Sometimes this means inviting someone to work in a specific frame, asking if they would be interested. Sometimes, it means creating the context around a work. There are different levels of exchange and collaboration and being open to inf luence is key. In theater we are used to that anyway. Theater is full of compromises and it is always collaborative. BF: Can you tell us about where your work is headed? What is your next project that you are excited about? FM: At the moment I work as a freelance independent curator, which offers the opportunity to work on several projects at once. With Jonas Staal

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Figure 11.3  “Training for the Future” Source: © Ruben Hamelink.

Figure 11.4  “Training for the Future” Source: © Ruben Hamelink.

we did the first edition of a project called “Training for the Future” in September [2019], a three-day program of creating a training ground with many different practices from artistic and activist fields. Hopefully we will have another edition and continue working on that project. Another of my projects is going to happen in a small city close to Cologne where the father of Friedrich Engels had one of his factories. This town does not have much of a typical art audience, so it is an interesting challenge to foster together with the artists a conversation about the changing role of work. And I was just working with

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Lola Arias as a dramaturg and now in a project by Tania Bruguera – you can imagine they have very different approaches and demand very different ways of collaborating! I also just finished writing a book on political theater… There is an advantage to not being involved in running a larger organization. The work can often be more precise and have a bigger variety. On the other hand, I am still interested in being part of a festival or venue – the work within institutions is often frustrating but also very important. For me it is still interesting to witness how a venue, or a festival can be inf luenced by the concept of performative curating. We need to challenge the performative potential of institutions while at the same time protect them in a time where more and more of them are under political and economic threat.

Notes 1 See: www.unfriendly-takeover.de/. 2 Veronica Kaup-Hasler is a dramaturg, festival curator and cultural producer. She is currently the Executive City Councilor for Cultural Affairs and Science at the City of Vienna. For information on the Steirischer Herbst Festival, see: www. steirischerherbst.at/en/. Malzacher is listed as the chief dramaturg and curator (Leitender Dramaturg/Kurator) for the editions of 2006–2012 in the festival archive. 3 For more information, see: www.truthisconcrete.org/. Also connected to the ­festival, Malzacher edited the book Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics. Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2014. 4 See: Artur Żmijewski and Joanna Warsza (eds), Forget Fear. Cologne, Walther König, 2012. 5 See: Beatrice von Bismarck, “Relations in Motion”, In: Florian Malzacher, Tea Tupajić, Petra Zanki, Frakcija 55 (2010), pp. 50–57. 6 Groys writes: “Traditional art produced art objects. Contemporary art produces information” (2016: 4). See: Boris Groys, In the Flow. London, Verso, 2016. 7 See: Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Arts, Supporting Publics. New York, Routledge, 2011. 8 See: Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London and New York, Verso, 2013. 9 See: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. 10 Training for the Future (2018–ongoing), a utopian training camp. See: www.­ trainingforthefuture.org. 11 Mouffe gave a keynote address on “agonistic democracy” at the 2010 iDANS Festival entitled “CosmopoliDANS.” See Ertem’s interview in this volume. 12 Jodi Dean has argued that art displaces political struggles from the streets to the galleries, See: The Communist Horizon. London, Verso, 2012. 13 See: Oliver Marchart, Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019. 14 Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. New York, Verso, 2019. 15 See: Florian Malzacher and Jonna Warsza (eds), Empty Stages Crowded Flats: ­Performativity as Curatorial Strategy. Berlin, Alexander Verlag, 2017. 16 See: Shannon Jackson, “Performative Curating Performs”, in ibid, n.p. 17 See: Judith Butler, Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2015.

12 Everybody has a space in the circle Interview with Émilie Monnet

At the time of this interview, Émilie was preparing her interdisciplinary ­performance piece Okinum. Her work today continues to expand through Scène contemporaine autochtone (SCA)/Indigenous Contemporary Scene (ICS), the platform she initiated to produce live works by Indigenous artists. Our conversation with Émilie took place via Skype in June of 2018. Bertie Ferdman: How would you describe the work that you do? Émilie Monnet: My practice is at the intersection of theatre, media arts, and performance. I most love working with sound, thinking about sound dramaturgy. My work is often presented as interdisciplinary theatre. I am a writer, actor, director, and also a curator/producer. I am Artist-in-Residence at the Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui in Montreal for three years and Okinum, my first play, will be presented in the Fall [2019]. Okinum is produced by Onishka, the structure I created to produce and present art back in 2011. It’s mostly an umbrella for my own projects and also for hosting spaces that cultivate exchange, sharing, artistic collaborations, and community-making. In 2016, I founded Scène contemporaine autochtone (SCA)/Indigenous Contemporary Scene (ICS), a nomadic platform for the presentation of live works by Indigenous artists. At the time, I felt there was a need in Montreal for more access to interdisciplinary forms of art made by Indigenous artists; there were many artists whose work had me excited but it was difficult to see it programmed in Montreal. I wanted to create a space for interactions with these works, and for gathering of community or communities. I like to think of ICS as something that binds things together, connects people, ignites collaborations between artists from different territories and disciplines, and bridges the gap between linguistic divides. One of Montreal’s specificities is the fact that it’s a bilingual city, and I believe work can cross-over from ­English to French and vice-versa. It just means there needs to be more opportunities for Indigenous francophone and anglophone communities to interact. It’s not everyone that speaks both colonial languages so it limits the works you can have access to. Onishka also produces community arts projects. At this moment, and together with visual artist Dayna Danger and a group of women who resided

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at the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal, we are preparing for a collective exhibit at OBORO art gallery in Montreal in September. Called Wishes/­ Souhaits, this photographic and sound immersive installation explores the possibilities of dream and imagination to envision ourselves as stars. Stars hold a place of special significance in all Indigenous cultures: referred to as ancestors, hand-sewn on blankets, as part of our names or wished upon. It’s part of a bigger community art project, initiated by choreographer Reena Almoneda Chang, around creating a feeling of sanctuary in one’s self. We facilitated workshops for the last two and a half years before presenting work publicly. BF: What are some of the encounters or exchanges you’ve cultivated? EM: This year ICS was presented in a different format, as the first Indigenous Creators Exchange, in partnership with Festival TransAmériques. It stemmed from the need for us to gather, as Indigenous artists from francophone and anglophone backgrounds. To be in the same physical space, so we can share our practices, the challenges we face, the frustrations in regards to slow change, discrimination, and appropriation. But also a space where we just visit, where we can laugh and eat together, go see art, and share our inspirations, what moves us, and what triggers us. To help me put together the Exchange, I invited Anishnaabe curator Patti Shaughnessy from Ontario. She had recently met Maori choreographer Victoria Hunt in Melbourne and suggested we invite her to lead a workshop. We invited 16 artists to take part in the Exchange; all are residents of Quebec

Figure 12.1  OKINUM, by Émilie Monnet, Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui, Oct 2018. 

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or Ontario, and a mix of francophone and anglophone, hispanophone too. Two participants were from Mexico – after all, it is part of the one same territory of Turtle Island. It’s the colonial borders and linguistic barriers that separated us. Every morning we would train with Victoria at the beautiful studios of Agora de la danse in downtown Montreal. We would start the day with Body/Weather exercises and then Victoria would lead us in some movement explorations. The theme for this edition of ICS was “Representation and Self-Representation.” At the end of the Exchange, we presented a performance offering, a public sharing, as a result of our time together. It was short, only ten days, but it felt very expansive. BF: It seems like this international exchange amongst Indigenous artists is vital for the arts community. EM: Yes. And it’s still too rare for opportunities like this to happen, at least in Montreal. We’re not focused on the result, how the work will be received or whether audiences will come. We’re focused on process, on just being together. The art of it all resides in being able to create a space that tends to the creative fire of the group, that cultivates safety, is nurturing, and holds space for the conversations we wish to have. PE: Is this the first time you have participated in that kind of Indigenous creative development process? Rachael Swain, for example, has been doing one with Indigenous choreographers based out of Sydney and Broome with Dalisa Pigram that involves a number of Canadian Indigenous choreographers. I know Victoria because I am from Melbourne originally, but Australians

Figure 12.2  S keena Reece’s performance, Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, ICS 2018. 

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performing elsewhere is quite small, and I know her work, so it’s really fascinating that you are setting up these collaborations across vast distances. EM: Yes, it’s always been very rich. Many initiatives aimed at developing more collaborations between Indigenous artists of Canada, New Zealand and Australia already exist. There’s a shared colonial history for these three countries. I’ve personally been developing more connections with South America; it’s probably easier because I am f luent in Spanish and Portuguese, and lived in Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia. I’ve always felt a strong connection with the people from these territories, a kinship among Indigenous peoples from the Americas. I travel often to the Amazon, Colombia, where I have my good friend and long-term artistic collaborator Waira Nina. She also travels up here regularly. But I think these exchanges have always happened, our ancestors had them. It’s just now easier to connect because of technology. PE: You spoke earlier about coming together as a group of artists, and about having a different conversation because it was among Indigenous artists. What kind of conversation do you think needs to evolve out of that kind of meeting or what tools do you need to bring into that environment? Are you thinking curatorially when you are setting up those situations? And as a curator, what kinds of things are you thinking about in creating the foundations for this event to happen? EM: The Creators Exchange was envisioned as a gathering space that should be whole and nurturing. When I speak about “whole,” I am referring to Indigenous ways of coming together, as a community. For example, having an elder to welcome us on the territory and to accompany us throughout the days. It sets things in a good way. Or the importance of gathering around food, being able to eat traditional food, it nourishes us in a way that is more than just the body. It’s a way to invest in a communal space with intention and care. PE: What projects are you working on with Onishka Productions now? EM: The next incarnation of ICS will be presented in Edinburgh, Scotland next year. It will be a month-long presentation of works by Indigenous artists in partnership with the Edinburgh International Festival, the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This is the first time ICS will be presented in a festival format at the international level. It’s by far our most ambitious endeavour for ICS and will keep me busy for the coming year. The programming will be articulated around the different layers of history that exist between Indigenous Canada and Scotland. Back in 2017, when I first went to Edinburgh, I met many Scottish artists – especially Gaelic-speaking artists – who felt a certain resonance with the history of colonization back home: they could relate to the government’s efforts at eradicating their languages, suppressing their identity and taking their land away. But history being complex, those who left Scotland to settle in North America also participated in the colonization process, prime minister of Canada John A Macdonald earning top honours for his role in the cultural genocide enacted upon Indigenous peoples. The effects of these policies are still felt today and some of the performances we’re bringing to Edinburgh speak to these truths.

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Also, many Indigenous folks in North America have Scottish ancestry. The connections to land are memories in our blood and stored deep within us. We’ll try to dig into these connections. There are many layers to our shared histories, and many conversations to be having. PE: Also if you are from Brittany, Brittany has a particular history as well in a sense that it is a part of France, but also strongly, culturally, and historically relates to Ireland and it’s a Gaelic kind of heritage. EM: Yes, there are definitely similarities between Brittany and Scotland, the kind of same power in the rocks and landscape, in their relationship to England and France too. BF: I am very interested in how you have straddled both worlds: being an artist and how you see ICS as an extension of yourself as an artist. Because ICS is very inclusive, it has to do with you curating other artists and you creating situations for exchanges among artists. Can you talk about how these two roles merge for you? EM: So far, we’ve presented four editions at ICS. The first edition was presented as part of OFFTA, a festival of live arts happening in Montreal every Spring. I curated and produced a special programme within their festival and we benefited from their built-audience: many people attended the performances and conversations we presented. But rapidly, it was important for ICS to become autonomous and expand into something else. BF: That seems important. EM: Yes, it is. But I like the f luidity of what ICS can be, and I do not want to feel restricted by establishment or a certain way of doing things.

Figure 12.3  This Time Will Be Different, by Lara Kramer & Emilie Monnet, ICS 2017, Darling Foundery, Montreal.

156  Interview with Émilie Monnet

Sometimes ICS will be presented as a festival, other times as a Creators Exchange. Or something else. The second edition was quite different, we were invited to present a touring programme of Indigenous women artists from Quebec to Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. There were also meetings and conversations organized with Indigenous artists from these countries. The conversations are central too, and we want ICS to be a creative space for dialogue that is Indigenous-led. BF: ICS is one part of your company? EM: Yes, through Onishka, the structure I created back in 2011 to produce my own work. Most productions are presented as theatre or interdisciplinary art, but we also branch into community arts projects too. Onishka has produced ICS since its creation in 2016. PE: There seems to be a kind of pattern where you have a series of events that are inter-relating over a number of days. There is an exchange of practices and experimental laboratory, and then, you’ve used the word “conversations” a number of times. You create this space for conversation. Is that something that has evolved out of the process? Or was it something that you brought to the project prior to, as part of its planning? EM: From the get go ICS was envisioned as a shared space, where interactions happen and inspiration is ignited by seeing the works of others. To be able to discuss deeply when we are able to recognize ourselves in the stories and bodies presented on stage. That’s what creates rich conversations. But the concept of conversations, how to provoke them and how to hold them, that’s been evolving and will most certainly continue, as we learn from past experiences or things that could have been done better. It’s also been helpful to work with a theme for each edition of ICS: it focuses the conversation and guides the curation of the programme. More and more, it’s also about the conversations happening within the production team and with the artists as we get ready to reach out into the world. The few weeks before the event are always intense and we want things to run as smoothly as possible. There are always lots of conversations involved to figure out how to best collaborate together, and with the community, the public and the institutions. So yes, this aspect of generating spaces for conversation has always been at the forefront of ICS. But in my opinion this is also the role of art, it makes you feel and think and engage in conversation; with others of course, but with yourself too. It makes me think of a conversation I had with Kiche Mayan artist Sandra Monterosso last October during a studio visit with her in Guatemala city. We were talking about the portrayal of Indigeneity in visual arts and performance, and she said that her role as an artist was also to provoke conversations that are not always comfortable or that take us outside of our comfort zone. This very much resonates with me. BF: One of the things you generate is space for these conversations to happen, and you are saying “uncomfortable conversations must happen, not just among artists, but for audiences to listen.” This relates to the issue of

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decoloniality, to decolonize curating, decolonize the arts. In learning about your work as an artist as well as your curating process, there seems to be a great awareness about the condition in which work gets made. It seems that you are developing new forms of sharing work with one other for different people in different ways. Can you speak to this idea of a decolonizing curating practice, if that is something that speaks to you at all? EM: Yes. But this is a huge job and there are many hurdles. I think in the case of Onishka and ICS specifically, it’s about working with a team of individuals that are Indigenous. The lens is different and it guides the way we want to work. But then, because of the colonial structures in place, there is always a great deal of negotiations that will happen, with funding bodies, institutions, audiences. For example having to measure the success of the project by the number of attendees for final reports or negotiating with theatres the right to smudge before performances. Just the creation of a non-profit, with a compulsory Board of Directors and board meetings is a colonial structure. So it’s a huge task at hand to have to dismantle these systems, to decolonize our way of making, producing and presenting works. There’s a lot of frustration ahead too. With Onishka, I want to ref lect more on how to implement traditional teachings, ways of being together and working together that have proven to be effective in the past for our ancestors. In a way to Indigenize rather than decolonize, when it is possible. These are the things I am interested in embodying and creating with others. PE: Could you say something about your own artistic practice?

