NOT FOREVER, BUT FOR EVERYONE

HOLDING GROUND: NUIT BLANCHE AND OTHER RUPTURES
Edited by Julie Nagam and Janine Marchessault
PUBLIC Books, 2022

By Jenn Goodwin

12 hours, once a year.

15 years.

180 hrs.

# of artists – 5800

# of curators – 51

# of artworks – 1600

# of spaces – 2000

# of talks – 64

# of Ai Weiwei Bikes – 3144

# of tears/break-ups/kisses/spilt beers – unknown

# of volunteers – over 9000

# of student co-op placements – 42

# of complaints – TBC

# of first encounters with contemporary art – TBC

# of mayors – 3

# of economic impact – $443 Million

# of kilometers I walked working 1 Nuit (12 hrs) – 43

# of kilometers of public space turned into cultural space – over 118

An all-night, one-night-only, free-to-the-public contemporary art event in public space. With the goal of making art more accessible to more people, bringing art to the public rather than waiting for the public to come to the art, and softening the often intimidating or alienating arena of the art world, Nuit Blanche deepens engagement between the public and public art in the city and has changed the way Toronto’s artists and audiences engage with art in the public realm. Using the city as canvas and the above framework as foundation, Nuit Blanche sees the city of Toronto—working in collaboration with Toronto’s arts communities, museums, and galleries—stay open all night while artists use buildings, streets, billboards, parks, and city architecture as their landscape and backdrop. Both event and exhibition, festival and fete, Nuit Blanche creates monumental spectacles and some surprisingly subtle moments, and has become a night for the city to come together under the stars to experience contemporary art. The founding principle of Nuit Blanche was to break down barriers to contemporary art for both audiences and artists. It is the ephemeral nature of the event that has been critical to its success, and ironically, a key factor in its endurance. Both its blessing and its curse is that people come out in droves.

Obstacles to attending art events often include cost, distance, time availability, a fear of not “getting it,” or a lack of perceived value in attending,1 as well as the general challenge of making people aware of when and where things are happening. The mandate and scale, the come-one-come-all energy, of Nuit Blanche helps to address and dissolve some of these barriers.

I started working at the City of Toronto in 2005 and went to Paris to learn and understand the original intentions from the founders and adapt the model for Toronto, developing the first Nuit Blanche in the city with my colleagues. The first year of Nuit Blanche in Toronto was subtitled “A Contemporary Art Thing.” We wanted to deliberately situate the event within the contemporary art world, while also offering a casual and playful welcome to those less, or not at all, familiar with contemporary art.  The exhibition was to be unpretentious, to use spaces familiar to the general public, and to free the art from the often-impenetrable artworld and its walls. It began on Queen Street West, in Yorkville, and around McCaul Street. As the festival grew over the years, it came to incorporate the financial district, Yonge Street, Chinatown, Bremner Avenue, Wellington Street, Liberty Village, and other locations, with an anchor at City Hall/Nathan Phillips Square. The original intention was to have Nuit Blanche move from neighbourhood to neighbourhood around the city from year to year. However, because of its popularity (425,000 people attended the inaugural night on a rainy and cold September evening), consideration needed to be given to the safety of attendees, transportation, food, bathrooms, emergency services, security, and a million other things. We responded to the public’s desire to be able to move from artwork to artwork fairly easily and quickly, and to be able to see a lot of works during the course of the night. Addressing the barriers to attending art events, and producing an event of this nature, involved a huge degree of coordination with city services, but in the end allowed the public to approach the art on their own terms.

In some cases, the connection to the art was approached a little too literally on select viewer’s own terms, and some works were damaged or stolen. We came to realize quickly that certain works could not be left unprotected and some types of work were too fragile or vulnerable for the situation, and so we worked closely with curators and artists to ensure proposed works would be materially resilient to the Nuit Blanche environment. In one instance, while walking with the art collective SuttonBeresCuller, we noticed a young and fairly inebriated man climbing the tall sculpture they had made. The artist yelled up to him, “Dude! What the hell are you doing?” Dude said: “Dude, I’m climbing this, why do you care?” Artist said: “Dude, I made this!” The dude then crawled down, said, “No way man! this is so awesome,” and continued to talk with the artist about the artwork for the next thirty minutes.

