LECTURE - Lydia Bell: Performance-based curatorial strategies in New York City 2018-present: where do we go from here?

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LECTURE – Lydia Bell (USA): Performance-Based Curatorial Strategies in New York City 2018-Present: Where Do We Go from Here?

 

Lydia Bell, U.S.-based independent curator and creative producer, will speak about curatorial strategies within the context of recent dance and performance projects in New York City. Topics will include: collective research practices, institutional interventions, de-centering whiteness, and the historical imagination. Case studies will include Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance, a Danspace Project Platform curated by Reggie Wilson in 2018 that examined the relationship between race, dance, and religious architecture in New York City. Another case study will be collective terrain/s, co-organized by Bell, Jasmine Hearn, and Tatyana Tenenbaum in 2019, a collective research process into sounding in the body. Questions from these case studies to be examined include: How did civil rights grassroots activism and organization in churches and community centers make way for contemporary models for performance, dance, arts organizing, and presentation? How does the body open up possibilities for voice and resistance? What resonances in the voice and body exist beyond language? Bell will also discuss the recent uprisings and protests across the U.S. in support of Black Lives Matter and how the dance and performance community is engaging with calls to action.


Topic Tags: Blackness Churches DowntownDance

 

  • Curatorial threads in actual bodies and the ethos of a community
  • Individual, artist and organization advocacy for best practices for systematic change
  • Somatic strategies of care to take care of protesters
  • Collective terrains: the relationship between voice and the body, voice as a way of protest
  • Concept: parallel play
  • How do decades of research on choreographic inquiry set up the lenses to see others’ work?
  • What are the relationships between race, dance and religious architecture in New York and other US states?
  • All the curatorial strategies that I’ve been building all these years, are they relevant now in the present context?
  • How do we frame or create containers for artists to be within? How do you work out how much space to give an event?  
  • Have dancers/cultural workers produced choreographies on the streets in the context of protests?
  • What does it actually mean to pause? (in context of the call for white cultural workers to take time off and educate themselves on the resources when it comes to BLM)

Lydia Bell is a Bessie Award-winning independent performance curator and creative producer based in New York City. From 2011-2014 & 2015-2020 she worked at Danspace Project, most recently as Program Director & Associate Curator, a role in which she oversaw programming, publications, and research initiatives. Recent curatorial projects include Aki Sasamoto: Phase Transition and collective terrain/s, co-organized with artists Jasmine Hearn and Tatyana Tenenbaum. From 2009-2011, she coordinated the Eiko & Koma Retrospective Project in collaboration with 15 partner venues, including the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Additionally, Bell has worked on projects with Movement Research, Sam Miller/OAM Company, and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. She has presented at conferences and institutions such as: Association for Performing Arts Presenters (APAP), Kino Kultura (Skopje, Macedonia), New York Live Arts, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), and others. She has edited six Danspace Project Platform catalogues and contributed to publications such as Museum and Curatorial Studies Review and Movement Research Performance Journal. Bell is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wesleyan University (B.A., Dance and Classics) and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University.


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