Figure 12.4  P  erformance Sharing with Victoria Hunt, at Festival TransAmériques, Indigenous Creators Exchange, Montreal, June 2018. 

158  Interview with Émilie Monnet

EM: I just got back from a one-week technical residency with the Chair of Sonic Dramaturgy, at the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi for the creation of Okinum, my upcoming production. I’m in creation mode right now, and it’s been very stimulating to think of sound as a cradle for cultivating a different quality of listening. I’m working with sound artist and musician Jackie Gallant, and together we’ve created new material, found interesting points of interaction between the written text, my voice, and the sounds generated live by Jackie. Because it’s a solo show, bouncing back to Jackie’s sound is like having a second performer on stage with me. I’ve also done many audio recordings of beavers and it’s been very fun to experiment with immersiveness and the coming together of animal and human languages. My play is about a recurring dream I’ve had of a giant beaver. PE: A beaver, the animal? EM: Yes. It follows me in my attempts to decipher my dream. I share a bit of what I’ve learnt about beavers through this dream. The play is called Okinum, which means dam in Anishinaabemowin. PE: As a playwright do you also direct your work, and do you perform in the works or do you have other people you collaborate with? EM: I am both the writer and performer of Okinum. And co-director alongside theatre director Emma Tibaldo and choreographer Sarah Williams. I’m very grateful for this collaborative process, it’s very nourishing. And, I’m the producer, through Onishka. I notice that my collaborators tend to be recurrent from project to project, and are more than often close friends or family. BF: What are some important issues you feel are relevant moving forward both in creating work and also in presenting others? What considerations do you think are necessary for artists to come together or for audiences to see new work? EM: Making spaces available. It’s still not enough. And too often it’s still tokenized. There needs to be a real commitment from theatres, galleries, and other institutions and it will have to be more than the “f lavour-of-themonth” conversation. It needs to be a long-term commitment. There needs to be more outreach to young people too, we need more Indigenous designers and technicians in the performing arts ecosystem. It’s important to offer proper conditions for artists to create, so that their art can really f lourish, so that they can take risks and experiment. There needs to be more resources allowed for that.

13 Acts of self-preservation Interview with Gabi Ngcobo

We interviewed Gabi via Skype on February 3, 2020. Gabi’s was the last interview we conducted for this book. Little did we know that fewer than two months from that day, our lives would be significantly impacted by COVID 19. Bertie Ferdman: We always start with the same question for everybody – How would you describe what you do? Gabi Ngcobo: I work curatorially as an educator, as an artist, and as an exhibition maker. BF: And what do you do as curator? GN: It has more to do with sensibility – so it’s a sensibility that is always with me no matter what I am doing. I don’t switch it off necessarily. It is a kind of approach to things – to history, to the present, it is a way of trying to find questions that are more enabling or a future that is more enabling. BF: You say this is something that you take “wherever you are.” How would you say that you got there? What kind of inf luences lead to what you do now? GN: My main inf luence is my environment, it’s where I choose to live, which is here in South Africa, in Johannesburg, but also to be part of a continent that is as diverse as Africa. I started at a university and then I started organizing exhibitions and later on I started teaching. I am most interested in self-organized practices and so for the longest times I have been in collectives or kind of a collective movement. Collaboration for me is important; it is integral because I don’t believe in working alone. There is always the need to bounce off and to think with others. As an educator, this is something that I also try to inf luence on students. I can see how it changes the artistic landscape when people work together. More things can happen or more self-organized initiatives tend to take place which means that, in the context of South Africa, we don’t have to rely so much on commissioned galleries, which I would say are more powerful than museums because museums often do not have money or funding. There is always a need for me to look at the scene of the environment and try to change it by making sure that our voices have an impact on society. It is important to know who you are talking to or who you are addressing with your initiatives. In the context of South Africa, which has a particular

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history, also within Africa, it means that we are always somehow addressing the West or responding to what the West is doing. I prefer a conversation that is much more global. Not to say: “they are the West, and this is what I am doing.” It is also the way that I think what an exhibition is and isn’t. I don’t like to be an exhibition machine. Sometimes things that I think about and want to do, sometimes the exhibition is not an answer necessarily and I am very okay with this because often times I don’t trust its model. I know that it is only a beginning and there are other things that are perhaps more important that would come from that format. BF: You identified brief ly as being a curator, a researcher, and an educator. Can you speak more about how these roles inf luence one another? GB: I see my practice as a training that cannot be broken down because everything is connected. Research is critical for anything that I do – whether I am writing or making an exhibition or teaching. I try not to break it apart because it only makes sense as a whole. I guess this is why I prefer to say that I work curatorially rather than to say I am a curator, because working curatorially, at least for me, means all of those things are together all the time. When I make an exhibition, I think a lot about education first before anything else. I don’t like the order where a curator makes an exhibition and then brings in an educator. To me it is critical that it is all together. Peter Eckersall: This question you raise about terms – between “curator” and “working curatorially” – and this triangle of practice that you describe, leads me to the next question. As you imply, the term “curator” is itself a loaded term. How do you negotiate that term or how did you in your evolution as a practitioner in your own context? Were there conversations about the terminology that you participated in? GN: Yes, there is always this conversation and I think people have regarded the curator as performing some sort of task or role. I started working and much later went to Bard to do an MA in Curatorial Studies. It is there where I knew that I don’t want it as a label. I wasn’t keen on immediately getting a museum job, for example – for me it didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense in terms of who I am in the world and how I approach the questions of our times and the aging professions of our times. I try to free myself as much as possible. I wasn’t applying for these jobs although they were opening up. I decided that I was more interested in getting a university job and working within thinking about education and its history in this country. My course was always titled “Performing the Curatorial” which comes from a book edited by Maria Lind.1 Every day we have to do these kinds of performances or rituals, you might call them ‘acts of self-preservation,’ and this is an everyday kind of thing. With my students, I make sure I help them work collaboratively. I always insisted on this, and I would also form the groups. I had a system I developed in order to get to know the students quickly – like in a week

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I knew their names and where they come from, where they went to high school – in order for me to be able to put them together to create tension. If you don’t create that tension, things look too easy because people would gravitate toward their friends. In South Africa, believe it or not, people gravitate toward people of similar backgrounds. You’ll find it in the class, white people gather together, black people, Indian people, so you have to break that apart. PE: I am struck by the term ‘performing curatorial practice’ and the question of a ritual practice. Looking at your curatorial leadership at the 10th Berlin Biennale and 32nd Sao Paolo Biennale, you’ve emphasized the idea of a collective institutional approach. There was also a focus on decolonization and democratizing the museum space. Could you speak a little bit about how you did that in those – they are very major forums and they have a long history and I wonder how you can crack open something that is so institutional already. GB: I think of the curator’s role as a way of undoing. We exist in this society where a lot has to be undone and in Berlin, we tried by all means to not use the term ‘decolonization’ or ‘post-colonial.’ If you read what we wrote or what we said you won’t find decolonization or post-colonial but if you read what other people have written, they would immediately use those terms. And we are trying to move away from these terms not because we are not doing that, but because it becomes so easy for people to say “oh that is decolonial” without really understanding what it is. For me, it is like the curatorial. It is not a thing that you go and do at work and then when you come home you are done with your decolonization. It’s a means of understanding where the coffee you drink comes from, and the way you speak to your kids or your family, it is an embodied thing. When we arrived in Berlin the way so many museums were decolonizing it was kind of crazy and you realize that actually there is funding that has been churned out to different institutions with this as a focus. Knowing how funding works, there is a focus for five years and then after that there is something else that needs to be addressed. I don’t believe in that. I believe that it is a process that is going to take hundreds of years and like I said, it’s everybody. Also, we don’t believe that it is a duty of certain people and not of others. It is humanity’s duty. Because we are black immediately people thought that we are going to fix everything – that we’re going to decolonize the shit out of Berlin! So, we were like “no, there is a mess. It’s our mess and we all have to do it.” It was a way of distributing responsibility. BF: Going back to how everything that you are doing extends beyond art, to our everyday – how can one contextualize or make meaning through curatorial practices, not just in the content of what you might exhibit but in how you make it happen – how you pay people, how you organize, how you produce it? Can you speak about how you shape historical narrative in both content and how you practice – I think the word you used is – ‘self-preservation’?

162  Interview with Gabi Ngcobo

GB: Yes. BF: And also, do you see this as a form of dramaturgy in your practice at all? GB: Let me answer your question and you can tell me if it is or isn’t. For me, first of all, it’s important to speak to as many people as possible. In Berlin, for example, I spoke to so many institutions and people in order to know where one sits. Knowing exactly that ground is uneven, we negotiate as we work and also welcome those shifts. There is a way in which institutions work in general, but there is also a way in which European institutions work in general, and then there is a way in which Germans work in particular. It was interesting to enter a space that has been around for 20 years and to see who is working there. Berlin is known as an international city and to us the question that raises within the institution, for example where there is a long history of Vietnamese people in Berlin, is “where are they”? These are the questions you absolutely have to ask and to stress that this is not part of the theme. We are not trying to suggest that for the next two years we need people who look like this, but the institutions themselves have to ask these questions. If they put up the application for intent, who is applying and who feels that they cannot? We have to think about those things a lot and vocalize them with the staff and the production team. Sometimes people are content with consensus which is also toxic because it doesn’t think outside of itself at all. So those people they have the privilege of not having to know, of not having to deal with things like this. There were a lot of things to undo and a lot of things to learn about the institution as well, and these questions, they ended up in the exhibition. At the Berlin Biennale there was a work by Fabiana Faleiros, a Brazilian artist who created a portrait of the art institution. This was a very interesting process because she has done it at other institutions in Brazil. It’s called Legendaries, and it has to do with bringing people together who were part of forming the Berlin Biennale. She brings 14 people in a room together to brainstorm. Who will be the ‘legendary’ of this institution? Not the superstars necessarily, but also the people who work in engagement or maintenance. What is the art institution and that probably tells you the history of that institution over the last 20 years in this Berlin that we laud for being such an international city. This is an interesting kind of exercise. When you walk in, the first thing you would see is this portrait of the institution. It was also to say, “look at the twenty years of this institution and try to see what the future could look like if it was portrayed in this way.” The same happened with Akademie der Künste because it is one of the oldest institutions in Europe and to think about the impossibility of ever understanding its archive in its fullest. It has a vast archive with music, architecture, literature, visual arts, etc. Thinking about the Haitian Revolution which, when you consider the history that was taking place— the

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Akademie der Künste already existed— but Hegel never writes about [the Haitian Revolution]. They looked at it as an event that was unthinkable as it was happening, unwritable, they wanted to pretend that it was not happening – the first successful slave revolution! We think about that and we go to the archives to see if there is anything at all that has to do with Haiti and there would be nothing until the forties, like 1945 when a lot of people were f leeing Europe or Haiti. They started writing in 1945 and they go via the Caribbean and some people go via Haiti or Jamaica and so ended up in places and write. But when it was taking place it was unthinkable. So we inserted that history into the architecture of the institution by building, I don’t know if you have seen the work of Firelei Báez, which was outside. She created an installation using the varying iterations of “Sans-­ Soucis” – the castle in Haiti built for King Henri I in Milot, and also “Sanssouci,” the estate of Frederick the Great, built just outside of Berlin, and also the Haitian Colonel Jean-Baptiste Sans-Souci, who was a leader of rebel slaves in the Haitian Revolution. To enter certain questions in certain places, to specifically think about that site and what it produces, what is its history and also to think about hierarchies, how do we rethink the idea of hierarchy? This was important for us. What we did not tell the artists was the title of the exhibition which had already existed – We don’t need another hero – because we didn’t want them to be responding to a title but to a set of questions that were urgent in Berlin at the time, in Europe at the time, in Germany at the time, and in the world as well. PE: This work you describe is quite performative in a very productive way and excellent example of performing curatorship as you introduced earlier. I want to move to the medium of performance and discuss the work that you did at Cabinet, in Brooklyn in 2010 called Rope-a-dope: To Win a Losing War. Can you talk about how, as a curator, you came to the medium of performance? How has this inf luenced your practice, or did you bring things to the performative context from your previous work that were helpful? I am also looking for some ref lections on performance makers and how you’ve worked with them, in this case the Brooklyn-based artists A.K. Burns and Kenya Robinson. GN: We were thinking about a bi-political strategy which is rope-a-dope, which refers to the boxing match,2 which is already a stage in itself. You know, artists that I work with, they would do a performance sometimes and people would say “oh, you are a performing artist?” and they would say “no, I am an artist.” It is what the question means, and the question might mean a painting. I come from South Africa and I think South Africa is a very performative space and somehow it makes sense because people are always performing in public! You go to the market and you find people watching something. Performance strategies are so visible and so present and so make sense in trying to address the questions of our times. It comes naturally, if I may say, and I see this in the exhibition itself, in the way architecture is

