From content to context the emergence of by Ernesto Sopprani

Kenneth Dewey at “The Theatre of the Future” conference, Edinburgh Festival, 1963. Photo: Courtesy of the Scotsman Publications

Bert ie Fer dman

Fr om Cont ent to Cont ext The Emergence of the Performance Curator

In 1963 at the Edinburgh Festival, a theater conference took place organized by director Jim Haynes, John Calder, and critic Kenneth Tynan at the brothel turned theater club now known as the Traverse Theatre, one of the better known venues for cutting- edge performance at the Fringe. During the last day of “The Theatre of the Future” Calder invited artists Allan Kaprow and Ken Dewey to do performance pieces, unannounced, during the course of the discussions. Dewey’s Play of Happenings, which he created with collaborators Charles Lewsen and Mark Boyle as a reaction to the presentations they saw at the conference,1 caused an uproar. Edinburgh model Anna Keseler was wheeled in in the nude, a sheep’s skeleton was hung from the ceiling; men stood from windows seventy feet above; a piper played; tape-recorded voices of the audience’s own skepticism were heard; and when American actress Carroll Baker jumped from the platform to pass over the audience to the exit, people stood up, craned, and shouted. An observer asked, “Was this ‘theatre’ in any recognizable form?” The Lord Provost of Edinburgh called it “a pointless vulgarity.”2 After the general outrage at such a disruption of what, according to conference organizer Kenneth Tynan, should have remained a “serious discussion of the shape of the future stage,” Dewey had the following response when prompted by Tynan: I am trained in the classical traditions of theatre, but my feeling about the pyrami-

dal structure of the theatre — management, director, author, cast — is what I want to deal with. This kind of theatre is like jazz, at one level: It is held together not

by law, not by control, but by the rapport between collaborators. We are trying

to give back to you, the audience, the responsibility of theatre — performing your

own thoughts, building your own aesthetics. Maybe you will get the most out of it by disliking it.3

f er dman Although Dewey’s Happening at Edinburgh went down in theater history as shocking the public mostly due to nudity, the structure of the event was unprecedented. The very conventions of the theater event — when it took place, where it took place, why it took place — were being challenged. There was no “show” to speak of, no box office, no typical “venue,” only a constellation of live events that infiltrated another, apparently, more important event titled “The Theatre of the Future,” but that itself did not provide enough of a framework for the audience to contextualize what was going on. Dewey’s performance stirred much anxiety precisely because it undermined the hierarchy of theatrical production and questioned the very politics of this art system. It would have been impossible to purchase this show and present it at the festival. It could not tour in the conventional way. By paying attention to the context of the theatrical event and rethinking the norms of participation in the realm of the live, prompting everyone to ask what is this?, Dewey and his collaborators had unwittingly upset the logic of the programming establishment, which, according to tdr’s 1973 article on the Edinburgh Festival, went something like this: The machinery for soliciting performance groups for the Official Festival consists of a theatre adviser, who presumably spends much of his time visiting theatres

around the world and who then submits his recommendations for approval to a

committee made up of artistic, business, and city representatives. There is no discernible policy aside from the “excellence” criterion.4

Even though Dewey was reacting to the conventional play structure within theatrical practice, he was also reacting against the system that promoted such a lineup. In other words, the assumptions about where, when, and how theater should exist went unquestioned at the “official” venue. The “excellence” criterion lacked focus, intent, vision. Looking back, Dewey’s performance (as well as Kaprow’s No Exit) helped to foment the Traverse Theatre as an antidote to the official festival and developed the aim “to promote the work of new playwrights and to expand the frontiers of theatre technique.”5 Audiences would come to associate the Traverse with a certain kind of programming, as with any festival or venue, and come with a specific set of expectations. By essentially orchestrating a dramaturgy of liveness, which simultaneously operated as institutional critique, Dewey’s work generated the creation, assemblage, and distribution of meaning that in many ways would precede curatorial thinking in performance at the turn of the twenty-first century. Given the changing lens of performance since the sixties, as exemplified here with Dewey’s intervention, the role of the curator — programmer, festival director, producer — as one who generates connections and structures formats around new work is of growing concern, in particular to influence how a public interacts, understands, and receives such work. The role of the curator as a mediator between artists and audiences is