Another key factor to Nuit Blanche’s connection to the public is that it is a free, non-ticketed event. Removing the price barrier allows people to experiment more with their choice of what to attend, and perhaps opens doors for many who would not normally have art events on their radars or in their budgets. Entire families could be seen wandering around the large-scale exhibit by artist/activist Ai Weiwei, who we worked with from afar while he was under house arrest or Early Morning Opera’s 360 degree aquarium made for performances.  Groups of teenagers socialized and took selfies next to sports fans and the art cognoscenti as they watched John Sasaki’s spirited mascots in I Promise It Will Always Be This Way (2008) together. They later stood next to each other to see Brendan Fernandes’s dramatic shipping containers of Future (∙∙∙ --- ∙∙∙) Perfect (2008), which addressed the trauma of migration, displacement, and change. Not only is the event free, but attendees are free to observe it at their own pace for as little or as long as they want. The fact that viewers can see divergent works allows room for a variety of appreciation and differing viewpoints. And it seems to be appreciated that photos are not only permitted but encouraged, making Nuit Blanche one of the most privately documented events in the city, and allowing the public to bring home evidence of their connection to contemporary art on their phones. Barbara Fisher, Executive Director/Chief Curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and the University of Toronto Art Centre, who curated the Nuit Blanche exhibition Taking to the Streets in 2017, notes:

The end effect, after having Nuit Blanche in the city annually for over a decade, there is a… receptiveness and awareness… to how art works. In a way, contemporary art’s ways of working—performance, installation, video, conceptual and other immaterial practices—have become familiar and… young people will have experienced hundreds of different works over the course of their life; they would have grown up with art, and I imagine integrate the experimentation of visual art, the multiplicity of possible visual languages, and expanded literacy with visual and physical communicative forms and media—in their own lives and work.

The timing of Nuit Blanche is also important for reaching the public—it takes place between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. in the early fall. Though often the weather is cool, this time of year was purposefully selected to not infringe on summer festivals and events and to take advantage of early autumn nightfall, which adds theatrically to the streets, turning the familiar into something magical, and drawing the audience in.

Nuit Blanche appears and is gone in twelve hours. There is no ‘maybe I’ll go tomorrow’. It lives for the moment, and it asks its audience to do the same. Turn the corner in the financial district and all of a sudden you are transported to a floodlit tennis court featuring John McEnroe replaying Bjorn Borg in the 1980 Wimbledon championship, created and performed by Tibi Tibi Neuspiel and Geoffrey Pugen. Sit on a park bench and watch a human glacier comprised of 50 contemporary dancers from the Anandam Dancetheatre slowly roll past you. Call 1-855-IS-IT-ART (2013) and ask the group VSVSVS if what you are looking at is art … or not. Witness and dance alongside the flatbed-truck performance of Deanna Bowen with Syrus Marcus Ware’s work Won’t Back Down (2017), where the artists and activists’ work evokes a moment in the Black Lives Matter movement’s history. Often the juxtaposition of works concerned more with aesthetics with works making powerful political statements allows the audience to stumble onto themes and viewpoints outside of their daily experience, providing an experience rich in variety and depth.

The event is often reasonably criticized for its party like atmosphere, and yet it is this feeling of playfulness and joy that subverts the often awkward and intimidating relationship between the public and contemporary art. Removing the walls removes the conditions of how viewers are expected to act in relation to art. You do not need to know about art to enjoy it.

The underlying philosophy of Nuit Blanche also expands the playing field for artists. Its massive scale requires the participation of a large number of creators and works, and often leads to a juxtaposition of works by internationally recognized artists with works by emerging local artists. Each curated exhibition is assigned a geographic area within the city and headed by a curator to create an exhibition within this area, supported by city programming and production staff. The works are categorized as monumental, curated exhibitions, open calls (picked by the curators), as well as independent projects, major institutions, sponsor projects, and unsanctioned exhibits such as Off Nuit (Les Rues Des Refusés) and Off Off Nuit (DIY and aspiring artists who show their work pop-up style all over the city). All of this makes up the ecology of the event, and the lines between each category are often blurred. Many viewers don’t know (or care) about the categories of exhibitions (which has its pros and cons in terms of quality assurance). Open call artists are regularly incorporated into curated exhibitions. This organizing structural intent is to link curators to a wide variety of local, new, and emerging artists each year, in hopes of new presentation and exhibition opportunities being opened to those artists in the future.