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conceived in relation to a body of people, how they encounter things, how the body moves – that is creating a narrative or dramatizing the encounter of the moment. I also think about it as a dream sequence – to me it’s important that when you approach the exhibition it almost feels like you are in a dream. Another thing that we were thinking about in Berlin is the idea of healing. If you can make an exhibition that is like a medicine, so when people come in, and I saw it happening, when people went in and came out, there was – something had moved. Most of the time, with exhibitions, I am not moved. I kind of stopped going. I was thinking about that a lot, about how we can create an experience that will punch people in their chest. PE: That’s not going to heal them, that’s going to hurt them! GN: But not in a way that is so in your face. We didn’t want the things that were sensational but things that kind of grow on you. You can meet the landscape of your hands somewhere as you go along and it can just go “puff,” but not to shock, shock, shock. Which is why we had to move away from using certain terms because that would set an expectation. One of the things we didn’t do is we didn’t say where artists are coming from and this was really frustrating to people who would come to make a shopping list and the shopping list would be based on your background. We wanted to absolutely remove that so that people are encountering work. BF: You are co-founder and Creative Director of The Center for Historical Re-enactments (CHR).3 I was particularly drawn to one of its projects, PASS-AGES,4 because it was staged within the context of the Pass Office. I was drawn to how, as you said, we can link a site to its history, to what’s not there but what is hidden underneath. Can you talk about this specific project and how it came about? GN: Yes, it was produced just one time. I had just come back from New York and was approached by the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism ( JWTC) to do a curatorial project. I said if they can find this space for me, which was a former Pass Office – so this is where black people had to go to get permission to be in the city, to work in the city, and it had to be signed by their white employee that they had a right to be in the city, and if you were found without this passbook, you would be deported to the homelands from the city. In Johannesburg, that office was the Pass Office, where this kind of activity took place. I was quite interested in that history but also in its present because now it is a shelter for women and children, most of whom are homeless. They are destitute or they have crossed the border to come to South Africa and they don’t have any kind of accommodation. In this shelter, there is a basement which was in use, where the piece PASSAGES took place. I wanted to work with artists but not necessarily to exhibit works, but to show the research processes, the things that are in their studios that would never see an exhibition, which are important for their thinking practice.

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I was also interested to see how people walked around these spaces. There was a performance that happened without people knowing that it was happening, or that they were actually taking part in the performance. It was set up in a space where people could be seated for the performance and then have a space that says that the performance will start in 20 minutes. Then, every 20 minutes there is an announcement like at the airport: “Ladies and gentlemen, the performance will start in 20 minutes.” You would see people slowing down and waiting and waiting and waiting for the performance and not understanding, and not understanding that the performance is them, the performance is happening, this is the performance! I am interested in how people look at bodies and performing bodies. Sometimes I am more interested in people who think about this space. I have worked with artists who didn’t mind – because sometimes people come in and say, “when does it start?” There must be that kind of drama where, “now, it’s starting!” Having a performance that you are not sure if it is a performance or not, and if you start to look, then the performance will concentrate on you. There is a saying: “every spectator is either a coward or is a traitor.” I think a lot about this quote because I think of myself as a bad spectator. Maybe I am a coward because I just can’t deal with this – and then they see an artist who can make a performance that is not so demanding, to parade differently in a space where you yourself become part of it somehow, whether you know it or not. Like the spectacle, I don’t like that. I do not know what to do with myself. With CHR, this is the kind of drama that we were trying to develop, like a syntax of a kind of trying to do things differently. When things are expected, they tend to work in a different way, in fact they tend not to work – I believe. For example with the project that was titled “Xenoglossia,” which included 15 art projects we set up and it was very minimal and it would grow over a period of time, we decided that when we are done setting it up we need to leave the space and not be present at all. There is something in these exhibition spaces, at least, as I have witnessed them, like openings, for example, in Johannesburg, because you just spend so much time making small talk and then people want to talk to you. What happens when you remove yourself from that space and let it happen? We hired a photographer and told them to not take direct photographs  – ­position yourself, like disappear in a space. The memory of that exists for us in this photograph in terms of how people were going about, and you can see that people were really engaging with the works. We even had a reader who compiled the texts that speak about audiences who are just engrossed and they are just waiting – it’s an opening. And people were listening because a lot of the works were spoken as well. This is what I see in the photographs. To me, this is really trying to address this question of spectatorship, of looking,

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of being looked on, looking a certain way. These are the kind of sensibilities that I am after when I work. PE: One of the things that I have taken from our conversation is just how much there is a dialogue between curatorship and performance itself as a medium. The work has become performative in so many different ways: the kind of conversations that you have been using around mobilizing audiences or collaborative processes or even by the way you talk about curatorial practices as a kind of ritual practice for survival. These are all things I think are very interrelated in the conversation around dramaturgy and performance. BF: What plans do you have for the future that you would like to share with us? GN: Well, I am working on myself! (Laughs) So I did a very classical exhibition last year. At the end of March [2020] the exhibition will come down, so for the coming month, I will be doing a series of iterations where certain works will be removed and they keep going gradually, and are replaced by other things, like banners, T-shirts, that say something, like texts. This is a kind of performance that I developed a few years ago to engage people, a sort of speed dating within the exhibition space. The prompts or texts are set up and are taken from somewhere and people face each other for ten minutes looking at a particular question and then they move on to a different person and then they look at a different question or text and talk about it for ten minutes. I am commissioning a performance and a sort of text machine. The actors send texts and come inside the exhibition space. This is my way of closing the exhibition, but it is gradual, and it has other processes. Remember when I was saying an exhibition is not everything? In this case, that was just the beginning. I am still thinking through that exhibition in how to take it down and thinking about what the next step is. I am taking certain lessons from this process to an exhibition I will do at the South London galleries in July.

Notes 1 Maria Lind, Ed. Performing the Curatorial: Within and Beyond Art. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. 2 The boxing match Ngcobo is referring to is the “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, who was the world champion at the time, which took place in Kinshasa, Zaire on October 30, 1974. From the exhibition’s description: Rope-a-dope, a fighting strategy employed by Ali to defeat Foreman, is based on the idea of enduring your adversary’s repeated blows until they exhaust themselves, before you finally rise up to triumph over them[…] the term and strategy have been deployed in the public sphere to reference similar strategies in politics, business negotiations, and personal relationships. See: www.cabinetmagazine.org/events/rope-a-dope.php. 3 The Center for Historical Re-enactment (CHR) is a collaborative platform that was founded in 2010. According to its website, “the CHR explores how

Acts of self-preservation  167 historical traditions in contemporary art are developed and dispatched.” See: http://historicalreenactments.org/. 4 PASS-AGES: References and Footnotes was a curatorial project by the Center for Historical Reenactments in collaboration with the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism ( JWTC). See: http://historicalreenactments.org/ images/projects/Passages/15-1.pdf.

14 Just responding to history is never enough Interview with Chiaki Soma

I interviewed Chiaki Soma in November 2017. I regularly saw Chiaki when she was the first programme director of Festival/Tokyo and she held some remarkable festivals from 2009 to 2013. I was able to introduce Back to Back Theatre from Australia and she showed their wonderful production, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich at her last festival. Among her many projects since, Chiaki is the director of Arts Common Tokyo and a pioneering figure in introducing documentary theatre and arts and social practice to Japan. She was a curator/performing arts director at the Aichi Triennale 2019. Peter Eckersall: How do you describe what you do? Chiaki Soma: It might sound banal to say this, but what I do, is to propose new values – new ways of thinking and new ways to see the world. These are not necessarily my own views or proposals, but those of many different artists (that I work with). PE: Would you call yourself a curator? CS: I call myself an art producer. At the same time, I do curation as well. Those two roles are complementary, but they are not necessarily equal. I think the task of the producer is to develop a project from its beginning stages – its zero point – through to completion. In other words, creating an opportunity for a project and taking a responsibility for the project through to its conclusion, including taking on its financial aspect. So, a producer is a planner who is responsible for all the production processes, including fund raising and negotiating with stakeholders. On the other hand, the term ‘curator’ originally came from the fine arts. From what I know, it comes from the same root as ‘care’ and it emerged as an occupation in the museum in the twentieth century. The curator in the fine arts is essentially a researcher, and their work is about placing art, when it is presented or exhibited into its historical context. Therefore, when I curate a performance work, I think it is important to explain how the work is placed in the historical context. This includes the question of how I produce and present the work – that should also be made visible and contextualized. PE: I think you are correct to identify the term ‘curator’ as a caretaker of art and its contexts. Recently, we have been using the word ‘curate’ in the way that Hans Ulrich Obrist uses of it, especially with regards to how we

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might talk about the relationship between the curator and artist. Obrist says that for him, curating is about the way that he works closely with individual artists to create new contexts for their work. He describes curating as a dialogue. Do you think that this kind of idea is relevant to your work? CS: Yes, I think so. I think the reason why curation deals with history, is so that we might better be able to tell the audience about the past, present and the possible futures (of life and culture). PE: I think we understand how a curator works in relation to the past, as the history of the art, and the relationship of the artwork to the present is very often introduced by a curatorial statement. Could you speak a little bit more about how you, as a curator, orient your practice and the artwork to the future? As a curator, how do you imagine this? CS: I see the future as ‘living in the continual present,’ which is continually being updated as society keeps changing. At the same time, we need to consider that there are shared aspects to our humanness that are also dependent on geographical issues. What is important is how I connect the audience in my target community with various examples of artworks from national and international arts scenes. We need to think about them as contemporaneous, with a sense of their connections to the past, present and to possible futures. It could be an arrogant way of curation – collecting artworks from all over the world based on a theme and presenting them with a ‘here you go!’ (cavalier) attitude – it’s like filling a shopping cart. What is important for me, however, is to look further ahead from the present moment to how the works that I select for a current audience might also be relevant to a future audience. Who might these future people be and how will they respond? In this way, I can establish links between the artworks and social issues now and into the future. PE: What you are saying is very important, and I’m interested in exploring how you think curatorial thinking can do this, how in a sense, curatorial thinking is also artistic thinking of/by a curator. For me, it seems much clearer to understand the process of looking back and providing historical context for art by nominating a theme for the current situation, such as the current crises in global politics, the Fukushima triple-disaster, and so on. But recently, people are talking about the need for art to imagine futures – to offer creative ideas to address concrete problems. I am wondering if this concept is helpful for you? Does this orientation to imagining futures inform your idea of how curatorial thinking is facing the future? CS: I can respond to this question with a cultural comparison. Working in Europe is easier for me in some ways, because the historical axis is very clear and shared not only among arts professionals but also, to a certain degree, among audiences. Europe, and Western countries more broadly, seem to have a rather obsessive desire to accurately verify and analyse their histories. One of the reasons for this is that there is a major premise that art history and theatre history have been structured (and studied) predominantly in the West.

