Turba

We are living through a great disturbance or, as Amitav Ghosh has called it, a “great derangement.” Over decades that, in retrospect, now seem like a treacherous lull, many in the so-called Global North could maintain a belief, anchored in the everyday work of transnational institutions, that we had somehow managed to tame the four mythical riders of the apocalypse—death, pestilence, war of conquest, and famine—and that we were on track in curbing the rise of a fifth: the self-harm we as a species inflict by making our planet increasingly less habitable. The rise of self-serving, anti-globalist, anti-truth and anti-reality movements and leaders before and during the last two-and-a-half years of the COVID-19 pandemic—which is now expected to be but the first of many to come—began to erode such benevolent hopes for our future histories. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, with its barbaric strategy based on scorching the earth and systematically murdering civilians, its dire consequences for food chains worldwide, and its sidelining of efforts in the climate crisis, has only brought more gloom. The five riders are not only back—they now reinforce each other.

Letter from Tunis: We will keep dancing … We just don’t know quite yet how to keep on balance …

In the aftermath of the Hors Lits Festival, I am writing to share with you the reality of artistic, and particularly choreographic, performance in Tunisia. Here in Tunis, we have to date only one national dance festival and two or three private festivals, still struggling for their existence. Faced with the lack of a strong event dedicated to dance, we conceived the Hors Lits Festival (literally, “out of bed”), offering performances within the privacy of spectator's homes: in a living room, a bedroom, or a kitchen … out of bed. This format has allowed us to reach a new audience, to present artists, to try out new artistic forms … to demonstrate the importance of creating alternative spaces for dance.

Letter from Istanbul: There Is a Sonic Revolt in the Streets!

When the government announced Turkey's withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention on 20 March 2021, we were waking up every day with the news of missing, murdered, raped, and beaten women and LGBTQ+ people. Our situation was sadly not unique; indeed, all around the world, our comrades had been struggling with the same systematic violence. Hence, we were not alone in this shit!

Theater 44 (2) “Performance Curators” (2014) and Theater 47 (1) “Curating Crisis” (2017): TURBA in conversation with special issue editors Bertie Ferdman and Tom Sellar (USA)

TURBA: I've been wondering for some time why it took so long to develop a body of literature around performance curating. In the Global North in 2010, there had been two initial events that laid the grounds for a discourse in the field: the Croatian theater journal Frakcija 55 “Curating Performing Arts” and the conference in Essen, Germany, “Beyond Curating: Strategies of Knowledge Transfer in Dance, Performance, and Visual Arts.” It then took four years before your “Performance Curators” issue of Theater was published, and then another three years until “Curating Crisis.” The concept of the performance curator had been present for decades. So why did it take so long? Why did you, Tom, decide in 2014 that we needed a collection of essays and dialogues on this topic at that time?

The Parma Manifesto (1968): Frederic Rzewski (USA)

In times of emergency men find it possible to perform operations necessary to survival without bureaucracy, police, money, and the other obstacles which normally obstruct the way to efficient behavior. In such moments the organism, acted upon by forces beyond its control, is able to act, to respond to reality in an efficient manner. It is forced to move, to create space for itself, in order to survive. When confronted with the possibility of destruction, it discovers the alternative of creation.

This account about The Birth of Seven Documented Performances—a series of planned live artworks by Yan Xing—features an assemblage of texts by five authors: a curator (Andy Campbell), a critic (Meiling Cheng), three performers (Campbell, Cheng, and Hendrik Folkerts), an audience member (Amelia Jones), and the artist (Yan Xing). The first installment of Yan's performance series took place via Zoom in the guise of a quasi-improvised panel discussion, which was billed as part of Live Artists Live III: Despair/Repair (2020), a festival cocurated by Andy Campbell and Patty Chang at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles.

The Performance of Curation in WifiBody 2020 as Virtual Body

The main goal of curating the initiative WifiBody Choreographers Competition for solo and duet forms, presented as part of the Cultural Center of the Philippines Choreographers Series, has been to discover emerging choreographers and offer them an educational and mentoring component. In migrating this live dance event during the COVID pandemic to an online platform, we asked, “Can we determine where the dance ends and the dancefilm begins?” This critical text is indebted to Erin Branningan who, in her seminal book Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image, proposed the term filmic performance as a “comprehensive term incorporating all aspects of cinematic production, so that the choreographic quality of the dancefilm can be considered in relation to both the profilmic and filmic elements” (2011: viii). The profilmic here refers to that aspect of the initiative that coincides with the live event, the writing on the dancing body. The filmic elements are those that considered how the responsibility for this was assigned to both artist and video mentors and editors. A third level of performance discussed here is that at which these works were rolled out online, and in particular on social media platforms. The performative aspect of this effort will be fleshed out and will touch on the curator's responsibility as they navigate the terrain of social media.

The Gates of Discomfort: Making Contemporary Dance Present

This article critically examines the state of dance-specific curatorial practices and, more specifically, the underlying politics of choosing what bodies are seen on stage. I argue that dance presenters directly perpetuate Eurocentric bodily imaginaries by anchoring their curatorial choices in flawed interpretations of the “contemporary.” By favoring the conceptual over the representational, and by dismissing referentiality and signification, dance presenters relegate differences of technique, temporality, and bodily situatedness to the realm of tradition, thus actively contributing to deterritorializing the corporealities of contemporary dance and to excluding a whole range of embodied subjectivities from the stage. This article invites presenters to consider self-reflexively unchecked programming behaviors and their curatorial praxes more broadly.

