Sarah Spies Choreographies of the Curatorial: Performative Trajectories for Choreography and Dance in the Museum

Sarah Spies Choreographies of the Curatorial: Performative Trajectories for Choreography and Dance in the Museum Sarah Spies Choreographies of the Curatorial: Performative Trajectories for Choreography and Dance in the Museum Acknowledgment To my supervisor, Professor Dorothee Richter, I am very grateful for your support, encouragement and critical counsel. It will remain with me in both thought and feeling beyond the residue of the thesis and publication. I am also very thankful to Professor Susanne Clausen for her continued support and to Maayan Sheleff for the current support and creative collab- oration. My deepest gratitude also to my Accumulations colleagues; Dr Dani Abul- hawa, Hannah Buckley and Dr Amy Voris – especially to Dani for the pro- cesses of co-curation and shared writing as part of Precarious Assembly. Your collegiate and collective sharing of practice and provocation is warmly valued. To my aunt, Dr Jeanne Gamble, for her gracious support and deeper under- standing of both the value and cost of this type of work. Thank you to my mother, Marianne Spies, for her very generous support during the final stages. To Brendan, for being there at the start and at the end, thank you. Sarah Spies Choreographies of the Curatorial: Performative Trajectories for Choreography and Dance in the Museum The present study was accepted as a dissertation at the Department of Fine Arts of the University of Reading. Prof. Dr. Dorothee Richter advised the dissertation. This publication is based on the dissertation as part of the PhD in Practice in Curating Program, a joint doctoral program of the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Reading, supported by swissuniversities. Published by ONCURATING.org Proofreading: Stephanie Carwin Set and design: Biotop 3000 Cover Photo: Funmi Adewole, Restfulness, within a space curated by Elizabeth Price. Available at: http://www.accumulationsproject.com/funmi-adewole/. Photograph: © Christian Kipp. © 2020 ONCURATING.org, and the author. The rights of this publication remain with the author. The publication is openly accessible on the website www.on-curating.org and can be downloaded and shared under the restriction of crediting the author and/or OnCurating.org. The Publisher is granted a non-exclusive right of use with respect to the online publication of the work without the obligation to make use of this right. The Author is entitled to make a PDF version of the work publicly accessible online via her personal website, an institutional server or a suitable subject-based repository once it has appeared in book form. This usage of rights is in compliance to the requirements by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). ONCURATING.org Pfingstweidstraße 96, 8005 Zurich, Switzerland www.on-curating.org ONCURATING.org is an independent international journal supported by the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK. ISBN: 9798708819697 CONTENT LIST 2 Acknowledgment 4 Imprint 6 Introduction CHAPTER 1 9 1.1 Choreographies of the Curatorial: Contexts, Tensions and Performative Trajectories Between the White Cube and the Black Box. 31 1.2 Ungoverning Choreography as Apparatus of Capture: Histories, Mythologies and the Social Choreography of Visual Pleasure and Performative Bodies in the Museum. 61 1.3 Democracy’s Body?: Pre-Curatorial Conditions of Judson Dance Theater. 80 1.4 The New Performance Turn. CHAPTER 2 101 2.1 Case Study 1: Yvonne Rainer: Dance Works – Raven Row, London, 11 July to 10 August 2014. 129 2.2 Case Study 2: Trajal Harrell: Hoochie Koochie – Barbican Gallery, London, 20 July to 13 August 2017. CHAPTER 3 143 3. Performativity as Method CHAPTER 4 161 4. On Practice: Precarious Assembly – Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, 4 August 2016. 187 CONCLUSION 197 Bibliography 221 List of Figures 6 INTRODUCTION Introduction The origin of this publication arose from a metaphoric change of tongue between my primary choreographic practice and the enfolding develop- ment of my curatorial practice over the last decade. My cumulative curatorial activity, particularly within the fields of performance and contempor- ary choreography, often revealed the cross-currents between the broader contexts of ‘performance’ and ‘exhibitionary art.’ The escalating range of exchange between choreographic and curatorial frames also extricated some of the larger and deeper conceptual, theoretical and practice-based forces moving and unsettling their relational and configurative interplay, which in turn started to reverberate through my own practice. I started to notice the taxonomic and cartographic shifts that were occurring, from the shared languages that I started to employ via my own practice, to the exciting discoveries of innovative projects and virulent approaches that breached the categories and contexts of previous exchanges. Naturally, these increasing transpositions also exposed the complexities and chal- lenges attached to artistic and disciplinary traversals of this kind. The embedded conceptual ethos of this book therefore acknowledges the potential of the current choreographic-curatorial overlap as a generative force within both artistic practice and research. It was equally my inten- tion to remain attentive to the hereditary disposition of both realms within institutional and experimental conventions without making extensive claims about the fate or futurability of either – a precarious assemblage in and of itself. Chapters 1.1 – 1.4 track the nascent conceptual, theoretical, material and practical overlap between the discursive fields of the choreographic and the curatorial via distinct performative and ideological trajectories that account for some of the more dominant historical forces manifesting at present. INTRODUCTION 7 Chapters 2.1. and 2.2 offer a contemporaneous linkage in the performative “cultural (re)production of bodies” via the two selected case studies within distinct curatorial approaches that reflect the theoretical threads of chapters 1.1 – 1.4. The methodological framing – Performativity as Method, Chapter 3 –fore- grounds the curatorial process as an evident means of performative research following the theoretical drivers of the preceding chapters. The penultimate chapter that depicts the practical component – the performative event Precarious Assembly, Chapter 4 – demonstrates the applic- ation of the research methodology and forms a deliberate critical encap- sulation of the overall approach of the book. CHAPTER 1 CHOREOGRAPHIES OF THE CURATORIAL 9 1.1 Choreographies of the Curatorial: Contexts, Tensions and Performative Trajectories Between the White Cube and the Black Box. 1.1.1 Curating the Choreographic. The context of this project examines the arc of curatorial frameworks that since the early 21st century have prioritised and mined Western contem- porary choreographic practice for its potential to negotiate and critique the systems that govern intimacy, collectivity, transmission, embodiment, mediation, participation, spectatorship and immaterial exchange.1 The discursive parameters underpinning the new performance turn,2 which are more markedly and critically activated through choreographic practices, is also recognised for its distinct ability as “social apparatus of capture” via Andrew Hewitt3 to produce structures of attention and affect that facilitate objects, bodies, collectives and communities. These pre-choreo- graphed cursives that pattern and circulate corporeality permit at times a rupture in “the endless reproduction of an imposed circulation of consen- sual subjectivity”4 via situated spatiotemporal and ephemerally constel- 1 Mårten Spångberg, “Conference: Expanded Choreography. Situations, Movements, Objects…” Conference 29 -31 March 2012 at Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA), Barcelona, accessed 31 March 2015, https:// www.e-flux.com/announcements/34425/expanded-choreography/. 2 Cosmin Costinas and Ana Janevski “Introduction,” in Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? The New Performance Turn, Its Histories and Its Institutions, eds. Cosmin Costinas and Ana Janevski (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018), 7. 3 Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 4 André Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the task of the d a n c e r,” TDR 57, no. 4 (The MIT Press, Winter 2013): 20. 10 CHOREOGRAPHIES OF THE CURATORIAL lated works as expanded art forms of movement and moving body polit- ic(s). Their inherent potencies allow instances of agential cooperation and collective fugitivity that instil what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten identify as the interpellated refusal of “the call to order.”5 Bojana Cvejic´ classifies the new performance turn as a set of critically speculative and embodied choreographic practices that allow the emergence of multiplicitous and contingent subjectivities.6 A recent example of this is Manuel Pelmuş’ Movements at an Exhibition and Borderlines,7 a performative presentation at Salonul de Proiecte speculating on differentiated collective temporalit- ies and modes of collective presence designed to refuse or escape con- summation and disappearance within the experience economy. Similarly, Edi Muka’s curated public art project (Agency Sweden), Choreographies of the Social (13-25 August 2019), asks: “What are today’s choreographies of power, solidarity, and care” 8 that influence “the respective forms in which bodies, individual and collective, appear and reassemble?” 9 Another recent manifestation is the performative symposium

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