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I work on that basis as well. But when I think about what I am going to do in Tokyo, Japan at the moment, just responding to history is never enough. First, I have to look carefully at the reality of the present moment in the time and space in which we and the artists are living. This is not always easy as in Japan; these questions do not reside in the theatre or in art galleries. In Western countries, the theatre and the art gallery have addressed contemporary reality and analysed social issues to a certain extent. As a response to engaging with galleries, people in the west might be able to grasp where they are standing now. However, in Japan, even when we go to a theatre space (the art gallery might be a different story), the history of theatre has not been accumulated there. So, I keep a balance between responding to the historical axis, and responding to the current reality in which we are living. I present works that aim to speak to current audiences as well those from the future. PE: What are the practical challenges that you face in doing this kind of work? CS: One of them is that I work independently and between institutions. The art policy in Japan, as in other Asian countries, has now been developed to a level that arts institutions are finally being established and a lot of money is being invested in them. However, often in Asian countries, if one becomes an insider and works only within an institution, one can get totally stuck. In fact, when I was working at Festival/Tokyo – an institutional theatre festival – I couldn’t avoid experiencing such limitations. On the other hand, being independent is equally difficult, as finding assistance and support to remain sustainable is not always easy. I am trying to find a way to work between these constraints, by having a lightness which allows me to exist between working in institutions and being independent. PE: Following on from this, what kind of things are easier to do in Japan in the art world, and the performance world, and what things are more difficult to do? For example, it might be easy to make a small festival in an area of Tokyo and to get some support from the city government for instance. But if you wanted to feature a difficult work in such a small festival it might be very hard. Drawing on your experience, do you evaluate projects that you think would be easy or hard to present. Do you measure that kind of thinking or impact? CS: For me, a festival is a model. As long as I follow the model, then I don’t actually think it is so difficult to create a festival. Originally, we wanted festivals to create festive and extraordinary experiences. But if we only look to a festival as an expression of festivity, then we cannot update the model of the festival to be more contextual. For example, I think that what I did at Festival/Tokyo was to incorporate the notion of festivity into the context and reality of the city. In Tokyo today, places like Shibuya Crossing and the Akihabara area are already festive sites with non-stop bright lights and activity. If a theatre performance was to be placed there it would be very weak – the immediacy of the place is so very strong. On the other hand, in the recent Tokyo city

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elections we saw the impact of what was called ‘Koike Theatre’ (the name given to the ‘performative’ campaign of the candidate Yuriko Koike, who is now the Governor of Tokyo). Compared to these examples, I think that performances ref lecting anti-establishment or wider public opinion are not effective at all. There is no meaning in reproducing the traditional style of festivity. Therefore, we need to replace the notion of festival as ‘festivity’ with something totally different. Akira Takayama and the performance group Port B, with their citywide performance Tokyo Heterotopia (2013), is one example of how to approach things differently.1 Port B’s work is an example of how performance can allow us to explore the invisible things in the city; things and people that what we usually cannot see or meet. Similarly, I think that it is important for me to discover how I can install this kind of experience, not only through the artwork itself but in the bodies of viewers and participants. How can they/we experience the city differently and in diverse ways. This is why I am now setting up Theatre Commons Tokyo as a new project, one which is not based on the model of a festival. It breaks away from the traditional festival model to one that presents a variety of artworks. I am aiming to create interactive projects with workshops and lecture performances that encourage audiences to embody theatrical ideas so that they can useful and practised in their daily lives. I guess this is a reference to what Augusto Boal did in the 1960s and 1970s during the Brazilian military dictatorship. It is important to take care how we utilize theatre in a place and context where history has not been accumulated, as it has done in Europe. PE: You spoke very interestingly about the power of institutions. You also spoke about audiences and about the need for new kinds of performance to motivate audiences and connect those audiences with the world. And, you spoke about the different sense of history in Japan in comparison to the European and the Western sense of history. As a way of drawing some threads

Figure 14.1  ‘Playing Japanese’ by Hikaru Fujii @ Theater Commons ’17, Tokyo 2017 Source: Photo: Hikaru Fujii.

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together, could you ref lect a little more on your journey from Festival/Tokyo to Theatre Commons Tokyo? For example, you were very famous for making Festival/Tokyo, which became an important global festival and featured a lot of international, particularly European, contemporary performance. It’s very interesting now that you are working more regionally and connecting with various Asian artists. Could speak more about this journey or transition to the regional as opposed to the international. CS: As you know very well, I think Japanese artists from the theatre and performing arts were only very weakly linked with the world of European performing arts at the beginning of the twenty-first century. That was only happening at a few exceptional places like Toga-mura, and at several artist-­ run initiatives like dump type. But those were not always democratic places, as they were created by specific artists and/or their networks. I am thinking here of artists and groups like Sankai Juku, Saburo Teshigawara and dumb type, or Tadashi Suzuki in the earlier stages of his career. When I was studying in France in the early 2000s, I started go to the theatre more regularly. I originally didn’t like theatre at all – partly because of my poor experience of Japanese theatre in the 1990s. But in the 2000s I had many chances to see new theatre forms – like European documentary theatre and post-dramatic theatre. It was then that I realized the extent to which we could experience reality through theatre and bodies. I wanted to present this kind of cutting-edge European theatre together with the new body language that had emerged out of Japanese Theatre in the 2000s, such as chelfitsch. It wasn’t about which one is better or newer, but about creating a space where there is a discourse around emerging contemporary expressions. There had been no performing arts festival of an international standard until then, although Toga-mura was there, but that was an extremely special case. When I was put in charge of the Festival/Tokyo, I was particularly aware of adopting the standard format of a world-class festival circuit first, and then working towards putting a more local vernacular together. I think that over the six editions we achieved this. At the same time, as new theatre companies from Europe. like Rimini Protokoll, Romeo Castellucci, and Christoph Marthaler, and companies from countries such as Iran and Lebanon came to Japan, the Japanese artists who had been working locally were also being presented on the world circuit. This provided enormous excitement for the creators and artists from overseas as well as for the creators and artists in ­Japan. I think this interaction generated a very good dynamic. Since leaving Festival/Tokyo, I have been seeking to develop independently, outside of the festival model. The problem of being independent in Tokyo – and I guess in New York as well, is that it’s difficult to find a space. Large booking fees make it difficult for the independent producer. So, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of making theatre without having a space. For that reason, I am currently developing Theatre Commons Tokyo in a way that evolves and updates the essential idea of theatre. So even though we don’t have a space, there is a place for the theatre in a pure sense.

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I think that an educational and workshop setting is one of the possible directions to take. Since I have recently started teaching at a university, I  have found that although most of my students are theatre students, they don’t know Yukio Ninagawa, or they haven’t heard about Brecht. They are however, all interested in musicals or ballet. Most of them have never seen the works that Festival/Tokyo presented. Most theatres in Japan present commercially successful works like ballet or musicals. The average theatre-goer sees this as representative of theatre. So, even if I tell them how interesting Brecht is, or show them the different kinds of works that also exist, it will mean little to them. This is understandable, since these works are unfamiliar and often have dense texts they can’t align their own experience to them. It is impossible to expect them to generate an interest in more ‘contemporary’ theatre without providing them with links from these theatre works to their current immediate reality as individuals. That’s why, instead of providing a particular ‘knowledge’ of theatre, my work has shifted to teaching students how to utilize theatre or theatrical ideas. To do this, I have developed the idea of a workshop where everyone is a practitioner, a viewer, and a participant. In these workshops, the students try out ideas; they practice, criticize, and give feedback to each other. What makes this workshop interesting is that people can see what others are doing. They can exchange comments and evaluate themselves and others. There is a rather banal image around the word ‘workshop,’ but I am hoping to utilize this kind of mutual learning programme to create a classic, yet new model of theatre-education that responds to the trendy term ‘socially engaged art.’ PE: This is a very interesting journey, from ‘high theatre’ to workshop and local theatre participation. It seems that you are driven by a desire to re-frame the relationship that theatre has to audiences, as well as connect to new audiences. I wonder if this means the end of a particular type of theatre? If, as you suggest, theatre as workshops constitute your work in the theatre field, what happens to the experience of theatre provided by Festival/Tokyo for example, or productions from Castellucci and others. We are talking here about two very different kinds of performances. CS: In my mind though, they are linked. Theatre is not dead. It is becoming more important to everyone, as well as to me. The need for stories is inherent to human beings, and neither the post-dramatic or the post-­modernist age will make a difference to that. Theatre venues and festivals that produce dramas and provide places to share stories will continue to survive. The affect of dramas, like those of Chekhov or Chikamatsu, the catharsis, the discourse, and the possibility to review these works through a contemporary lens remains important. I also love such dramatic theatre and have no intention of denying them, if they have good qualities. However, for many, there is a danger that they become no more than entertainment. The world is filled with stories that people can consume though other means, rather than watching a play in the theatre. In Japan, the area of manga

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and anime (animation) is very developed, and many young people are satisfied with the experience of story-telling through this medium. They don’t feel the necessity of going to a theatre – actually, it used to be the same for me. There is also the problem of economic disparity in Japan, as well as a gap between urban and rural areas, making it either too expensive or too far for people to go to the theatre regularly. If you have to pay 10,000 yen to see a good work, it cannot function as a public service. There is still no social infrastructure around theatre in Japan. PE: It is really interesting to hear you speak about the way in which the work that you are making responds to the economic, political, and social conditions and circumstances in Japan. I wonder if there is also a personal motivation here for the shift in your working mode, which may be complicated by your relationship to the idea of theatre? More broadly, what motivates a good artistic producer or good artistic curator? CS: It is important to have a good understanding and respect for the artists who create these works or projects, as they have a special perception of the world compared to those who are not artists. Early in my career, when talking to artists, I felt they would miss the points that I could see, but after spending time with them, I found that they look much further into the future; that they see things others don’t. I now begin by listening carefully to the artists’ voices. PE: I absolutely agree. Giving the voice to the artists is an important aspect of this. A good producer also has a relationship to the artists that is very equal, so I am curious as to how you ensure this equality, and how you think this equality can be maintained. CS: To me, this equality is natural, so I wonder how I could actually describe it. What I keep in mind, is to challenge what previous generations have done. I try not to copy their outcomes. I seek to do things in a new way. This aspect of my work might be in common with the spirit of an artist; placing oneself in a place that is most insecure and making one feel torn apart. Of course, working to further develop a field that is already stable and has a solid reputation is important, but if I work only to repeat or mass-produce work that needs only to be successful, I would inevitably go backwards. Instead, as curators, we should keep placing ourselves, as artists do, at a place where we are continually tested. We need to hear criticism and counter-opinion. Therefore, I try my best not to copy what our predecessors did. It is not easy though. PE: I will ask a simple question to which you can simply answer Yes or No. Is there dramaturgy connected to your work? As an artistic producer, have you ever called yourself a dramaturg? CS: Yes, I of course think so. Curator and dramaturg, they are almost the same thing. PE: I wonder if you can talk about the differences? CS: As a dramaturg, one has to be knowledgeable and well-versed in the history of theatre. Dramaturgs have knowledge or practical experience

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not only of theatre but also in various cultural fields and historical and social events. They integrate and share this knowledge with the artists. So, when programming a theatre or a festival, my practice definitely includes dramaturgy. PE: I’m interested in thinking about how curatorial practice is also dramaturgical. Obviously, one is more focused on visual arts and another more on performing arts. But increasingly, these worlds are coming closer together. For example, both curators and dramaturgs are producing workshops, conferences and symposiums as artworks. Perhaps we are approaching a certain kind of coming together of these practices. CS: I absolutely agree with you. Actually, I have been appointed as a curator of the performing arts for the next Aichi Triennial. The artistic director is the journalist and media activist Daisuke Tsuda. He is not an art expert, and I am not sure how much arts he has seen. But nevertheless, he is in this position. The cultural critic and philosopher Hiroki Azuma has been appointed as his advisor; he is also not an art expert. However, they can both critically understand and view current society. They have the knowledge to present a vision. I have been communicating with them, and I utilize my expertise in theatre to give suggestions that can aid in developing their vision. While I am a curator in theatre and performing arts, I have also been asked to provide advice to their visual arts programme. I can then, for instance, propose an artist such as Akira Takayama, whose work is at the intersection of theatre and visual arts. This is interesting, because in current emerging work it makes no sense to draw a line between the disciplines. My expertise is in theatre, so my curation tends towards theatrical approaches, but in the context of a visual art festival like Aichi Triennial, theatrical curation can be introduced to fortify a visual art context, and vice versa. For example, recently at Theatre Commons Tokyo, artist Hikaru Fujii did a workshop. He is a movie director in a very pure sense, but also a visual artist. We asked him to develop a work which used some theatrical action, like performing or sharing the space. However, we had an extremely tight budget and we could only use the theatre space for two days. He planned a workshop that was really thrilling. The title of the workshop was Performing the Japanese (2017). We had 20 people from among the public, selected without any pre-conditions. First, they were divided according to their gender at birth. Then each group lined up side by side and faced the other group. As the title of the workshop was ‘Performing Japanese’ Fujii asked them to look at each other, and then to rearrange themselves into a new order: Japanese and Non-Japanese. If it had not been within the framework of a workshop the participants might be have been hesitant, but because it was within a workshop situation they were playfully engaging: ‘Ah, you have a defined facial feature, so you are non-Japanese’ or ‘You have single eyelids, so you are Japanese.’ Eventually they made a very clear pecking order – totally rearranging the rows they were in.

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Figure 14.2  ‘Tokyo Heterotopia’ by Akira Takayama / Port B @ Festival / Tokyo ’13, Tokyo 2013 Source: Photo: Masahiro Hasunuma.

Fujii was filming throughout the whole workshop. After this task, he asked them to re-enact a historical event Jinrui-kan (‘Human Pavilion’), that took place in Osaka in 1903. There, they had ‘exhibited’ living human beings from different nations: Ainu, Okinawan, and Korean people were all ‘exhibited.’ Fujii asked the participants to re-enact this event as a part of the workshop. The people who had been categorized into ‘non-Japanese’ were just put on display; meaning that they couldn’t participate further in the workshop, while the ‘Japanese’ group walked around discussing the ‘exhibits.’ Amongst them though, was a decoy, a professional actress who had been placed as one of the exhibits. She is an actual Korean resident in Japan and towards the end of the workshop, she revealed his identity, saying ‘I’m a Korean.’ This created a rift. When people who are used to working purely in the visual arts field are asked to use a theatrical approach, they may not be prepared for the outcome. While this workshop seemed a little cruel, it recently won an award from the Nissan Art Awards. For me, drawing a line between theatre and fine visual art doesn’t make a sense any longer, but on the other hand, I want to definitely keep practising with my own expertise. PE: I have two more questions. The first one: You have already spoken a little bit about the difficulties of making work in Tokyo, in terms of institutions versus being independent, in terms of having access to space, and in terms of having access to fund raising. These are problems which are shared in other global contexts. You might not have an answer for this question, but do you think there are particular challenges about working as an artistic creative producer, or curator, or dramaturg in Tokyo? You have already spoken about this to some degree, but are there any specific things that impact on your work here?