t he emer g enc e of t he per f or manc e curator becoming more front and center, as both artists and audiences look for new ways to present, interpret, program, produce, finance, and experience work. The rise of interdisciplinary performance festivals in the last decade has increased the visibility of the curator as a central and powerful figure in the changing landscape of the performing arts.6 A growing number of artistic directors, festival programmers, creative producers, and artists not only are beginning to pay attention to what gets seen — either commissioning new work and/or selecting finished work — but are also conceptualizing how, where, when, why, and for whom such events are structured and presented. As more exhibitions in art galleries and museums continue to embrace theater and dance, and visual and conceptual art is presented in performing arts institutions and festivals, the act of “curating” performance is becoming vital to both its development and its reception. If the sixties and seventies were the heyday of experimental theater and rise of postmodern dance — in lineage with the historical avant-garde — the current moment, almost half a century later, is seeing a renewed interest not only in breaking with disciplinary models but also in providing new frameworks in which such work can exist. Presenters are now often faced with the challenge of producing work that does not necessarily fit into preconceived conventions of theater. What practices do

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Judy Hussie-Taylor at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, Wesleyan University, Middletown, ct, 2012. Photo: John Groo

f er dman they implement? What presentational forms do they create? Does a curatorial paradigm for such trends exist? The term curator historically derives from the visual arts as one who cared for museum collections and objects. According to art historian and cultural critic Beatrice von Bismarck, the professional profile of the curator began to evolve in the late eighteenth century with the advent of museums and galleries. It crystallized as a job position after 1945 with the expansion of the art market and the cult status eventually granted to the curator, what Michael Brenson has called “the curator’s moment,”7 which according to Bismarck degraded artists and scholars who now held a lower position in the art world.8 Initially, the job and function of the curator as caretaker of collections expanded as art became more discursive and attuned to context, in particular in the sixties with the rise of immaterial production such as installations, happenings, and performance art. As art critic and curator Paul O’Neill explains, “Art and its primary experience became recentered around the temporality of the event of the exhibition rather than the artworks on display.”9 He charts a genealogy of curatorial practice in the visual arts that exploded in the sixties with the “demystification” of the exhibition (an object of critique in its own entity)10 and that grew to “supervisibility” in the late nineties with the proliferation of curatorial anthologies, graduate programs, symposia, and journals devoted to the subject. With the rise of group exhibitions and biennials in the late eighties, the independent curator became like an art star, whose role began “to be understood as a constellation of creative activities, akin to artistic praxis.”11 This transformation of what O’Neill calls the curator-as-auteur, exemplified by Swiss curator Harald Szeemann’s concept of “the modern-day Großausstellung (‘great exhibition’) in which artworks are tied to a central concept and are assembled into new and often surprising interrelationships,”12 was a significant shift in the development of curatorial models that continues to this day. As the curator’s role grew in importance, so did the discourse and awareness of its prominence in legitimizing and shaping our understanding of art. Just as a need to question curatorial models in the visual arts grew once contemporary art began to expand beyond objecthood and traditional museum spaces, a similar need has developed in the performing arts, in terms of rethinking how such works get labeled, produced, and “staged” as part of a larger vision. Performing artists are increasingly employing site-based practices, infiltrating the public, private, and virtual worlds, challenging modes of spectatorship, and creating live encounters that blur the boundaries between what is real and what is staged. In site-based practices in particular, we have moved away from a concern with location — which reached its heyday in the 1980s — to a concern with interaction and mediating situations. A diverse range of artists are increasingly questioning the form of performance just as much as content, using “the live” as the source for their work. As a direct response to such rapid changes, Lois Keidan, for example, who served as director of live arts at the Institute of Contem-

t he emer g enc e of t he per f or manc e curator Unbranded posters promote cine Collective, 2005. Photo: Gus Powell Design, Prem Krishnamurthy

porary Arts (ica) in London from 1992 to 1997, cofounded the Live Art Development Agency in 1999 to provide a curatorial platform for artists engaging in practices that were difficult to categorize.13 She writes: The term Live Art is not a description of an artform or discipline, but a cultural strategy to include experimental processes and experiential practices that might

otherwise be excluded from established curatorial, cultural and critical frameworks. Live Art is a framing device for a catalogue of approaches to the possibili-

ties of liveness by artists who chose to work across, in between, and at the edges of more traditional artistic forms.14