It has been argued that the ephemeral construct of Nuit Blanche diminishes the value of the event. Is it worth the money, time, and effort for one night? I would argue that it is its ephemeral nature that has been the key to its success and the key to fulfilling its goal of making art more accessible to more people. Because the event only lasts one night, it can take over large and unique spaces. Because the ask for these spaces is so limited, the City can take responsibility for issues of safety and infrastructure. Because of this extraordinary access, spaces can be repeatedly transformed by artists and their visions, expanding our ideas of how space is used, altered, and occupied. As a result, the negotiation and potentiality of public space becomes more critical and collective. Questions of who uses the space, why, how and when receive new and unique latitude and license. In 2008, Chaos Computer Lab (CCC), Berlin-based artist/hackers, worked inside City Hall to turn its facade into a light sculpture. In 2014, Critical Art Ensemble staged an oil spill on Nathan Phillips Square, creating a theatrical dialogue around corporate and environmental investment. The 2017 exhibition Monument to A Century of Revolutions, curated by Nato Thompson, centred artist-activists with a focus on revolutions past, present, and future. Rebecca Belmore’s Gone Indian (2017) situated the financial district as grounds for the reclamation of land in a restorative performance for spectators of the present and past.2 And in 2019, the Scarborough civic centre became the site of an artistic filibuster. From government buildings to streets, churches, movie theatres, alleys, lakes, and lobbies, artists’ work and the public’s presence transform spaces and reflect upon their histories, their uses, and their possible futures. Working in different spaces creates opportunities to consider and reflect different histories, communities, and narratives, and creates the necessary conditions for distinct questions and conversations. The here-today-gone-tomorrow aspect of Nuit Blanche provides the possibility for extraordinary presentations, which in turn produce lasting echoes throughout the city.

In 2018 and 2019, in its desire to break down barriers with audiences and reinvent itself every year, Nuit Blanche presented a curated exhibition in Scarborough. Known for its flourishing arts scene, Scarborough is also home to grassroots organizers and artists who are committed to building strong and sustainable communities. As noted by Emelie Chhangur and Philip Monk in their Art Gallery of York University exhibition Migrating the Margins, “Migrating the margins to the center does not mean moving them ‘there.’ It means realizing that the margins, or the suburbs, are now the center.” Curated by Alyssa Fearon and Ashley McKenzie Barnes respectively, these two Scarborough exhibitions were situated in and around the Scarborough Civic Centre and Scarborough Town Centre (STC), a former city hall and a shopping mall respectively—two vastly different yet meaningful spaces. A government building centres the artistic voice in a place of political presence and decision making and opens the institution itself to comment and critique. The Scarborough Town Centre is as much a community centre as a shopping mall—a place of significance and meeting for many. Scarborough has a reputation in the media that is very different from what residents actually experience living there. In the first year, much of the work by 100 artists and residents spoke to transcending media and misinformed public stereotypes, systemic racism, and marginalization. The extraordinary Scarborough pride, the natural mentorship and engaged community were inspiring to witness. After watching audiences in the mall engage in conversations until 6 a.m. about toxic and positive masculinity, inspired by the work From Boys to Men: The unearthing of a poorly structured identity (2019) by Anthony Gebrehiwot, I will never see STC as simply a shopping mall again.

In many cases, the limited duration of the event and access to unique spaces freed artists to think in forms, materials, and content they may not otherwise have worked with. As a result, producers and audience alike are annually surprised by what the curators present. Annually, artists are given an urban playground for their imaginations to run wild in, and access to spaces that would normally be completely inaccessible. Participating artist Brandy Leary notes:

Nuit's scale allows an artist to imagine beyond conventional modes of engagement, opening alternative possibilities of working with time, space, attention, bodies, gazes that are unavailable through established institutional contexts. For me, it has allowed an expansion of aesthetics within my practice and communities of practice. It has highlighted that intimacy, relationship and critique can maintain integrity if scale and spectacle are consciously being subverted.