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CS: Well, as I said, finding a place and venue could be a particular challenge. Finding a format of continuous activity and not relying on a rooted budget could be another particular challenge. Only a few have been successful with these problems. But the larger question is how we respond to the particular Japanese situation. Japan doesn’t have an obvious pressing issue that people feel they have to fight against in the way other Asian countries have. Such as fighting against dictatorships, or censorship, or as in China, fighting for freedom of expression. These are clear points of oppression for people to fight against. In Japan, such acts would be quite useless. The ground on which we stand to fight here, keeps sliding – so that we cannot grasp the objectives clearly. Of course, the social, political and environmental issues are there, in concrete issues like Fukushima. But I have the feeling that the root at the bottom of the problem lies within us. We, Japanese who live in Japan, are ailing deep within. Perhaps this stops art from shining clearly. If the reality that we are fighting against is vague, like air, even when someone does something provocative, it tends to slip away, out of public view. It disappears like smoke. We often say that freedom of expression is decreasing in Japan, but nobody knows how this is actually happening. There is a climate of collective silence; perhaps stemming from a Japanese habit which we are all guilty of creating. It is not particularly somebody, or a specific something – this smoke screen created by the assemblage of internal aspects of Japanese repression is very difficult to explain to those outside of Japanese culture. It is difficult to realize that the pressure from the society, the ‘vague air’ which is hard capture but is the root of this matter, actually lies within ourselves. No amount of criticism from above or from the side will change this. So, you see, Japan is not changing much, is it? This is the most difficult aspect of working here, I think. PE: Yes, I can see that it’s difficult, but maybe this is what makes working here in Tokyo necessary and possible. Some people would argue that this is the most important thing – this focus on the local, on Tokyo. It is something that makes working here difficult, but also something that creates a sense of possibility. CS: I think so. I am not intending in leave Tokyo. Many people, with a view to the Tokyo Olympic Games, have left Tokyo or have begun working overseas. I have never thought about leaving here. I think I get energy from confronting this hopeless city. Both in the positive and negative sense, Tokyo represents Japan and Tokyo has in it all the ungraspable aspects of Japan anyway. I want to be able to take time to carefully glean all the truths and realities hidden here. After all, the Olympic Games is an event that comes and goes in ten days. What we can do after the event matters a lot. I will do my best to survive until then. PE: The next question. Could you speak a little bit more about your Theatre Commons project? Where do you think Theatre Commons Tokyo will be moving to and how are you taking the project forward? CS: I think what I am doing now is much more challenging. Because of the nature of this project, we plan certain things backwards. A festival, for

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example, can be an annual event at a certain time of the year in a certain place. There is already some level of framing to the idea. My challenge is to find what I could create through the programming within that framework. But in the case of Theatre Commons Tokyo, I am providing all of the framing. There are colleagues who help, but basically, I do everything, including writing texts and planning. I am also the only one who works on raising money. In this sense I am always thinking on my feet while working – without always having a view of where I am going. It is such a hard project, but I do it of my own free will – no one has asked me. Therefore, it is very exciting. I keep writing project proposals to make sure I collect every single yen available without even knowing if I can continue this next year. At the moment I cannot say clearly how this project is going to be developed in a practical sense. But ideally, I would like to establish a platform where theatre, activism, education and social practice cross over. Perhaps this is an alternative to the word ‘workshop.’ For example, it could end up as a project which establishes a school, or something else where people meet each other. I am willing to grope around for these possibilities slowly. PE: One last question. You are teaching at Rikkyo University now, and there is a new project there which involves art and social practice. You are also closely aligned with Tatsuki Hayashi, and Akira Takayama, and the social practice project at Geidai Tokyo University of the Arts. It looks like there is a new focus in Tokyo in the area of social practice. How do you hope that teaching into these areas will manifest in the future? What do you hope that your students will gain from this experience? CS: I am not expecting all of them to become theatre professionals, neither would they be willing to. And I think this is very healthy, simply because working at a theatre or in the theatre industry is not a very attractive job in current Japanese society. However, like I said before, it is possible that they can internalize the theatrical ideas themselves and utilize them as they carry on living within the society. It is similar to what Boal or Brecht had aimed for – how to face, as well as take distance, from the reality. In the case of Invisible Theatre – it is invisible, but one is practising theatrical acts in everyday situations as a means to intervene in ubiquitous injustice. I feel that the students are learning that without particularly being aware of theatre. The students nowadays are very obedient; good boys and girls. They never criticize people because they don’t want to be criticized. When I listen to their problems, 99% of their problems are about human relationships. Not about sex, financial issues, or existential questions, but about interpersonal ­relationships and friendships. A notable example are the problems on and around online SNS/social networks. In my classes, I want students to find methods to cope with these problems, even if they are not particularly conscious of these methods as coming from theatre. PE: Actually, that’s very interesting. Because in Europe, the social practice movements, generally speaking, are more about community changes on

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a global level, but here, you see it in terms of human relationships. Is that something that is very important? Do you think that is something specific to Tokyo or here, in Japan? Do you think people interpret social practice here in that way? CS: I think it is linked to what I said before – that an awareness of exactly what we should be fighting against in Japan is unclear. In Europe, there is rank and social inequality, as well as the issue of migrants and refugees. In Japan, the rifts in the society is not so clear. The rifts are hidden inside of each individual. Don’t you think that is why Japan has a high suicide rate? I think that the social practice that is specific to Japan comes out of the tough and often ungraspable atmosphere of public life in Japan. That could be another possibility for curatorial and dramaturgical practice that is unique to Japan. PE: Thank you so much.

Note 1 For further information on Port B’s Tokyo Heterotopia, see: http://portb.net/en/ archives/119. Accessed 15 January 2020.

15 A different kind of politics to the table Interview with Nato Thompson

We interviewed Nato in the conference room of Creative Time’s offices in the East Village, New York City. It was late October 2017, barely a year after Donald Trump’s election. At the time of our interview, Nato had been selected to serve as the first artistic director of Philadelphia Contemporary, a multidisciplinary arts venue dedicated to contemporary visual and performance art, where he has been ever since. Bertie Ferdman: How would you describe what you do? Nato Thompson: I’m the artistic director of Creative Time. There are different roles I play here. We have an annual summit on art and politics. We have a series of different projects that are commissions in public art. We have a media department that uses the broad media as a platform for artistic production. My goal is to find new platforms and produce new ways for artists to create meaning in the world. Typically, in a more traditional sense, I don’t want to call that public art; but I think the mandate of public art is pretty enjoyable if you just define it as more of a political statement than a spatial one. It’s a question of access, of legibility, and of what constitutes art. And, that’s it! We don’t do projects in galleries and museums; pretty much we are defined by what we are not. BF: When you’re talking about access and legibility, does that implicate your viewer? How do you pursue legibility and access as a curator? NT: To be quite frank, when it comes to single arts commissions, my real job is to find great artists. Typically, the artists are pretty much in control of their own projects; they know what they want. We don’t just commission artists, we commission projects. My main job is making sure that when we decide on a project, it is the right thing to do. Part of it also entails managing the practicalities between the budget and art and promoting the art. When we talk about legibility, I try to find artists who have a certain ethos in their work that allows for many people to understand, coming from different demographics as well as classes. You don’t need to know about art in order to appreciate it, but there’s a certain kind of access in the way it’s registering. It also means that everything we do is free and open to the public. So, that is also a question of access and publicness.

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BF: The marketing and advertising is also very good. NT: Yes. That part of what we do is really ethical because “public” does not necessarily mean it’s in a park; it’s much more about how we think about what it costs, who shows up, what their aesthetic sensibility is. With museums, it is clear that you need to know a lot about art to understand what’s going on, and I have a problem with that. That is not what we do. BF: You self-identify as a curator and political activist. Do you see your own work in curating as a form of political activism? NT: Of course! I think art, or some art, has the power to change the discussion. I have been overseeing Creative Time for 11 years, before that, I was at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) for seven. During my tenure at Creative Time, I’ve seen what we do register in all the institutions in this city. The kind of work we have been showing is now everywhere! This kind of political, “social engagement shtick,” if you want to call it a shtick, is registering in a lot of different kinds of institutions, which also registers in a certain kind of pedagogy for publics, which also registers for young artists, which also registers in the way art is discussed… I don’t have a problem with “preaching to the choir.” I believe that what we call “art audience” as a choir is completely off-key, and hasn’t trained very well together. There are a lot of people that see art; if you look at the people that go to MoMA, it’s a ton of everyday people! This is not some rarefied audience. So, even as much as our products are open to the public, I do think the political act is to change the discourse and the arts themselves. Also, in terms of basic, fundamental politics, lessons that have supposedly been in the air for a very long time are still yet to be implemented in practice: civil rights, diversity in terms of artistic programming, diversity in terms of staff, gender equity and pay, in other words, a fundamental sense of what an ethical process should be. Upholding something one should never be proud, but assertive about the process; I think that’s a politics of action that we really hold dear. You’ve probably read the study that was around New York on the racial composition of most of the arts institutions in the city… It’s outrageous! BF: I think it’s essential to discuss—to start with looking at who is curating. NT: Yes, but I think it is a political issue because in the arts we think of ourselves as super progressive. But then you look at some of these breakdowns and it is absolutely conservative! On the other hand, I work with a lot of artists that work on Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock …. We do have direct relationships with a lot of people at the forefront of these movements, and it’s not surprising that many of them are coming out of art backgrounds or critical practice. It wouldn’t be so radical to state that there is some sort of connection to these mass social movements right now. Peter Eckersall: There is a strong argument in your book (Seeing Power: Arts and Activism in the 21st Century, 2015) about social aesthetics and the

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production of culture as a political act. I want to take this toward a slightly theoretical direction: How important are the ideas of Antonio Gramsci to you, since you keep coming back to him in the book? NT: Gramsci is central to the concept of hegemony, and he is one of the founders of the thinking around (the idea of ) the culture industry. The problem I would have with him is his traditional Marxism—a lot of people borrow from Gramsci in a profound way. But there can be a real trap around the concept of hegemony if you think that everything is co-optation, that capitalism is so powerful that it will just swallow everything up, for it produces no agency for anyone within it. From my own position, I would say I am part Gramsci and part Machiavellian because I need some breathing room to feel like I can challenge power. Although Gramsci was a pragmatist, he doesn’t often theorize the holes within the analysis of hegemony. I think it’s important to understand that power is porous; there are many kinds of power. There is patriarchy, there’s white supremacy; they’re not the same thing (for example). I am not a believer in “capitalism is everything.” I think even without capitalism, people would still be cruel to each other. … I believe that cultural production and/ of capitalism has never been adequately wrestled with in terms of the arts. It’s almost like the arts became a side question to the bigger questions, which are related to TV, radio, and social media. It seems bizarre to talk about that and not talk about arts. Not only in terms of publicness, because (people) do like to produce art that’s involved in all of that, but also with the Creative Time Summit or with my Culture as Weapon (2017) book, for example, I want to come up with a way to talk about art that is on the same footing as talking about the spatial organization of Ikea, or the ways in which marketing campaigns are framed, or the ways in which culture is being produced by a wide array of very powerful cultural forces (and I am not talking about Guggenheim here, I am talking about Deloitte Touche [Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu is one of the largest accounting firms in the world]). PE: Is that because you want to speak back to power using some of their own vocabulary? NT: Yes, but not just a question of speaking back to power, I want to understand power and have an effect on it as well. I think the only way we can understand what art is doing is if we put it in conversation with all manner of cultural phenomenon. Because, if I put an art project on the street, so does Red Bull! The logic of gentrification meets cultural industry, shapes urban landscape … I don’t think you can talk about public art without having a good language around the cultural production of space. It would be just disingenuous. It becomes difficult for me because inevitably I deal with a developer on every project I work on in public space because it isn’t “ just” space. That’s why these things are already inherently in dialogue. I don’t have a white box to close-off and pretend it (public space) is not there.

