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

By -

 


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.


Comments

Post a Comment

Contact Form

Name

Email *

Message *

Popular posts from this blog

PUBLIC DISCUSSION / ARTISTS AND CURATORS TALKS / COLLECTIVE CURATING OR CO-CURATORIAL COLLABORATIVE PROCESSES /

By -
Image
    PUBLIC DISCUSSION/// ARTISTS AND CURATORS TALKS /// COLLECTIVE CURATING OR CO-CURATORIAL COLLABORATIVE PROCESSES///  Jasmina Založnik, dramaturge, writer and producer /  Paz Ponze, independent curator, writer & researcher of contemporary artistic creation / Jovanka Popova curator in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje / Mira Gakjina, senior curator at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Skopje      Moderators: Biljana Tanurovska – Kjulavkovski and Slavco Dimitrov      Jasmina Založnik is a dramaturge, publicist and producer primarily engaged in the field of contemporary dance. Over the last years, she has focused on recent histories of contemporary performing art and choreography, and their multiple relations to everyday life. She is interested in strategies of social politicization and emancipation. Her work is mainly developed in a dialogue with various colleagues, most often in close collaboration with Rok Vevar w...
Read more

SEMINAR – Suzana Milevska: Becoming-Curator vs. Becoming a Curator

By -
Image
SEMINAR – Suzana Milevska (North Macedonia): Becoming-Curator vs. Becoming a Curator Abstract :  Topic Tags: Curating curatorial curator offspring curatorial agency In recent times, curating has provided a point of cross-disciplinary interchange between several distinguished disciplines and professions that deal with art. The courses and university departments that initially taught curating as a subject mainly focused on its practice, but such a dichotomy no longer exists now that curating is taught as a subject or course in many different departments and universities, and the term itself is used in a much broader terms. This presentation will therefore address the question how the concept of curatorial relates to both the theory and practice of curating. I want to argue that “curatorial” and “curatorial knowledge” have advanced into terms that encompass the condition in which philosophy, theory and epistemology are intertwined and produced a new discourse and culture th...
Read more

WORKSHOP - Danae Theodoridou: Artificial Social Imaginaries: Curation of Live Events as Construction Sites for Social Change

By -
Image
  Danae Theodoridou: Artificial Social Imaginaries: Curation of Live Events as Construction Sites for Social Change Through a series of individual and group tasks of reading, writing, discussing, questioning, designing and testing, this workshop will involve students in a critical process that aims to reflect on the relation between curatorial practices and social change. In this frame, we will approach the design of any curatorial project as an artificial construction site for the creation of alternative social imaginaries, i.e. as a concrete alternative proposal about the way we imagine and practice our social coexistence. The act of curating will, thus, be worked as a practice that moves away from established norms and social habits; as the crafting of social encounters towards more imaginative, unknown directions, away from capitalist demands that strive for the ‘groundbreaking’, the ‘new’, the ‘successful’, the controllable, popular, profitable and effective product. Key terms...
Read more

ARTISTS AND CURATORS TALKS by Barbara Bryan / presentation of her work in Movement Research

By -
Image
  ARTISTS AND CURATORS TALKS///  Barbara Bryan, Executive director of Movement Research New York, independent art producer and curator/// presentation of her work as a curator and executive director in Movement Research///   ABSTRACT:   As the Executive Director of Movement Research, my role is to innovate curatorial and programmatic structures that hold space for the amplification of artists’ voices in curation and programmatic planning. My goal is to conceive fluid and malleable formats that support evolving and emergent practices, and new voices in the field. Questions that I ask from a curatorial framework are how to be responsive, rather than reactive, to evolving discourse and trends in experimental dance and the intersections of socio-political contexts and activism? How do we develop frameworks that have flexibility built in to the fabric of the format, and thus are not formulaic, but rather are ideations that can be stretched, reshaped and reimagined by ...
Read more

Artists and Curators Talks with Kristina Lelovac and Jana Kocevska (Tiiit Inc.)

By -
Image
  Artists and Curators Talks with Kristina Lelovac and Jana Kocevska (Tiiit Inc.) Topic Tags:   festival feminism intersectionality independent cultural scen e co-creation   ·          Prvo pa Zhensko Festival (First Born Girl) ·          Program structure: balancing theory, art, popular content ·          Festival production core values: togetherness, inclusiveness, intersectionality, solidarity ·          Building communities and audiences to breed alliances ·          Co-creation between organizations, institutions, individuals ·          Supported from local independent cultural scene ·          Prvo Pa Zhensko Festival 7 video: https://tiiiitinc.com/public/index.php/en...
Read more