Given the fact that Keidan, prior to her tenure at ica, was responsible for funding interdisciplinary artists at the Arts Council of Great Britain, she was well aware of the necessity of labeling work as the legitimizing process that would get it funded. Keidan’s legacy is an important one for performing arts curatorship, for she exemplifies how curating operates as both cultural and financial strategy. The curator is one who envisions an intention for the work and thus, as Leslie Hill writes, “places” the work in a specific historical and interdisciplinary context.15 Keidan’s contribution to practices she has termed “live art” continues to expand the field and provide a curatorial frame for their reception. A similar example of curating as strategy, but one with a very different agenda, is RoseLee Goldberg’s Performa, which is “dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth-century art and to encouraging new directions in performance.”16 While Keidan established live art as its own category of

f er dman interdisciplinary work that embraced both performing and performance art, Goldberg is very particular about “placing” her “curation” within visual art performance. This is an important distinction that enables a different kind of financial value on the work, as well as a different set of assumptions and expectations, particularly as more museums, galleries, and art biennales introduce performance into their collections. More than just precursors of taste, curators thus position work within a specific set of disciplinary and institutional frameworks that have lasting repercussions. Whereas the function of the curator has been the subject of much discourse in the realm of the visual arts as a direct response to changing paradigms in art making,17 the conversation around curating in performing arts is only just beginning. In 2011 Wesleyan University created the Certificate Program in Curatorial Practice in Performance with a focus on “the curation of live and time-based work” that helps students and professionals “develop tools to contextualize performance.”18 The first program of its kind in the United States, its inception mirrors in significance the establishment of the Whitney Museum’s Curatorial Program and Critical Studies Program in 1987, headed by Hal Foster, which foregrounded the possibility “to develop alternative curatorial forms and challenge the established conventions.”19 O’Neill marks 1987 as a pivotal year that brought a change in how curating was conceived in the visual arts — “from vocational work with collections in institutional contexts to a potentially independent, critically engaged and experimental form of exhibition-making practice”20 — that parallels the shift in curatorial models happening only now in live art contexts: from a logistics of programming to a concept for programming. In January 2013, I attended the first ever panel at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, which is essentially a shopping mall for performance, on rethinking curating practices. The panel was hosted by the Wesleyan curatorial faculty, among them Danspace Project curator Judy Hussie-Taylor and choreographer Ralph Lemon (both of whom appear in this issue), and Philip Bither, senior curator of performing arts at Walker Art Center, who challenged the audience’s conceptions (mostly composed of presenters) regarding live programming — “ booking the season, fulfilling season subscriptions, filling seats, or selling tickets” — as not necessarily the curator’s job. As a position that combines production demands with aesthetic goals, he provoked the audience to think beyond “the box” and conceive of performance as event, with tailor-made considerations for an audience, producing partnerships, the space, duration, and time. Each event should constitute its own experience and its own individual production strategy. All the panelists emphasized the importance of “accompanying a work,” developing new work in alternative spaces, situations, and times. As the only scholar in the audience, I felt a clear divide between those who study and contextualize work (academics and dramaturgs) and those who currently present performance — something that is historically different in museum and biennale curatorship, where discourse and research are an inherent part of the job. This separation, however, seems to be converging.