Nuit Blanche does provide some definitive conditions, among them the 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. timeframe. It appears almost out of nowhere and disappears twelve hours later. Yet, for something to disappear it had to have been present in the first place. The double-edged sword of its radical temporality is that Nuit Blanche has been perceived more as event than exhibition. Historically, live art events were usually “programmed” rather than “curated” in visual art contexts such as museums and galleries and as such they were often seen as secondary to exhibitions of visual artworks, relegated to the outskirts of the institution. Because of their ephemeral nature, live works do not frequently find their way into the archives of the institution or into the canon of contemporary art.  Nuit Blanche’s attempt to straddle event and exhibition has created a compelling strain and something of an identity crisis. Conceptions of the value of event-ness is perhaps why it has taken 15 years, a new model of artistic director, and a pandemic to realize this book, document the Nuit Talks series, and create an appropriate archive. Exhibitions usually have these things. Events often do not. Because works were no longer available to the public after the yearly twelve-hour event, it took several years before the media wrote critical art reviews rather than event previews. The average attendee probably does not notice or care about these tensions. That’s not what they attend for. But in the artworld, if it’s not documented, it’s like it didn’t happen. Documentation, reviews, and archives hold great value and exhibitions usually garner wider critical response. If there was a lack of criticality it surely came from more than the line-ups, corporate activations, and street party atmosphere. Though conceivably not every work merited it, a missed opportunity for close and critical attention prevailed at times perhaps due to the event-ness of it all. Feasibly a publication at an earlier stage, or even annually, reviews of the artworks, a fully realized archive, and perhaps even a populist vs elitist acknowledgment by some may have shifted this.

Either way, as organizers, we looked to address this intriguing tension and deepen engagement with, and critical analysis of, Nuit Blanche where we were able. The talk and lecture series Nuit Talks (thankfully now recorded and online for extended viewing and access) provides opportunities to engage with curators, artists, and themes in greater depth. Docents and volunteers meet with artists and curators so as to be ready to speak about the art to the public eager, to engage in opportunities for deeper conversations about the works. Over time, assessing our own mandate and model, we extended some works for ten days allowing a longer viewing option for those who may not be able to or interested in attending during the busy and crowded 12 hours. In some cases, work has been left up for months at a time in spaces like City Hall and Scarborough Town Centre. Thanks to a social media campaign started by Mark V. Campbell, and reinforced by University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) and the local community, which appealed to the city and the STC to allow art to remain, much work was left up for months and some is still there today. Art and culture has since become a major mandate for the mall and its connection to the community and local artists.

Other offshoots of this desire for deeper engagement include Nuit Connects, a new mentorship and knowledge-sharing program created in collaboration with the Doris McCarthy Gallery and UTSC to facilitate long lasting reciprocal relationships and partnerships with artists and stakeholders. In addition, it is not rare for Nuit Blanche co-op students and volunteers to became employees or freelancers at the city of Toronto. Job training and creation is important as our team expands and contracts throughout the year. Whether the Nuit Blanche producers work directly on a Nuit Blanche project with an artist or not, consultations are frequent and welcome, forming new relationships, and the producing team acts as champions for artists, assisting with grant development, production development, and connections to other artists, curators, potential buyers, and galleries.

Many Nuit Blanche or similar events are now presented in over 120 cities globally. That is a lot more art in a lot more places. The structure appeals to many cities and organizations because of the accessible connection to the public. In an article, Rebecca Carbin states:

Temporary public art programs can push buttons and boundaries far more than permanent ones. They can ask questions that are as provocative as those asked in a gallery. They can elicit conflicting responses and heated debate. The work is not going to be there forever, but a growing legacy of civic engagement and dialogue will be, and as it grows so does an audience more comfortable with the sometimes-uncomfortable questions art can really ask.3

Throughout the night, even amongst the selfies, line-ups, and crowds, meaningful questions, conversations, and connections occur. These then make their way into stories, text messages, arguments, and artworks. They develop over family dinners, in workplaces, school grounds, and digital spaces. They exist as memories and experiences, both individual and collective. Nuit offers a feeling of being part of something. Together. To participate: in the night, the art, the city.