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PE: I love your phrase “the spectrum of legibility” in your book (Seeing Power 2015: 34–36), and I wonder if you could speak more about that. What are the parameters of that idea? NT: If only there was a tool I could pull out of my pocket and gauge the spectrum of legibility on any given art project! It’s clear that people come to art from very different backgrounds. There is a lot of guesswork that goes into this on the backend; you get a lot of foundations and grantors that are eager to pretend there’s a science out there that can do this, but it’s just difficult to gauge the subjectivities. PE: I pose this question from a kind of curatorial or dramaturgical perspective. For example, as a dramaturg I’m often asked to predict the outcome in conversation with the artistic team, ref lecting on how the audience is going to read a moment, particularly if it is a provocative, potentially difficult image or expression. Is that part of the “spectrum of legibility” that you talk about? NT: Of course! I’m a big believer in the idea that “relevance” is crucial. I guess it’s a Brechtian thing. Some art is much more on the “spectrum of legibility,” but there is also some art that is illegible. Some audiences like that kind of very obscure work; it’s a question of taste. But I try to think about mass publics and engage in that direction. I don’t want to make it sound like it is a qualitative decision; it’s a strategic position. I don’t judge something for being entirely didactic, nor do I change something for being extremely hermetic. I just think it’s good to be aware that you are making those decisions when you make them. PE: That leads us to the question of scale because a lot of your commissions are big projects, such as Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy (2016), Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), and Cryptozoology: Out of Time Place Scale (2006), which was super big. The other thing that I took from your book was the discussion around the amount of ambiguity, which is an important step because that brings us to the possibility of art. So, spectacle and ambiguity, how do they work together? NT: That takes some guesswork since one person’s ambiguity is another person’s didactic, so it is about trying to find the balance. I don’t always trust my taste. I try to go see things that make me crazy excited. The funny thing is that people were blown away by the Kara Walker project [for information about the project see: http://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/] but I thought it was pretty straightforward—not like it’s literally straightforward, but maybe I was just so familiar with the work that it felt very Kara Walker to me. So maybe where I am at is not always where my projects need to land. Ambiguity, in terms of what its function is, in terms of its opposition to the didactic, is very much related to art, to what art’s function is. I think it produces a space of possibility, a space for questioning. Ambiguity is also interesting because it makes people insecure, uncomfortable. It’s a delicate thing politically because we live in a world that is eager to make all of us either super secure or super uncomfortable or fearful. We’re toyed with emotionally

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by many different forces. So, producing a kind of space in which one can be uncomfortable, but not reifying dynamics of power or comfortability: art has a history of doing that. PE: In the contemporary moment the production of affect is everywhere. Art produces affect, and performances are very involved in that. So too are media, social media, politics, and culture. NT: Can’t you say, right now, we are all suffering from “Trump affect-fatigue?” PE: Yes, absolutely! NT: I feel like something’s happening to me emotionally, that I am being triggered too much, and I’m hitting some internal limit—something is happening where I can’t react the same way every day. We’re just going to have to shift emotionally. In Culture As Weapon, there is a real relationship between social media and affect, as well as the temporality of affect. There are more and more modes out there to trigger affect more quickly in our lives. I always say CNN is the perfect example because everything is breaking news there. That’s not just one breaking news; its “breaking news” and then the headline below it says “more breaking news.” The modality of the affect is so extreme that I do think our task is to contend with that because we are dealing with an effectively exhausted audience. PE: What about rhetoric? Listening to debate, it’s almost like politicians have adopted the “Don’t even ask a question.” It’s an extreme, invective anger, and it’s an affect. So, it seems like we’re now in this position where everybody constantly releases a kind of performative violence against each other. NT: It is tough because that is the dark side of art if you think of art as production of affect. What you’re describing is the face of discourse today. So, what is art supposed to do? So much of the theater of life has become this kind of staging; it’s like attending an opera. BF: In your body of work at Creative Time, you continuously engage with producing work that straddles both theater and visual art. What are some of the differences you’ve encountered working with artists from different disciplinary legacies, conceptually and in production? NT: The expectations of the audience are fascinating to me. People come with different sets of criteria if they think they’re going to see a theater show versus an installation. It’s an interesting thing to play with because I’ve noticed that what they’re looking for is different, the ways in which they tend to see is different. For instance, when I first got here I worked with Paul Chan on Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007). He didn’t originally stage that play, it was the Classical Theatre of Harlem. In fact, I think it’s kind of cheating but beautiful because they had done the play in New York City, and they just redid it in New Orleans. I think the only twist on that end was bringing Brechtian social engagement to the post-Katrina process in New Orleans and citing it in a particular way, even though I wouldn’t think of it as the most cutting-edge.

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PE: Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has a history of such interventions. It was done in prisons, it was done in the war zone in Sarajevo… NT: What was different is that the artist handed off a theatrical production to a director, Christopher McElroen. It was very classical and production-­w ise very straightforward. I’m thinking of the theater projects I did with other artists—I worked with artist and theater director David Levine, for instance. We did a project in Central Park in which he reenacted, or staged, scenes from different films that were shot in Central Park [“Private Moment,” 2015]. They were performed live in an endless loop throughout the day, he called it “GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) theatre.” That excited me very much. … It’s theater and people don’t know it’s theater. PE: It’s very popular, I imagine. NT: It was really cool. David Levine has done some interesting experiments in that regard, which I think have a bright future. Certainly, in the art world, there are figures like Tino Sehgal, who represent a certain shift in which theater provides them a mode to navigate the gallery space. BF: What about artists like Pedro Reyes [creator of Doomocracy]; he is a sculptor, doing a huge production with limited time and space? NT: It was interesting because it was a different way to write. He set up concepts for each room. He said, “I want to do political catharsis.” BF: It’s like devised theater. NT: Yes. Then we just started making all these different rooms. Pedro knew what they were about, but then he needed a director and he brought in Meghan Finn, who does experimental theater, and then Meghan brought in a playwright, Paul Huf ker. BF: There was also a playwright? NT: Yes! But all the rooms had been already solved; it was just what was said in them that needed to be written. After the play was written the casting was made. I don’t know how plays are typically made, but that just seems weird—it was almost as if the stage set concept started the process. PE: At the time of that work, there was another work called Hell House, [a haunted house/morality play scenario typically performed by fundamentalist Christian audiences]. I wondered whether they were aware of that? NT: Oh sure. The concept of haunted house is a great genre; it is so forgiving because even if it is terrible, it’s still okay. If you walk into a haunted house, you are not looking for high theater; you’re looking for getting scared, walking through things… I felt like—for the range of what people come to a haunted house for—the door was pretty accepting and wide. BF: I don’t know if you saw James Scruggs’ piece 3/Fifths (2017) at 3-­Legged Dog, which was about white supremacy and white privilege as a haunted house. It was quite subversive because he really punched into stuff that made one feel really uncomfortable. NT: I thought that [the Scruggs piece] was dark…

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BF: Yes, and it’s made just like that. He has the concept and then he hires playwrights. I mean, he happens to be a playwright himself, but the process seems similar. NT: I did a project for FringeArts Philadelphia with my wife [Theresa Rose] [The Proposition Tent, 2013]. It was called “This is not a theatre.” It went terribly. We worked with this small theater company that has been around in Philly for a long time, and it just became a family portrait of what they’ve been up to; they showed their old costumes and talked to us about their past. It wasn’t meant to be a play, it was meant to be a social process. But the problem was that people who showed up still bought tickets for seats and even when we said this is not theater, they came in expecting a play. People thought it was awful! They were like, “What is this? Some soapy family drama?” It didn’t work as theater, as you can expect. We also did projects with other artists such as Liz Magic Laser [see: https://lizmagiclaser.com]. She was doing this live-news-telecast-theatrical-production. It was OK, but it needed more rehearsal, it wasn’t tight. Then we also worked with a group called the Mammalian Diving Ref lex [see https://mammalian.ca]. They did an amazing project called All the Sex I’ve Ever Had (2010), and they work with senior citizens who tell their entire sexual history through each decade of their life. BF: Is this a show? NT: Yes, it’s a theatrical production with real people, and you cannot stop listening! To get back to your question earlier, I’m very aware that there are performing arts and theater festivals, such as Manchester Festival or Park Armory, that are trying to create crossovers between performing arts and visual arts. Admittedly, I come from the visual arts discourse, but I am aware of this whole other world where these experiments are happening. PE: You said you were very interested in the question of the audience. Could you talk a little bit about that? NT: When we encounter things, we put them in a box in our head, we frame an experience. We do not just come into a theater with a blank slate, we come with a set of expectations, with a personal sense of what enjoyment looks like for us. Whatever we’re looking for, we internally understand if that has happened, just like when you sit down for dinner. I’ve learned that when someone comes to a theater production they don’t look at it in the same way they would if they went to an art museum. That’s just human nature, but what’s interesting is that you can play with it. I would love more analysis of what those different criteria are. Also, in terms of traditions of audiences, what is the tradition of pleasure in audiences? For what do people go to museums, what do they come into the door looking for? How do they think they are supposed to think when they come into the gallery? PE: What would be your intuition on this, since you’ve worked in both contexts now?

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NT: I’ll be very frank, my taste for theater often is not “good theatre.” But I always say, “the cheesiness”— it’s such an Americanism—the appetite for melodrama is much higher in the theater world, whereas I feel that the visual arts is much more critical, or protestant, or reserved, if I may say. I  don’t know how to explain it, but there are different kinds of temperaments that come with those traditions of experience. It’s tough for artists because they have to be very aware of the different temperaments of their audiences, the communities that are looking for different things. If they’re in a theater festival, they’ve got to gear up for that audience. If they are at a contemporary art fair, like Documenta, they’ve got to gear up their work in a certain register. PE: What ways are they gearing up? I could make a guess, but how do you articulate that? NT: I’m only coming from my side; admittedly, that is having a biased pedigree. To some degree, I feel that as a curator it is what I am good at: I know my scene and what these art people are looking for. BF: I was surprised that a lot of people from the theater world didn’t go to Doomocracy; it was not a thing in those circles. And yet it was a huge production. So, the framing definitely affects who goes. NT: Yes, that’s what I’ve also noticed. I know what buttons to hit in the art world to make sure that the art community goes to see the piece. This is the background of whatever that job (that I do) is, and in theater, people have to do the same thing. BF: Is that something you work on as a curator when you work with the artist? How do you create new contexts or platforms for the work? Since it’s not art or theater now, do you work to create new contexts or new roles for spectatorship? NT: Each project has its own demands. What’s nice about Creative Time is we’re not a museum. We are somewhat more like a guerilla organization, so much that we re-tool ourselves for every project. The most important thing is picking the right project. For instance, I’ve been working with Pedro for a while, we’ve been talking for years. When we started thinking about “a political haunted house” it struck us as a great idea. Because I could feel … it was October (2016), the (2016) election, historically where we’re at, I just knew! Sometimes when you have a project that speaks to the zeitgeist, it’s a forgiving landscape. It’s catching what’s on people’s minds, which I like better than questioning “was it a good artwork?” Who cares? It speaks to where people’s heads were at. PE: What are the dramaturgical or curatorial strategies that you can use to avoid the inevitable comments about art being co-opted or just letting off political steam, or about the artwork becoming too connected to the realities of everyday life, politics, economics? What kind of dramaturgical strategies might come back to the idea of counter-hegemony? NT: First of all, I would say that New York City is a place of deep class inequity, with all kinds of ills occurring around race, gender, class and so on.

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Even if the audience was just from the city, I push back on the “preaching of the choir” because we should not pretend we’re on the same page here in New York City. There are different communities experiencing different versions of this city and different relationships to power. We do different kinds of work, too, and I must say, not all (of the works) are so political. I am okay with projects that are dreamy and appealing to the senses; I feel like you overstay your welcome if you always say, “Let’s get real, people!” We need time to just enjoy life. So, one of the strategies we use, depending on the project, is community engagement by clarifying the context, the relationship to constituencies on the ground, who’s involved, who’s at the table. Another strategy is to not assume that the audience is coming but to be proactive in who the audience is. We have a community-organizing staff who find people in the neighborhood that are involved in a particular issue and work with them so that their constituents show up to the project. In that sense, our work deals with the production rather than solely with the artwork. The production extends into who engages with the artwork and seeing that as a part of the process itself. That’s basically what Paul Chan did in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2006). He said he’s organizing it Hezbollah’s style, by knocking each and every door. The work Tom Finkelpearl did over at Queens Museum is also representative of this approach, where they have community organizers on staff.1 Rather than claiming, as a lot of these museums do, that they do racially diverse shows but no one comes, they are present in the neighborhoods, making friends and building concerns. It’s not just “them” and “us;” them is us, and they are actively finding ways to develop that relationship since they have the infrastructure to do so. We try to incorporate that kind of strategy into the projects we do. Simultaneously responding to your point about how to not get co-opted: I understand that there will always be a concern that one just becomes yet another spectacular cultural production in the swirling sea of advertisement that is New York. Sometimes New York pretends it is a physical space but it is just a giant glossy magazine, and that does haunt me all the time. If you were a doctor of urbanism, and you put your stethoscope over New York, you would not say, “this city suffers from a lack of culture.” One would have to be delusional if not somewhat haunted by this, by the fear of adding to the noise. I think that’s the case with artists, too. PE: How do you interpret the current moment of art-making in light of our political reality? NT: I’ve seen cycles during the Bush era, post-9/11, or even pre-9/11, and I’ve learned that it takes a while for the arts to catch up to the moment. As much as artists are fast, it seems like things don’t get into the air for two or three years, so I think we’re still in the adjustment period. Certainly, it’s a lot to take in, but I also know that art reacts to the time, that’s what art is. As much as Trump is on my mind, I do recall a lot of amazing progress being

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made during this period because, say what you will about Bernie Sanders, I heard the word “socialism” mentioned on an actual political campaign. That’s new in America and it certainly marks some shift in the landscape of politics in the world. The conversation on race, as much as it gets vitriolic and fraught at times, is very alive. Black Lives Matter is not just some social movement; it’s in the NFL, it’s in the everyday, it’s part of our speech. Class is a part of our speech. So much as Trump is out there, there are also some important discussions in the political waters right now. I also don’t think that we’re dealing with some alienated, disaffected youth who are not getting to the polls. I’ve never seen so many young people interested in elections, in the political system itself. I remind myself about that because if I just look at the headlines I’d be simply distraught. But if I think about our recent political experiences, there’s much to be excited about. There has been some post-fallout from Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, but in the arts field it’s encouraging to see that there has been a lot of pushback on institutions, and not only about what kind of artists they’re showing, like the Dana Schutz controversy at the Whitney or Sam Durant controversy at the Walker Art Museum. Those controversies were started off by a “woke” youth who are calling out on institutions for internal racial disparities. With Sam Durant and the Walker, for instance, there was a lot of pushback on institution’s having no relationship to the indigenous community. With the Whitney, there was a pushback on the racial implications. I think holding art institutions accountable is a very healthy sign because it means that people feel like they got some skin in the game. So, on that note, I do think it’s important to be very political. The tricky thing for me is that I’m very self-aware that in the span of art organizations we feel big, our brand is big. I just think of my young self; there was nothing I hated more than big organizations telling me about activism. PE: Yes, but that’s inevitable. NT: Black Lives Matter is amazing because it’s a ton of artists, and it’s very queer and female-led. It’s much more complex and dynamic than you’d ever read in mass media, and it brings a different kind of politics to the table. They are mostly young people; they’re impatient and they are fearless to say “We want this now!” Black Lives Matter is an impatient movement. I think it’s an exciting time. That’s the funny thing; we all knew Trump would make great art, inversely. The backlash, unfortunately, produces interesting things. Obama was tougher. Obama was slippery. BF: I still prefer Obama and his family. NT: Me, too, we all do. We all prefer bad arts where everything’s OK.