t he emer g enc e of t he per f or manc e curator In September 2013, Arnolfini, the leading contemporary arts center in Bristol, hosted a two-day intensive workshop “aimed at curators, arts administrators, and artists keen to engage in contemporary aspects of performing arts curating and programming,” titled “Curating Performance: Audiences, Dramaturgy and the Stage in Contemporary Visual Culture.”21 The Arts Curators Association of Quebec sponsored an international symposium on performing arts curating in April 2014.22 For its hundredth issue, paj: The Journal of Performance and Art had a special section on “Curating Contemporary Performance,” featuring New York – based artists and curators Morgan von Prelle Pecelli, Trajal Harrell, Travis Chamberlain, Ben Pryor, and Jonah Bokaer on the needs of more exploration in such practices. Culturebot, a New York – based digital platform on contemporary performance founded by Andy Horwitz, has numerous recent entries on curating, among them “Curatorial Practice and Cultural Production.”23 The performing arts journal Frakcija devoted an entire issue to “Curating Performing Arts,” guest edited by artists Tea Tupajić and Petra Zanki and curator Florian Malzacher, with essays by Rebecca Schneider, Beatrice von Bismarck, and Christine Peters, among others, an interview with Hans Ulrich-Obrist, and a glossary of curating terminology featuring prominent leaders in the field. In 2012 Malzacher conceptualized Truth Is Concrete as a performative statement, a twenty-four-hour, seven-day marathon where for 170 hours more than two hundred artists, activists, and theorists lectured, performed, played, produced, discussed, and collected useful strategies and tactics in art and politics.24 A book on the event, edited by steirischer herbst and Florian Malzacher and published by Sternberg Press, is due out in April 2014. The Frakcija issue was part of a larger project, itself a performance that sought to merge the act of curating with discourse. Titled The Curators’ Piece (A Trial against Art), and conceived by Tupajić and Zanki, it continues to tour the international festival circuit. It consists of six curators, chosen for their “visibility and long-term presence on the scene” as criteria for their selection, who are put on the stand to defend their programming choices and artistic ideals. The curators not only collaborate and perform in the piece but also serve as its coproducers, presenting and co-commissioning the show. Each one takes a turn being “on trial” when the performance tours to their respective festival, where they account for their role, vision, choices, and decisions in front of the festival’s audience.25 The night I saw it Vallejo Gantner, coil’s curator, was on the hot seat. The other curators relentlessly questioned him about his programming choices, his use of time, his paycheck, his fundraising strategy, his countless international travels, and his artistic vision. What is your personal proposal to the audience? What influences your programming? What makes it distinct? What’s new in coil? Are you jealous of American Realness? The work thus attempts to address the role of the curator and pry open the system that enables theatrical production in the first place. As such, The Curator’s Piece is akin to what Seth Siegelaub in the sixties termed “demystification” of the exhibition — “a process in which [curators and artists] attempted to understand and

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Station House Opera’s Beauty and Mayhem, proposed as part of Tim Etchell’s and Ant Hampton’s curatorial concept True Riches, 2009. Photo: Jan Poloczek

be conscious of our actions”26 — which O’Neill marks as a defining moment for those “providing the mediating context.”27 Like curators (and artists) at the time who sought “to reveal and evaluate the more hidden curatorial components of an exhibition,”28 The Curator’s Piece operates under a very similar pretext, which brings the curator’s role to the forefront and simultaneously seeks to unveil the conditions under which work is “curated.” In 2005, the collective cine, with artist David Levine as the writer and project lead, created a portfolio titled Re-Public: cine’s Collective’s Portfolio for New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater, which precedes The Curators’ Piece in terms of its desire to provide institutional critique while at the same time offering itself an alternative vision of leading such an institution. The piece, published in Theater, is an expanded version of “an August 2004 letter of application for the position of artistic director at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater.”29 A manifesto of sorts, where provocations about remaking a theater, a true public theater, come to the fore, cine proposes numerous initiatives — on-site and off-site — that outline this vision. Outreach initiatives include partnering with other companies (“to formally recognize and sponsor younger, edgier companies who already have their own theaters” [150]), developing public art as theater

t he emer g enc e of t he per f or manc e curator (“to expand the public for theater by expanding the definition of theater” [151]), and creating a repertory company with financially secure year-long Equity contracts (“rather than bringing movie stars to the Public, the Public will make movie stars” [152]). cine calls for the theater expanding its civic presence, cosponsoring “a vigorous inter-site program of lectures, panel discussions, and debates on matters that have nothing to do with drama” (154). Instead of a sole artistic director functioning as curator, cine prescribes a European model where the dramaturg (akin to the art scholar/art curator) “is responsible for programming the entire season” (155). Most significantly, cine proposes to include a Commission X as part of its annual season, “commissioned from the Public by a major corporation” (157), so as to make explicit that corporate relationships have always financed the nonprofit sector. Its aesthetic goals are aligned with its financial perspective and operating structure. Curating in this sense understands that new production models give rise to new aesthetic models. It means taking care of the institutional assumptions about what, where, why, and how work is produced, calling for theater to “give up its reliance on staged dissent and become structurally radical” (162). The recently formed National Theatre Wales (ntw) exemplifies this form of curatorship that rethinks structural component in order to affect its aesthetic outcome. In 2009 the British Arts Council gave £3 million over three years to set up a new Englishspeaking theater in Wales. Instead of using the money to physically “house” productions, the team operated from an office in Cardiff and strategically set out to create a new model of generating performance that made Wales itself the stage. It launched the Theatre Map of Wales with one show a month, each in a different location, each using a different approach to theater-making.30 The ideas for the shows were generative and came from artists through the website. In other words, Theatre Map of Wales served as a curatorial prompt to elicit artists’ proposals. They engaged local non–arts communities in their rehearsal process, and developed a team program, a nonhierarchical method of including the people’s voice into the decision-making process. It established an online community for active feedback, proposals, and conversations, setting up an alternative space to “house” and foster an audience. It set up a WalesLab for emerging theater ideas. It established a value system of being international, engaged, and innovative, and as such, invited such artists as Rimini Protokoll and Constanza Macras to each develop a site-specific piece. As ntw moves forward, it continues to reinvent its structures to accommodate and “take care” of both artists and audiences. Its programming is only one component of a much larger radical restructuring of a performing arts institution. Its curating practice questions all aspects of artistic production and reception. American readers will at this point claim that ntw is a utopian dream incapable of materializing in the United States, and although they are probably right, there are many independent producers that are constantly reinventing alternative strategies to “house” and “disseminate” the performing arts, two important facets of performance curating. Melanie Joseph, founder and producing artistic director of the Foundry The-