And almost as quickly as it arrives … it is gone. Seemingly. By 7:30 a.m. the cleanup has begun, and spaces are restored at lightning speed. A few viewers dawdle, most are long in bed. The fatigue and hangovers will pass, yet something lingers. Like many works of art, the works were released into the world to be taken in by the beholder. The viewers then hold, carry, and become material and message from the artworks themselves. They emerge as manifestations and potentiality of the night’s images and ideas, turned into modest but mighty remnants of the art itself. Living, breathing, archives.

A hard reality now in 2020 is that gathering in small numbers let alone in masses has changed entirely with the pandemic. Those crowded collective moments and memories seem radical and distant. Yet, our connection to and comfort with the ephemeral in public art is more so because of the presence and “disappearance” of Nuit Blanche. And we may need that. In a recent Nuit Talks panel, scholar Janine Marchessault noted:

I think we will demand different things from our cities now... the world is changing. It’s exploding in painful and exciting ways. What’s going on with art now, it’s transformative, it’s temporary, it’s ephemeral. There is nothing permanent… it’s an incredible time for us to be reflecting on the role of public art to bring us together but also to initiate and ignite demands for a better city and spaces for us to be together.

 

An awareness of the impermanence of experiences can actually increase our delight and presence within them. We don’t hold on to them per se, but as we look ahead, they are in our past and our subconscious and can contribute to how we move forward into the future. This is Nuit Blanche.

The event, the exhibition, the festival, the fete.

This is public art, for the public. 

And this is what it looks like: a little chaotic, a little magical, and very real.

Not forever, but for everyone. 

 NOTES

1Glenn Voss, Zannie Voss, and Young Woong Park, “At What Cost? How Distance Influences Arts Attendance,” SMU DataArts, 10 October 2017, https://dataarts.smu.edu/artsresearch2014/ncar-arts-activity.

2 See the CCCA Canadian Art Database Project, http://ccca.concordia.ca/nuitblanche/.

3 Barbara Fisher. Personal Interview. November 12, 2020

4 Emelie Chhangur & Philip Monk, Migrating the Margins. Circumlocating the Future of Toronto Art (Toronto: AGYU, 2019)

5 Brandy Leary. Personal Interview. Nov 13, 2020

6 Rebecca Carbin, “The Artful City: Public Art Doesn’t Have to be Forever,”.  The Artful City. November 2017. http://www.theartfulcity.org/home/2016/11/6/public-art-doesnt-have-to-be-forever

7 Janine Marchessault. Nuit Talks Panel. Nuit Blanche. Thinking Through Public Space in the Time of Covid. September 24, 2020. https://www.toronto.ca/explore-enjoy/festivals-events/nuitblanche/nuit-talks/

I’d like to acknowledge the work, passion and dedication of the entire Nuit Blanche team over the years who produced Nuit Blanche behind the scenes and made it all come together working within unique conditions.   

MOM ART →

May/June 2018 - The Dance Current - Anniversary Feature

With or without kids, making art is risky and hard work. I have two boys – ages six and eight. I feel equally blessed and overwhelmed that I am someone’s mom. But sometimes you wake up to a hockey stick in the face with two extra people to feed, clean, raise and schedule … and I hear the Talking Heads singing this is not my beautiful house/art career.

My husband says if I were a supervillain, I’d be “The Scheduler.” What a jerk. If I were a supervillain I'd make sure I had a time machine.

It is challenging to create time for self and art. These days the ecology of the arts is more open, and consideration is given to both parents and kids. And yet, I still struggle, as do many parents, with the conflicting pushes and pulls of parenting and art making – or as it sometimes feels parenting versus art making. Artistic time is constantly sabotaged by the relentlessness of a family schedule, and the ability to pursue inspiration often falls victim to hallucinogenic states of fatigue. Will I have anything else, anything left, to make art about?

As a new mom I was initially worried about making “mom art.” Thinking it had a type of softness or tenderness to it that I was not sure I was comfortable with. I once called in to a radio show hosted by writer/performance artist Miranda July.

“What’s your question?” she asked.  

“Now that I am a mom, am I destined only to make ‘mom art’?”

“What is wrong with ‘mom art’?” she asked.

A brief but potent radio silence followed.