Note 1 Finkelpearl served as the Director of Queens Museum from 2002 to 2014 and is former Commissioner of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs until 2019

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References Nato Thompson (2015), Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century. Brooklyn and London: Melville House. Nato Thompson (2016), Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life. Brooklyn and London: Melville House.

Bios

Rita Aquino is an artist, curator, dance educator, and researcher specializing in collaborative and participatory live arts practices. She is Professor at the School of Dance at the Federal University of Bahia, in its Post-Graduate and Professional Graduate Program in Dance. She has a PhD in Performing Arts and a master’s in Contemporary Studies in Dance from UFBA. She is Coordinator of Formative Activities at the International Festival of Performing Arts of Bahia (FIAC) since 2011, and participates in its curatorship since 2016. She was curator of MEXE – International Meeting of Art and Community in the city of Porto and curator of the Training Activities of the Sesc de Bienal Dança 2019. Along with Felipe de Assis and Leonardo França, she co-directed Looping: Bahia Overdub, which was nominated for the BRAVO AWARD! best Dance show of 2016, with presentations at international festivals, including Looping: Scotland Overdub at the Edinburgh Festival 2019. Felipe de Assis  is a director, producer, researcher, and curator. He is co-­ creator of the International Festival of Performing Arts of Bahia (FIAC), which he has curated since 2008. FIAC Bahia has been a member of the Nucleus of International Festivals of Performing Arts in Brazil since 2009 and Network of Festivals of Teatro do Brazil since 2015. Felipe collaborates with independent curators, notably, Rumos Itaú Cultural 2017/2018 Program, Oi Futuro 2017 and 2018 Edital, MITbr curator linked to the São Paulo International Exhibition 2018 and 2019, MEXE – International Meeting of Art and Community in the city of Porto in 2019. He is general coordinator of Cultural Mediation: training program in performing arts in Salvador and the Metropolitan Region. Along with Rita Aquino and Leonardo França, he co-directed Looping: Bahia Overdub, which was nominated for the BRAVO AWARD! best Dance show of 2016, with presentations at international festivals, including Looping: Scotland Overdub at the Edinburgh Festival 2019. Kristof van Baarle is a dramaturg and researcher. He received his PhD in art sciences at Ghent University in 2018. He is a post-doc researcher at Antwerp University, where he also teaches dramaturgy. With Kris Verdonck, he conducts a three-year research project on the convergences

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between Samuel Beckett and Noh-theatre at KASK – School of Arts. As a dramaturg, Kristof is a longtime collaborator of Kris Verdonck/A Two Dogs Company, and Michiel Vandevelde. He has also worked with Heike Langsdorf, Thomas Ryckewaert, and Alexander Vantournhout. Kristof has published his research and dramaturgical work in various academic and other journals and book chapters, such as Performance Research, Etcetera, and Documenta. He is co-editor, with Peter Eckersall, of Machine Made Silence: The Art of Kris Verdonck (2020), and, with Christel Stalpaert and Laura Karreman, of Posthumanism and Performance: Staging Prototypes of Composite Bodies (2020). Marc Bamuthi Joseph  is a 2017 TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. He is also the winner of the 2011 Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. In pursuit of affirmations of black life in the public realm, he co-founded the Life is Living Festival for Youth Speaks. His evening length work, /peh-LO-tah/, toured across North America for three years. His piece “The Just and the Blind” investigates the crisis of over-sentencing in the prison industrial complex. Bamuthi is currently at work on commissions for the Perelman Center, Yale University, and the Washington National Opera. Formerly the Chief of Program and Pedagogy at YBCA in San Francisco, Bamuthi currently serves as the Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact at The Kennedy Center. Philip Bither  has been Walker Art Center’s Director and Senior Curator, Performing Arts since April 1997, spearheading one of the country’s leading contemporary performing arts programs. He oversaw the building of the McGuire Theater (2005), raised the Walker’s first performing arts endowment, and commissioned 180 new works in dance, music, and performance from leading artists. He was responsible for producing and/or co-curating key exhibitions such as Trisha Brown (2008), Eiko & Koma’s Naked (2010); Ralph Lemon: Scaffold Room (2014), and Merce Cunningham: Common Time (2017). From 2016 to 2020, he co-chaired the Walker’s Interdisciplinary Initiative, a large-scale production, research, and publishing effort. He served for eight years as the Artistic Director for the Flynn Center/Discover Jazz Festival in Burlington, VT; and seven years as Assoc. Director/Music Curator for BAM’s Next Wave Festival. He received the Assn. of Performing Arts Presenters’ Fan Taylor Award in 2009 and in 2011 helped found Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. Ron Berry is the founder and Artistic Director of Fusebox Austin and has guided the organization through fifteen years of critically acclaimed programming. The organization is most known for its annual Fusebox Festival that features local, national, and international artists exploring the intersection of live performance and other art forms. Fusebox also uses the festival as an opportunity to work hand-in-hand with community members to identify

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creative, out-of-the-box solutions to some of the most pressing issues facing the city. These efforts have resulted in new initiatives related to community health, affordable housing, and transportation. Ron has served as a panelist for numerous organizations and foundations including the NEA, Creative Capital, the MAP Fund, Texas Commission on the Arts, and SXSW and he regularly speaks at festivals and conferences all over the world. Lili Chopra is the Executive Director, Artistic Programs at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). Lili oversees the residency and regranting program as well as the public programs which include the annual summer festival River To River as well as the Arts Center at Governors Island. From 2006 to 2018, Lili was the Executive Vice President and Artistic Director of the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF). At FIAF, Lili founded and co-curated the Crossing the Line festival, a transdisciplinary festival featuring commissioned works with the U.S. and international artists. She also co-conceived and co-curated the Tilt Kids Festival, a culturally diverse and trans-disciplinary arts festival for young audiences. Prior to her time at FIAF, Lili spent four years at New York Live Arts (formerly Dance Theater Workshop) as Associate Producer and as Curator of its gallery. She has also worked with numerous festivals and independent artists in France and in the U.S. as an administrator and producer. Peter Eckersall teaches at the Graduate Center, CUNY and is a Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne. His research interests include Japanese performance, dramaturgy, and theatre and politics. Publications include Machine Made Silence (ed. with Kristof van Baarle, 2020), The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics (ed. with Helena Grehan, 2019), New Media Dramaturgy (co-authored with Helena Grehan and Ed Scheer, 2017), and Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan (2013). He was co-founder/ dramaturg of Not Yet It’s Difficult. Recent dramaturgy includes Everything Starts from a Dot (Sachiyo Takahashi, LaMama), Phantom Sun/Northern Drift (Alexis Destoop, Beursschouwburg, Riga Biennial). Gurur Ertem is a sociologist, dancer, and performance studies scholar. She earned her PhD in sociology from The New School for Social Research. She has been immersed in contemporary dance culture for two decades as a dancer, dramaturg, scholar, educator, and curator. Ertem curated the iDANS Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance (Istanbul 2006–2014) and edited several books on dance such as Dance on Time (2010); Solo? In Contemporary Dance (2008), and Yirminci Yüzyılda Dans Sanatı (2007). She currently researches and writes on politics of/with the body and the affective and aesthetic enunciations of the “political” with a focus on recent social movements and corporeal resistance. Recent publications include Bodies of Evidence: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Politics of Movement (co-­ edited with Sandra Noeth, 2018) and Gezi Uprising: Performative Democracy and Politics of the Body in an Extended Space of Appearance (in Media Practices, Social Movements, and Performativity; Routledge, 2018).

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Bertie Ferdman  is an associate professor at Borough Manhattan Community College and also teaches at The Graduate Center, CUNY and Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her research interests include site-based performance, urban dramaturgies, and curating performance. Recent publications include The Bloomsbury Handbook to Performance Art, co-edited with Jovana Stokic (2020), Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific (2018), and a reprint of her chapter “From Content to Context: The Emergence of the Performance Curator” in Curating Live Arts: Critical Perspectives, Essays, and Conversations on Theory and Practice (2019). Her essays have appeared in Theater, TDR, PAJ, HowlRound, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and Performance Research. She was co-editor, along with Tom Sellar, of a Special Issue of Yale’s Theater Magazine titled “Performance Curators,” as well as guest editor of a special section of PAJ titled “Urban Dramaturgies.” Ana Janevski is Curator in the Department of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art. She co-organized David Tudor: Rainforest (with Martha Joseph), the opening project of MoMA’s new performance space The Studio, and Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done (with Thomas Lax and Martha Joseph). She has collaborated with many choreographers and artists such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jérôme Bel, Yvonne Rainer, Rabih Mroué, Boris Charmatz & Musée de la danse, Simone Forti, Martha Rosler, Ralph Lemon, and Trajal Harrell. She is the editor of a MoMA Dance Series book on Boris Charmatz and co-editor of Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe (with Roxana Marcoci and Ksenia Nouril). With Cosmin Costinas, she co-edited Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive?: The New Performance Turn, Its Histories and Its Institutions. From 2007 to 2011, she was Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland, Fernando José García Barros is a cultural manager, architect, professor, and visual artist. He has double nationality, Bolivian and Spanish. He has worked in Syria, Spain, Italy, and Bolivia, always in projects related to the revitalization of cultural heritage. He was president of Nodo Asociativo para el Desarrollo de las Artes (NADA) and is currently the Executive Director of mARTadero, a cultural center conceived as a livelihood for the arts, located in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Fernando has organized several national theatre festivals and contemporary art biennials in Bolivia. He is editor of el guía, an independent cultural agenda of the city, and produces cultural events in public places commissioned by the Municipal Government of Cochabamba. He has curated numerous projects in Latin America and Europe, and was awarded the Premio Único del Concurso Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo II CONART 2004, among others. He teaches courses on Art History and Theory, Artistic Expression, Cultural Management, and Museum Education in universities in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile.

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Judy Hussie-Taylor has served as Executive Director & Chief Curator of Danspace Project (DSP) since 2008. She initiated and is artistic director of DSP’s Platform series 2010–2018 and is editor-in-chief of DSP’s catalogue series. She organized PLATFORM 2012:Judson NOW and co-­ curated PLATFORM 2016: A Body In Places featuring Eiko Otake. From 1990–2008 Hussie-Taylor lived in Colorado where she contributed to the artistic and administrative leadership of the following organizations: Colorado Dance Festival, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. She served on the faculty of the University of Colorado-Boulder in the Department of Art & Art History from 2000 to 2005. She is a faculty member and on the Advisory Committee of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University. Hussie-Taylor was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 2014 and received a 2017 Bessie New York Dance & Performance Award, the first ever awarded to a curator. Florian Malzacher is an independent performing arts curator, dramaturg, and writer. From 2013 to 2017 he was artistic director of Impulse Theater Festival (Germany), and from 2006 to 2012 co-programmer of the multidisciplinary arts festival steirischer herbst (Austria). He curated the 170 hours marathon camp “Truth is Concrete” on artistic strategies in politics (Graz, 2012), the performative exhibition “Appropriations” (Ethnological Museum Berlin, 2014), the congress “Artist Organisations International” (Berlin 2015 with Jonas Staal and Joanna Warsza), “Sense of Possibility” on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the revolution in St. Petersburg (2017), and “Training for the Future” (since 2018, with Jonas Staal). As a dramaturg, he has worked with Rimini Protokoll, Lola Arias, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Mariano Pensotti, and Tania Bruguera. His publications include Curating Performing Arts (2010); Truth is Concrete. A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics (2014); Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre of Today (2015); Empty Stages, Crowded Flats. Performativity as Curatorial Strategy (2017); and Gesellschaftsspiele on contemporary political theatre (in German, 2020). Émilie Monnet  is a director, playwright, actor, and curator who works at the intersection of theatre, performance, and media arts, centering on questions of identity, memory, history, and transformation. Her works privilege collaborative processes of creation, and are typically presented as interdisciplinary theatre or immersive performance experiences. She is the artist in residence at Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui in Montreal until 2021. This Time Will Be Different, her installation performance co-created with choreographer Lara Kramer, premiered at Festival TransAmériques in June 2019 and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2019. Since 2016, Monnet has produced Indigenous Contemporary Scene (ICS), a nomadic platform for the presentation of live arts and creative exchanges between Indigenous artists and communities. Émilie is both Anishinaabe

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(Algonquin) and French, and she currently lives in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyaang / Montréal. onishka.org Gabi Ngcobo is the Creative Director of the Center for Historical Reenactments and lecturer at the Witts School of the Arts, University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2018, Ngcobo was announced as curator of the 10th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art. Ngcobo is also a founding member of the Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA) and has served as its Western Cape co-chair and National Representative. In 2010, she co-curated rope-a-dope: to win a losing war at Cabinet, New York, and has contributed to an ongoing project titled Xenoglossia, a research project which travelled to the 11th Lyon Biennale in September 2011. Ngcobo is the curator of DON’T / PANIC, a curatorial project that coincided with the 17th UN Global Urban Summit on Climate Change (COP17) and took place in Durban, South Africa in November 2011. Chiaki Soma  is an art producer and dramaturg who produces and curates numerous projects that transcend the boundaries of theater, visual arts, and socially engaged art, both in Japan and abroad. She was the first Program Director of Festival/Tokyo, Japan’s leading performing arts festival from 2009 to 2013, as well as the first Director of Steep Slope Studio in Yokohama from 2006 to 2010. She founded the NPO Arts Commons Tokyo in 2014, and currently serves as its representative director. In 2015, she received the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture. Since 2016, she has been an Associate Professor of Body Expression and Cinematic Arts Studies at Rikkyo University, Tokyo. In 2017, she founded a new independent project “Theater Commons Tokyo” and currently works as its executive committee chairperson and director. She was appointed as Performing Arts Curator of Aichi Triennale 2019, Nagoya. Nato Thompson is the Sueyun and Gene Locks Artistic Director at Philadelphia Contemporary where he began in November of 2017. Previous to Philadelphia Contemporary, he worked at the New York-based public art organization Creative Time as Artistic Director which he joined in January 2007. Since then, Thompson organized such major Creative Time projects as The Creative Time Summit (2009–2015), Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy (2016), Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), Living as Form (2011), Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures (2012), Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Key to the City (2010), Jeremy Deller’s It is What it is (2009, with New Museum curators Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie), Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008), and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007), among others. Previously, he worked as Curator at MASS MoCA, where he completed numerous large-scale exhibitions, including The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004), with a catalogue distributed by MIT Press. He has written two books of cultural criticism, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (2015) and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life (2017).