f er dman atre in New York, integrates art making with the social reality that enables, produces, and informs art. “An experiment in the creation of a theatre company,” the Foundry has no physical venue, as with ntw, and therefore tailor-produces every project. It operates as an ongoing performance of ideas, with its commissioned theatrical works as valid as its ongoing dialogue series and community engagement.31 Alternative models in curating performance are more collaborative, nonhierarchical, generative, and open. They seem to counter the star curator pattern that dominated the visual art world for decades (and still does) after its period of “demystification” in the sixties and that still permeates some curator-as-auteur festivals and favor an artist- centered approach. Even at the high-profile and well-established Festival d’Avignon, a different group of associate artists shapes the festival’s program each year, which was the visionary proposal that got former codirectors Hortense Archambault and Vincent Baudriller hired as curators of the festival in 2004. Danspace’s Platform series, devised by curator Judy Hussie-Taylor, also redirects programming decisions to dancers and choreographers as artist-led curatorial initiatives in dance. Increasingly, artists are appropriating the curatorial process as part of their artistic practice. When ica announced the closure of its Live Arts and Media Department in October 2008 with a statement by its director, Ekow Eshun, stating “that the art form lacks depth and cultural urgency,” artists Tim Etchells and Ant Hampton responded with a curatorial proposition titled True Riches. Conceived as an imaginary season, they invited twenty-five artists and curators (including Lois Keidan, who ran that program in the nineties) to each propose a live art project idea. The resulting program reflects the variety of approaches — performances, exhibitions, lectures, discussions, interactions, installations, and encounters — that together serve as a testament to the richness of this form, its history, and its future. Many of the artists dreamed up scenarios that responded directly to ica’s closing, such as Geraldine Pilgrim’s Black Box, which would flood the ica Theatre with water to symbolize “the flood of ideas that have filled this black box space over the years,” and Christine Peters’s The Living Archive, which for over a period of six months would transform ica into “a living organism” called Slow Production, where over seventy artists produce and present at the same time in a “fully committed — financially, infrastructurally and staff-wise” institution.32 All the space of the ica would be taken up in Zhana Ivanova’s A Slow Dance for Z with one hundred activities occurring at the same time, and a continuous loop of twenty-four hours would be required for Station House Opera’s Beauty and Mayhem, which would respond virtually to viewers’ interactions in real time. There is even a one-week 24/7 performance for one German shepherd conceived by Rimini Protokoll’s Stefan Kaegi, appropriately titled Protecting the ica from Live Art, and a twenty-minute control-free Space Station picnic, Be Your Soul, by Vivi Tellas and Nicolás Goldberg. None of these events will ever happen, but as Etchells and Hampton shrewdly explained in their program notes, “The ica Live Art Department, even though it does not exist, is alive and well and glad

t he emer g enc e of t he per f or manc e curator

for your support.”33 More than a selection or compilation of artists’ work, True Riches is a manifesto for the viability of live arts as an established practice, as well as a form of institutional critique that challenges the hierarchical system of museums where live art is continuously relegated to the lower end, even as some visual art institutions supposedly embrace “the live.” Another set of artists — Andy Field and Deborah Pearson — reacting against the commercialization and homogenization of the Edinburgh Fringe and an institution- dependent mentality widespread among performing artists, also decided to take matters into their own hands. In 2007 they created Forest Fringe, which, more than an alternative festival of experimental and innovative work, has operated for the last six years as an artist-run collective that engages in curatorial models that question conventional approaches to programming. Offering “a different kind of opportunity” not only to present new work, their mission aims to “experiment with different ways of doing things and new contexts to accommodate even the most unusual experiences.” As such, they are interested in both the work and the structural frameworks that distribute and make that work happen. After they lost their space in 2011, they have embraced their nomadic status, developing ways to bring their curating strategies to other places