Yeah, what is wrong with “mom art”? I thought. And what the hell is “mom art” anyway? I honestly don’t know, but I think I should stop worrying about it. What I see is potent, powerhouse moms making thoughtful and courageous art, about a plethora of ideas and issues.

My work isn't necessary about my kids, but it is informed by my time with them. The way they see the world has changed its landscape for me too. Becoming a parent has helped me evolve artistically. I have just as much, if not more to say, and less time to fuck around with how I say it. My relationship with dance has transformed over the years; less frequent making, doing, seeing, thinking, but it’s also more intense and more focused on the long game. I have seen my practice unfold and grow, shift and stagnate, mature and mutate. Life practice is more connected to art practice. Domestic space more entangled with work space. Conversations, shows, classes and missed classes, the studio and lack of studio, the walks, dinners, soccer games, chauffeuring, scheduling… It’s all one practice. Sometimes it flows and sometimes it's a hockey stick to the face.

My relationship with dance is growing. It offers a place of artistry, agency, connection and community like nothing else I have experienced. It allows me a pure joy and presence while bringing distinct and divergent experiences into a room for a clear and concise period. I desperately love dance class again. I just want to get there more. The way I work and what I make has changed: I either make dances that take four years, involve a lot of research with long breaks in between, or works that take four kamikaze weeks, with frantic prep and involving ideas that can be rehearsed and performed within an economical time frame. When possible, I try to provide a caregiver at rehearsals for dancing parents, hopefully reinforcing the value of parent and child friendly circumstances and spaces. I welcome having meetings or hang outs with kids present, or while exercising, going to shows, soccer games or cleaning out closets.

As I write, one child is hitting me with a pillow and I am trying to find someone to pick up my kids from school tomorrow. (My babysitter is sick.) It will figure it out and I will carry on with art making and concern myself less about what it’s called. Who has the time?

-----

Suggested research: http://www.artistresidencyinmotherhood.com/

Your timing is perfect and other wallworks. 2014 (Score)

A performance by Jenn Goodwin, with collaborators/performers: 
Valerie Calam, Luke Garwood, Kristy Kennedy, Jared MacSween, Zoja Smutny and Heidi Strauss. Roxanne Luchak (video), Laura Nanni (dramaturg) and Camilla Singh (consultant).

Special Thanks to Jeremy Mimnagh, Walter Willems and Ame Henderson and The Theatre Centre, for their input in the development of the work.

Working across disciplinary institutions, Your Timing is Perfect was developed within the context of a lens-based gallery, traditionally imagined as a space for wall works. Through the conceptual frame of portraiture, the piece explores the possibility of connection across time — with strangers and friends, performers and audiences, between a sense of self and collective and the walls of a room. Performers in the work see themselves and their stories as objects, icons and images, they examine practices of looking, how we see and are asked to see. An intimate, 360 degree, durational performance/movement experience, audiences are welcome to come and go from the work at their leisure. Stay for ten minutes or for four hours.

Kim Simon- Curator

SCORE

Your timing is perfect and other wallworks

See everyone that walks in the room.

Offer instructions.

Welcome.

Introduce yourself and others.

You can ask questions.

The Story starts with We.

We are all here together.  Right now.  Not for long. 

You are individual within a group.

Portraits can overlap when there is only 1 person talking. Do not overlap talking portraits.

Your portrait is a part of the whole.

The whole is your portrait.

You are in this together.

You can ask for help.

You influence the space, the order, the audience.

You are influenced by the space, the order, the audience.

Just being is enough.

Stay connected to the wall.

The wall is your partner.

The wall is your frame.

The wall is your canvas.

The wall is a restriction and an opportunity.

You can change the lighting.

You can add video.

You don’t have to stop with the song.

Let things take the time they need.

Vary your speed.

Be aware of time, or ignore it, get lost in it, fight it, welcome it.

Spend time together.

You are responsible for your experience

Document what is happening.

Start where it ended.

Keep going back to the writing.

Find opportunities to move.

Move during punctuation.

See each other.

Listen to each other.

Listen to the room.

What is happening is really happening.

Be affected.

Don’t pre-plan.

Make connections.

Make it yours.

Fight/struggle/aim for presence.

Let what is happening in the room inspire you.

Doing nothing is something.

It doesn’t always have to make sense.