Index

Abramovic, Marina 5, 133–134 academic research 38 access 17, 151 Achugar, Luciana 63 Actor Network Theory 24 aesthetic development 2 Agamben, Giorgio 38–39 agonism 18, 145 Algan, Ayla 97 Algan, Beklan 97 ambiguity 17, 183–184 American Dance Festival 122 Americanism 187 Amsterdam School of New Dance Development 98 Andre, Carl 139 The Arab Spring 6 Arapahoe community 123 Arendt, Hannah 106–107 Aristotelian drama 4 art audience 181 art framed economy 55 artistic inclinations 8 artistic research 38, 45, 46 artistic thinking 17–18 artistic work 29 Art Place America Grant 63 assembly 18 Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) 70 audience development scheme 56 Báez, Firelei 163 Bal-Blanc, Pierre 132, 134 Basualdo, Carlos 138 Beckett, Samuel 42, 185 Bel, Jerome 136 Berrada, Omar 88 Beuys, Joseph 76

biennialization 101 bi-political strategy 163 Bishop, Claire 10, 132 Bismarck, Beatrice von 5 Black Lives Matter 180, 189–190 Bosch, Rosan 102 Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art 121 Brodbeck, Christine 97 Brooklyn Academy of Music 71 Brown, Trisha 74, 88, 122 Buden, Boris 146 Burns, A.K. 163 Butler, Judith 18 Carvalho, Renata 28 Castellucci, Romeo 90, 172 Çatı Association Collective 103 censorship 18–19 Chang, Jeff 52 Chan, Paul 180, 188 Charmatz, Boris 86, 136, 140 Clifford, Jo 28 coexistence 19, 33 Cohen, Steven 91 collaboration 12, 18, 19, 29, 30, 41, 50, 71, 75, 82, 84, 88, 126, 127, 129, 140, 148, 151, 154, 159 collections 19–20, 30 Colorado Dance Festival 121–122 commissions 19–20 Community Curating 128 community engagement 10–11, 188 community health 61, 62 conservatism 28 contemporari-ness, festival 35 contemporary art 3, 7, 19, 20, 23–25, 35, 36, 49, 58, 73, 76, 83, 101, 114, 187, 194

198 Index contemporary cultural management 112 contemporary dance dramaturgies 8–9 contemporary performance 3, 69 Cook, Brett 51, 52 Costinas, Cosmin 133 COVID-19 5, 58, 159 craft 20 creaction 19 creative ecosystem 20–21, 49 creative production 114 cross-disciplinary development 2 cultural economy 144 cultural heritage 111 cultural institution 6, 54 cultural management 114 cultural organization 93 cultural politics 8 cultural production 10, 31, 36, 182–183 culture formation 50 culture making 66 Culture Program 97–98 culture sharing 66 Cunningham choreographic techniques 81 Cunningham, Merce 74, 88 curatorial strategies 141–150 curatorial work 29 cyborg 38, 39 Daisuke, Tsuda 175 Dances of the Spirit 122 Danger, Dayna 151–152 Danspace Project 120–121 Davida, Dena 120 Davis, Hodari 51 Dean, Jodi 7 decolonization 26–27, 161 DeFrantz, Thomas 10, 11 De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa 103, 134, 137, 138, 140 Deleuze, Gilles 43 Dietz, Steve 81 Dilley, Barbara 124 Dominguez, Juan 98 Dove, Simon 87, 88 dramaturgical curator 11–13 dramaturgy/dramaturg 7, 35–36, 53, 126, 174; artistic process 79; contemporary European theatre 40; self-identifies 45; text-based model 146; Turkish 95 Duty Free Art 147 economic disparity 174 economies 21, 75

Edinburgh International Festival 154 ends 21 Engberg, Siri 74 Erdoğan, Tayyip 105, 107 Esquenazi, Deborah 60 essayistic choreographies 43 European contemporary dance 99 European documentary theatre 172 exhaustion 39, 45 exhibition machine 160 expanded choreography, iDANS Festival 98 expanded dramaturgy 99 extinction 39 Fagin, Larry 124 Faleiros, Fabiana 162 Fenley, Molissa 122 festivalization 8–9 festival management 30 financial imperatives 57 Fitch, Lizzie 83 fluidity 22 Forti, Simone 139 Free Range Art 59 French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) 85, 88, 91 Friedman, Martin 73 Fusebox 9, 17, 58; gallery space vs. theater space 64 Future Leaders Initiative 83 Gabriels, Jane 120 Gallagher-Ross, Anna 58 Gallant, Jackie 158 Garces, Michael 53 Gatti, Armand 113 geographies 21–22 Gielen, Pascal 99 Gill, Beth 81 global politics 169 The Gospel According to Jesus: Queen of Heaven (Clifford) 28 Gramsci, Antonio 182 Grand Union 124 Grehan, Helena 24 Haitian Revolution 163 Halbreich, Kathy 5, 71–72, 74, 75 Harrell, Trajal 94, 134, 136, 137 Harris, Rennie 122 Hassabi, Maria 77, 94, 134, 139 Heathfield, Adrian 88, 89, 132 hegemony concept 182

Index  199 Hikmet, Nâzim 47 hip-hop 50 Hiroki, Azuma 175 Hodge, Chinaka 51 hope 22–23 Houston-Jones, Ishmael 24, 125 Hunt,Victoria 152 Huynh, Emmanuel 100 iDANS International Festival of Contemporary Dance and Performance 95, 96, 105, 145 immigration policies 68 impersonal approach 39 implication 23 Indigenous Contemporary Scene (ICS) 151 Indigenous Creators Exchange 152 indiscipline 23, 32 inquiry 95–108 Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) 70 institutional-creative practices 2 Institutional Dramaturgy 70 institutions 23 interdisciplinary approach 9 International Edinburgh Festival 9 International Festival of Performing Arts of Bahia (FIAC) 28, 29, 30, 34, 36, 109 Istanbul Cultural Foundation’s Theatre Festival 98 Jackson, Shannon 10, 74, 145, 147–148 Japanese culture 177 Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC) 164 Jones, Bill T. 74, 122 Jones, Kellie 74 Judson Dance Theatre 124 Kaup-Hasler,Veronica 142 Kennedy Center 49 Kharms, Daniil 42 Killacky, John 71–72 Klein,Yves 76 Kramer, Lara 154 Kravas, Heather 63 Kronos Quartet 71 Kunst, Bojana 7 KUSKA 110 Kuswidananto, Jompet 83, 84 Laermans, Rudi 41, 99 Lakota community 123

Lamar, Kendrick 53 Landsman, Aaron 65 Lang, Jack 85–86 Larrieu, Daniel 86 Latour, Bruno 41 Lee,Young Jean 56 Lefebvre, Henri 25 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 3–4, 96, 141 Lemon, Ralph 41, 74, 76, 77–80, 94, 121, 126, 127 Lepecki, André 88, 132, 134 Le Roy, Xavier 134 Lester, Gideon 88 Levine, David 185 Leysen, Johan 41 Lia Rodrigues Dance Company 33 Lichtenstein, Harvey 71, 73 Lind, Maria 160 Linehan, Fergus 9 liquid modernity 22 listening 23–24 literal community 57 Living Theatre 44 Living Word Project 51 Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) 116, 117 Lowe, Rick 51 Lowry, Glenn D. 1 macro-contextual themes 115 Mallo, Natalia 28 Malpede, John 116 Mammalian Diving Reflex 186 Mandle, Julia 86 Maravilla, Guadalupe 67 Marchart, Oliver 11, 12, 146, 147 Margolles, Teresa 132 Marthaler, Christoph 172 Martinez, Carra 60 mass social movements 182 McElroen, Christopher 185 Melillo, Joe 71 Mellon Foundation Dance 80 Michelson, Sarah 73, 94 Mitchell, Rashaun 81 Monk, Meredith 74 Montreal-based art organization 11 Moran, Jason 74, 83–84 Morrison, Tony 52 Mouffe, Chantal 11, 18, 145, 146 Müller, Heiner 41 multi-disciplinary annual program 70, 145 Musée de la Danse 136

200 Index Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 1, 20, 21, 25, 73, 75, 89, 131–140, 181, 194 mutual learning programme 173 Nauumann, Bruce 139 networks 24 New York-based artists 88 New York Live Arts 85, 86 Nina, Waira 154 Nizhny Tagil Charter 113 non-fiction storyteller 96 non-hierarchical approach 9 nourishment 24–25

process-based art 133 productive ambiguity 17 Profeta, Katherine 41, 80, 126 Prouvost, Laure 82 Public Enemy album 50, 52 publicness 181, 182 quality of experience 3

object-based culture 75 Obrist, Hans Ulrich 168–169 Ondák, Roman 132 O’Neill, Paul 2 Onishka 151–152, 154, 156, 157 Ono,Yoko 76 oral heritage 111 Otake, Eiko 195 Ouramdane, Rachid 100 over-identification 43–44 Overlie, Mary 124

racism 28 Rainer,Yvonne 138, 139 Rawls, Will 125, 126 reconceptualization 8–9, 62 Redden, Nigel 73 registers 120–130 relational aesthetics 24, 147 relational curating 128 relationality theme 33 Reyes, Pedro 180, 183, 185 Riener, Silas 81 right-wing politics 28 Rimini Protokoll 33, 104, 172 Rizzo, Christian 100 Robinson, Kenya 163 Rugoff, Ralph 7

Paik, Nam June 76 Paradise Now 45 participation 30, 32 participatory aesthetics 33 pedagogical tools 50 pedagogical work 29 Pedagogy of the Oppressed 51 Penguin Café Orchestra 71 performance art 1, 5; contemporary 3; ephemerality 26; festivalization 8–9; multi-disciplinary annual program 70, 74; museum 133; selection 3 performance of ‘theory’ 43 Performance Practice program 66 performative curating 147–148, 150 “performative turn” 5–6 The Performative Turn 132 performativity 74, 145, 148 performing curatorial practice 161 perpetual revolution 63 poiesis 25 political activism 181 political agency 31 political responsibility 32 polytheism 33 post-COVID 19 9, 18 postdramatic theater 4, 172 posthumanism 38

scale 25 Scène contemporaine autochtone (SCA) 151 scenic essays 43 Scruggs, James 186 Sehgal, Tino 134 self-awareness 7, 11 self-censor 19 self-identify 6 self-organized practices 159 self-preservation 159–166 Sharp, Elliott 71 Showcase Beat Le Mot (SCBLM) 141 Sierra, Santiago 132 Silier, Aydin 96–97 Simon, Lizzie 87 site-based practices 3 Situationist International 115 Sızanlı, Filiz 100 Smith, Anna Deavere 94 social dramaturgies 10–11 social entity 25 social environments 1–2 social health 111 social inequality 179 social responsibility 131 social transformations 36 socio-cultural animation 112

Index  201 Soltanoff, Phil 63 space 25–26 spectrum of legibility 183 Staal, Jonas 148–149 state-funded museum 131 ‘state of being,’ stage 38–48 Steyerl, Hito 147 Stuart, Meg 84 Swain, Rachael 153 Takayama, Akira 171 target community 169 Taylor, Cecil 71 Teker, Aydın 100 temporality 26–27, 32 temporary communities 145 Theatre Commons Tokyo 171–172, 175, 178 theatrical performance 82 Tibaldo, Emma 158 time-based art 133 Tokyo Olympic Games 177 Training for the Future 148–149 Trecartin, Ryan 83 Trencsényi, Katalin 70 Truth is Concrete 142, 143, 144, 148 Tuna, Tuğçe 100 Unfriendly Takeover, Frankfurt 141–142 Universidad Federal de Bahía 29

Vandevelde, Michiel 43 Van Kerkhoven, Marianne 3, 4, 40, 96, 99 Verdonck, Kris 39, 41, 46 Vergne, Philippe 74 Vidokle, Anton 2, 3 Viso, Olga 72, 75 visual art 1, 2; co-invent strategies 142; curators 82; new dramaturgy 4; performance curator 3; uses of 5 Walker Art Center 20, 21, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 83, 192 Walker, Kara 180, 183 Walther, Franz Erhard 132 Warsza, Joanna 143 Weinberg, Adam 73 Williams, Raymond 17 Williams, Sarah 158 Wilson, Bob 88 Wilson, Reggie 127 workshop-based activities 122–123 youth expression 50 youth literacy 50 Yula, Özen 19, 102 Żmijewski, Artur 143 Zorn, John 71 Zummo, Peter 71