The Theatre Map of Wales, 2010. Courtesy: The National Theatre Wales

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Ciudades Paralelas, hotel, Warsaw, 2011. Photo: Marta Pruska

and forms. Just recently, for example, they produced their festival in Paper Stages, a book coauthored by over twenty Forest Fringe artists, where each page consists of a different instruction-based performance for the reader to perform. These performances vary: some can be performed individually, others collectively, some indoors, some in the streets. The book is free, but to acquire it one has to volunteer one hour of time to the Forest Fringe collective (or their partner organizations).34 Another strategy they have implemented is what they call the Microfestivals, which bring the artists, performances, and “the spirit of Forest Fringe to different places across the world.”35 They started with Lisbon and Dublin and will be extending to Bangkok, Yokohama, Athens, and Texas. A traveling exhibition of sorts, this event marks a rising new phenomenon in recent performance curating models where concepts — as opposed to single performances or artists — tour. Ciudades Paralelas (Parallel Cities), conceived by artists Lola Arias (interviewed in this issue) and Stefan Kaegi, is also an itinerant festival whose main proposition is urban intervention. Kaegi and Arias invited eight artists to create performances for a city’s functional places like a court, a factory, a library, a hotel, a train station, which

t he emer g enc e of t he per f or manc e curator would be relocalized each time the festival toured. As Arias explains in her interview: “The pieces were genuinely portable, in the sense that the only thing we are transporting were concepts. The concept for each piece would be fully developed, and each piece would be restaged in the context of each city with different performers, different spaces, and so on. The only person traveling was the artist and his or her idea, recontextualized at every site.” Although the main premise of their idea deals with the conflation of the real and staged in city space, the concept for Ciudades Paralelas emerges as an alternative model for live art touring, where money spent on refabricated sets is allocated to local labor at every site. Forest Fringe Microfestivals and Ciudades Paralelas are thus representative of a significant shift in curating performing arts, one that responds not only to new forms of theater and performance but also to the changing context in which these can be distributed and received, as well as to changing economies of labor, touring, and production. The emphasis seems to be on how artists collectively can take ownership (not necessarily control) of the meaning surrounding their work. For this issue of Theater, we interviewed professionals in the field who are bringing new frameworks in which to contextualize the live. They are shaping curatorial practice in the performing arts. They are programming interdisciplinary live encounters, rethinking questions of participation, often staging the audience, and bringing a heightened awareness to their practice, asking what it means to curate. Just as experimental performance explores new ways of doing theater, innovative curatorial models offer experimental structures and discourses in which a public can encounter the work. If the term derives from the visual arts, its transfer to the realm of performance has been vague at best. As such, the people who self-identify in this position are constantly redefining its role. The range of professionals — artists, dramaturgs, creative producers, artistic directors, festival programmers — reflects the diversity of this growing field and gives testament to a practice whose methodologies and approaches are as diverse as the artworks they present. The role of the performing arts curator emerges as more than merely a “programmer” or “presenter” who travels the world to choose work and cobble it together, but one who questions preconceived assumptions that shape performance, as well as his or her own role in shaping that discourse. The great majority of the curators we interviewed are working in what can be termed a radical curating practice, operating in what Helen Cole aptly describes as contradictory: “One who works with new forms but within established centers.” As she explains in her interview in this issue, working with an awareness of operating structures and continuously seeking to unveil these can be a very challenging endeavor. The role of the performing arts curator thus emerges as a visionary who understands institutional models enough to warrant new ways of working within it, through it, and in constant opposition to it. Having come a long way since Ken Dewey’s public intervention, contemporary curating models are opting to rethink and level those long-standing “pyramidal structures” of theatrical performance and its presentation.