Try to be honest (most of the time).

Seeing you search, receive and recover is ok.

Everyone is a participant.

It is ok to struggle with presence and performance.

Discomfort, uncertainty and boredom are valid.

Entertainment is too.

Notice.

Pay attention.

Accept.

The small moments make up the big picture

Every day is epic

Movements and Navigations In/Around/Under/Through/With City Hall

Published Fall 2018. Canadian Theatre Review. Commissioned by Alana Gerecke

City Hall was the least likely place I thought I would end up spending so much of my time. As a freelance dance artist and occasional event/arts programmer I had actually very purposely avoided heavily administrative and bureaucratic work places.  When a job became available in the Culture Department at City Hall a colleague suggested I apply.  I don’t do full time, and I don’t do beige cubicles- but sure whatever, I’ll bite- and apply.  When I got offered the job I literally almost fell of my chair. I had to actually make a decision around this now. I was being offered a salary for the first time in my life, and a decent budget to work with on art events, activations and ultimately on artists and culture in the city I live in. But was I going to give up an emerging art practice and working in my office/patio in my bathing suit and ball cap? Maybe as an artist “inside” City Hall, I could make some sort of small… movement I thought. Cut to 13 years later -  Below is a score of fragmented choreographies; the coming together of people, ideas, and movements, connected by site.

A.

STAND outside of City Hall.

Wonder what the hell am I doing here?

Call friends and family for advice.

Think that perhaps this is a place to make a difference.

Consider: I deserve stability, I fear stability. What does stability even look like?

Think: I deserve to be paid well for my work.

Repeat: I am not actually working for the man.

Question: Or am I?

Hope to infiltrate from the inside.

TRY to be casual but actually jump for joy when your manager decides to bring Nuit Blanche to Toronto and sends you to Paris to do research.

Pretend you actually do own a suit.

Stare in amazement—for 12 hours straight—at the hundreds of thousands of Parisians in the streets experiencing the art.

Ask your Parisian colleague if they worry about being too loud in residential areas.

Listen when she says, No we don’t care.

Ask Parisian colleague if they do any family programming.

Giggle when she says, No, we hate children.

Befriend assistant to the Deputy Major in Paris who moves to Toronto to volunteer with the event.

Recognize you still need more help.

B.

LURE a friend out from one job so that she can help you on this one.

Hold meetings together on the treadmills in the basement gym of City Hall

Run at lunch with said friend.

Wear running outfits from the 1970s.

Question: Who runs things?

Together, start a running based collaboration called The Movement Movement.

Create performances titled Run with Art; invite the public to run with us through art galleries, institutions, and museums.

Propose: Collectively we are stronger and can actually question Who runs things?

Find a champion from within.

See negotiation as part of the artwork.

Realize there can be power in asking for permission.

Feel welcomed.

Work with security.

Befriend head of Security.

Feel a little bit flattered & athletic when one curator calls you “jocks not artists” and refuses to let you run in their gallery.

Recognize this is part of the art.

Run with more than 300 people through the Royal Ontario Museum, The Glenbow Museum, & The Melbourne Museum.

Run laps of five to ten km through Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Toronto Alternative Art Fair International, The Theatre Centre, around the Henry Moore at City Hall, and elsewhere.

Create playlists.

Create multiples.

Document the work.

Learn about the importance of documenting work.

A.

RETURN to City Hall.

Look at the city with new eyes.

Let space inform & transform.

See that every space is a stage, canvas, platform, opportunity.

Bring together incredible curators who then bring together incredible artists.

Open up the process to applications.

Talk and think about access.

Be diplomatic.

Be concerned when people say you are diplomatic.

Wear cheap blazers with rocks shirts underneath when a memo comes out about workplace attire (knowing it is directed towards you and your colleague).

TRY not to break your toe right before the event.

Wrap the hell out of it and carry on.

Jump up and down on said toe the night of the event with teammates yelling It’s working it’s working! People like it!

Don’t feel the slightest bit dorky.

Remember you want people to love this.

Repeat this formula.

Don’t let anything become formulaic.

Know it will never be the same.

Learn from your totally brilliant and passionate colleagues.

Value team & collaboration deeply.

