Curating Performance / Performing Curation: Tendencies and Tactics

Lecturer: Dr. Sarah Spies

The rise of performative formats across curated museum, gallery and research programmes demands a more nuanced understanding of the current interchange between performance, performance art, live art and contemporary choreographic practice under the ‘new performance turn’. Drawing from the tendencies of curatorial frameworks that excavated performance and choreographic practice since the early 21st Century – alongside seminal examples from the 1950’s onwards – this online course will focus on the expansive potential of performance as a mode of tactical production and performativity as a method of curatorial exchange.

Course content will highlight critical questions around the potential for performative curatorial activities to critique the systems that govern intimacy, embodiment, mediation, and spectatorship. The course will also provide a range of pertinent examples (both practical and conceptual) to advance more refined subject knowledge. Assignments are designed to support individual insights and future projects.

Dr Sarah Spies is a choreographer, independent performance curator and senior lecturer in contemporary dance and performance art. She is part of the curatorial collective Accumulations and has led and collaborated on numerous internationally funded public research and performative programmes.  She is the author of Choreographies of the Curatorial: Performative Trajectories for Choreography and Dance in the Museum (2020) and the co-editor of (Un)Commoning Voices & (Non)Communal Bodies (2021) with Maayan Sheleff. She is on the editorial board of TURBA – The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation.

 Image: Restfulness by Funmi Adewole, as part of Precarious Assembly at the Whitworth (2017). © Photo by Christian Kipp.