f er dman Not e s 1. Susan Malsbury, “The Ken Dewey Collection,” June 20, 2013, www.nypl.org/blog /2013/06/20/ken-dewey-collection. 2. Denis Calandra and Marcin J. Dabrowski, “Experimental Performance at the Edinburgh Festival,” Drama Review: tdr 17, no. 4 (December 1973): 53 – 68. 3. Ibid., 56. 4. Ibid., 54. 5. Ibid., 58. 6. In the United States, for example, the last decade has seen the inception of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival (Angela Mattox), Crossing the Line (Lili Chopra, Simon Dove, and Gideon Lester), Under the Radar (Mark Russell), Fusebox (Ron Berry), On the Boards (Lane Czaplinski), coil (Vallejo Gantner), International Festival of Arts and Ideas (Cathy Edwards), Danspace’s Platform series (Judy Hussie-Taylor), and American Realness (Ben Pryor), among many others. 7. Quoted in Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2012), 5. 8. Beatrice von Bismarck, “Relations in Motion: The Curatorial Condition in Visual Art and Its Possibilities for the Neighboring Disciplines,” in “Curating Performing Arts,” themed issue, Frakcija 55 (2010): 50 – 57. 9. O’Neill, Culture of Curating, 2. 10. Ibid., 27. 11. Ibid., 1. 12. von Bismarck, “Relations in Motion,” 51. 13. Live Art Development Agency was cofounded with Catherine Ugwu. Lois Keidan has served as its director ever since. 14. Live Art Development Agency, “What Is Live Art?,” www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about /what-is-live-art/ (accessed September 1, 2013). 15. Leslie Hill, “Mapping the Territory: Introduction,” in Performance and Place, ed. Leslie Hill and Helen Paris (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 3 – 7. 16. Performa, “Mission and History,” http://performa-arts.org/about/mission-and -history (accessed September 10, 2013). 17. See in particular O’Neill, Culture of Curating; Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012); Hans Ulbrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating (Zurich: jrp/Ringier, 2011); Judith Rugg and Michele Sedgwick, eds., Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance (Bristol, uk: Intellect Books, 2007); Carolee Thea, On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2009); and Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski, eds., Cultures of the Curatorial (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012). 18. For more information, see Wesleyan University, “Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance Certificate Program,” www.wesleyan.edu/cfa/icpp/program/index.html (accessed September 2, 2013).

t he emer g enc e of t he per f or manc e curator 19. Quoted in O’Neill, Culture of Curating, 2. 20. Ibid. 21. For more information, see Arnolfini, “Curating Performance: Audiences, Dramaturgy, and the Stage in Contemporary Visual Culture,” www.arnolfini.org .uk/whatson/curating-performance-performativity-dramaturgy-and-the-stage-in -contemporary-v isual-culture (accessed September 9, 2013). 22. For more information, see Arts Curators Association of Quebec, www.acaq.ca/ (accessed October 10, 2013). 23. Culturebot, “Curatorial Practice and Cultural Production,” October 21, 2012, www.culturebot.org/2012/10/14839/curatorial-practice-and-cultural-production/. 24. Truth Is Concrete, “About,” truthisconcrete.org/about/ (accessed October 2, 2013). 25. This description is taken from Bertie Ferdman, “Role Inversion: The Curator Takes the Stage,” paj: A Journal of Performance and Art 36, no. 1 (January 2014): 53 – 58. 26. Quoted in O’Neill, Culture of Curating, 19. 27. Ibid., 21. 28. Ibid., 19. 29. David Levine and cine, “Re-Public: The cine Collective’s Portfolio for New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater,” Theater 35, no. 3 (2005): 146–67. 30. See National Theatre Wales, “About,” nationaltheatrewales.org/about#ourstory (accessed September 9, 2013). 31. Foundry Theatre, “Mission,” www.thefoundrytheatre.org/mission.html (accessed September 9, 2013). 32. Tim Etchells and Ant Hampton, True Riches: A Programme of Live Art for the ica, 2009, www.anthampton.com/True_Riches_low.pdf. 33. Etchells and Hampton, True Riches. 34. Forest Fringe, “Paper Stages (Edinburgh 2012),” www.forestfringe.co.uk /festivals/2012-festivals/paper-stages-edinburgh-2012/ (accessed September 2, 2013). 35. Forest Fringe, “International Microfestivals,” www.forestfringe.co.uk/showcase /international-microfestivals-in-bangkok-and-yokohama/ (accessed September 2, 2013).