A Rural Dance Festival in the Palm of Your Hand: My Body My Space Translated onto WhatsApp during COVID-19

In 2021, after a year's hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual My Body My Space Public Arts Festival in South Africa, was relaunched in a radically different online form. Under the lockdown conditions of 2021, the festival was presented exclusively through the WhatsApp messaging application, running on a “behavioral chat platform” originally developed for public health text messaging. The experience of launching the festival into this new medium led to several unexpected insights, notably the specific affordances and limitations of the chosen online platform, an expanded understanding of the “interactivity” possible with online communications, and the digital empowerment that the process offered to practitioners who were mentored through the process of online translation. At a theoretical level, the experience of My Body My Space as an online festival also challenges the dichotomy between the relative status of performance and documentation in live arts.

Merging Asynchronous Sounds into Synchronous Voices: Reimagining Gatherings through the Process of Making the Adow ne Domaget 2020 KKK Radio Program-Festival in the Time of Physical Distancing

When COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, the world as we know it came to a halt—and along with it, many communities, especially among the remote Indigenous peoples, were isolated. This article outlines my process of creative collaboration with the Dumagat Indigenous peoples’ community in Dingalan, Aurora in making and presenting the Adow ne Domaget 2020 KKK (Kuwento, Kultura at Kalusugan sa Katutubong Komunidad) radio program-festival during the COVID-19 lockdown in the Philippines. Highlighting the method of saluhan—a Filipino term meaning “to catch each other,” “to share,” and “to gather”—in collaborative making, I will provide insights on the role of an immersive and fluid curatorial practice in reimagining places, moments, and acts of gathering and collective action, in bringing out the stories and the voice of the community, in the time of lockdown, distance, and forced isolation.

Experiencing Bird's-Eye View: From Physical to Online Events in an Age of Pandemic

Lewis Mumford's Art and Technics signaled, in 1961, certain challenges that contemporary life brings: “Yes: the burden of renewal lies upon us and so it behooves us to understand the forces making for renewal within our persons and within our culture, and to summon forth the plans and ideals that will impel us to purposeful action.” The necessities that arise in the course of one's life can also be opportunities that force a change of paradigm, as well as calls to embrace new plans that can meet these challenges. Mumford continues: “If we awaken to our actual state, in full possession of our senses, instead of remaining drugged, sleepy, cravenly passive as we now are, we shall reshape our life to a new pattern, aided by all the resources that art and technics now place in our hands” (2000: 162).

The Curation of Endings

Slowly, we pulled apart the contract. Acknowledging all that had been done, all that would never be done, we called it quits. Ignoring cancellation clauses and creative deliverables written long before anyone had even heard of COVID-19, we decided that what had been done was enough. It felt strange to help a show end, like an unspoken agreement had been contravened. Until that point, I'd only experienced shows ending by fizzling out, whether due to unsuccessful funding applications, a lack of presenter uptake, or collaborators getting more lucrative gigs. I'd seen shows end through a million cuts of scarcity, but this time the show ended by choice: the artists decided it was time to move on.

Seeing Your Breath on My Window: About Performance Art and Intimacy during the Pandemic

Eyal Perry (EP): I have been your witness and the silent presence in your performances for more than twenty years now, yet when I witnessed and documented Your Breath on My Window, during the pandemic, something felt different. Standing distant, next to only one or two as your audience, watching you from outside, with a glass window separating us for the first time ever during a performance, made me wonder what were you fighting for as a performer. What was that urgent need you had to go through so much, just to perform in front of so few? What perspective on performance during the pandemic led you to create this series in particular?

“Weathering the Storm”

In 2018, baritone Clayton Kennedy and flutist Alexa Raine-Wright conceived “Weathering the Storm,” a concert of Baroque song and instrumental music reflecting the spirit of a series of photographs that he had taken of darkening clouds. Back in 2018, it was supposed to be a “simple, humble concert,” in which Kennedy would both sing as a soloist with Raine-Wright's ensemble, Infusion Baroque, and be featured as a photographer via projections of his cloud photos. The original program included Baroque works by Rameau, Telemann, Prowo, and de Boismortier. A contemporary work by Sebastian Hutchings, “In a House Besieged,” complemented the concept.

Attention as a Form of Ethics

Traditionally, the beginning of January is when the most recent and courageous performing art works are celebrated in New York, a time when several major festivals take place across the city. Even as I write this text, they are announcing full or partial cancellations, one after another. The city is undergoing yet another wave of coronavirus, with daily cases nationally currently approaching one million. The beginning of 2022 felt different from the year before, when curators and venues actively engaged in carving out new spaces, both real and virtual, for COVID-safe productions and presentations. Now, in the second year of the pandemic, everyone seems exhausted and has instead chosen cancellations when standard forms of presentation become impossible. Has all that mind-blowing experimentation with practices, spaces, and distances been just a temporary substitute for the “festival as usual”?

Meta-Curation of New Music and Sonic Arts At Cmmas: Persistence Is Not Abundant in Latin America … and Hey! Here We Are!

Ricardo Rozental (RR): What made you start the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes (CMMAS) in 2006? What motivates you today?

Rodrigo Sigal (RS): I was a student of composition of Mario Lavista in Mexico, then moved to London to pursue my doctorate with Javier Alvarez. From Mario I learned that composing is solving one problem per piece. The audience needs to understand what that problem is, how relevant it is, and how it was solved creatively. I noticed how much I loved solving problems around music but also outside of music, in cultural management. That prompted me to return to Mexico into an environment other than teaching. I wanted to create a work environment in which I would feel comfortable. Not just to gain access to equipment but also to interact with others, be able to listen to what I chose to and do all this outside of Mexico City.

Martinon, Jean-Paul. 2020. Curating as Ethics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Di Matteo, Piersandra, ed. in collaboration with Edoardo Lazzari. 2021. performance + curatela. [In Italian.] Venice: luca sossella editore.