FEEL your heart swell as you see people run from artwork to art yelling More art more art, or quietly and intently talking about a work.

Be concerned for various reasons about the drunk teens

Don’t disagree completely when a friend notes Drunk teens need contemporary art too!

Know that it/you/things can’t be everything to everyone.

Believe in the power of art.

Know things are not perfect.

Change what you can.

Accept what you can’t.

Don’t accept this readily.

Understand that asking for forgiveness sometimes works better than asking for permission (and sometimes it doesn’t).

Get better at some things.

Get worse at others.

Protect your energy, time, colleagues, relationships, art practice, community.

Build resilience.

Know some things take a lifetime.

BE aware and work with bottlenecks, entrances, exits and flow.

Train in things like AODA, CPR, Health & Safety, and Conflict Resolution.

Listen intently during training sessions on lost children and riots.

Learn the difference between code blue, black, orange, red.

Learn radio etiquette.

Learn that it is not actually called a walkie talkie.

Think about scope, scale and spectacle (without losing meaning).

Challenge the constant push for metrics

Create new metrics

SEE more and more people come out year after year.

Do not pretend to know what you don’t.

Be in awe of your colleagues.

Don’t read the reviews.

Read the reviews.

Wonder how to change the story

Wonder how to highlight the good (because there is so much good).

Remember this is about access, advocacy, and art.

BE incredibly grateful that more hugely talented people are assigned to work on the event.

Learn a ton.

Screw up a bunch.

Keep working.

Rely on expertise of colleagues, City partners, and other professionals to assist with major issues of crowd control, navigation, and risk management.

Recognize that people hate to line up.

Accept that there are many times that this cannot be avoided.

Believe that some art experiences take time.

Attempt to soften the lineup experience by working with art guides & docents to talk to those in line about the art & artist.

Create signage to inform viewer of a wait times.

Create signage with a dear colleague to suggest & encourage a positive lining up attitude.

Accept that these signs work for some and annoy others.

Try to assist making it worth the wait.

B.

RETHINK use of stage when asked to choreograph something for the stage at City Hall.

Appreciate that the curator asks you to respond to the site.

Wonder if is this too close to home?

See that the stage is situated between stairs.

Wonder if you could repeatedly throw yourself down them.

Recognize your limits.

Hire a stunt woman.

Do a call for volunteers since the budget sucks.

Don’t feel great about this. But, at the very least, be totally transparent.

Try to get stuff for them.

Know that T-shirt’s and donuts don’t cut it.

Ask for more money for dancers, costumes, music, and your work when asked to do this work a second time at the same site by different and performance-loving producer.

Provide childcare during the performance for the performing moms.

Keep rehearsal short, clear, and fun.

Make a quick speech about the site of City Hall & what it means to you, both good and bad.

Talk about the movements up the stairs and the stumbles down being about female resilience.

Decide to do the work even though the stage is now shared with a beer garden.

Get beer tickets for everyone.

Climb over and around people with beer during performance.

Silently cheer for the guy who tries to help the falling performer.

Restore faith in humanity.

Remain calm when one of the original producers gives attitude because you won’t put video cameras on the heads of the dancers so he can get a good shot during a performance and says We responded to all your requests (water and a broom).

Recognize he obviously does not know how to work with human beings and try to be in a place of generosity.

When he asks you to step outside the room to talk so he doesn’t have to call you out in front of the other dancers calmly tell him There will be no stepping outside, there is no calling out, and this relationship does not require a private conversation.

Tell him he should be a little bit embarrassed and owes you an apology.

Accept the apology.

Be annoyed.

Keep eyes open.

Keep heart open.

Keep working.

Dance your dance.

Reflections on Ephemeral Artifacts

https://www.anandam.ca/news/reflections-by-jenn-goodwin

Ephemeral Artifacts is a cultural chameleon, a shapeshifter. It was pivoting before it was time to pivot. Yet, at its core the work's curiosity remains consistent. Ephemeral Artifacts poses questions through the body about dance practices and lineages that result in a choreographic framework to stage these questions as material for dance. 

Ephemeral Artifacts has been presented in multiple forms and spaces and is part of Toronto based dance company ĀNANDAṀ’s repertoire. Choreographer Brandy Leary originally created the work as part of my Curatorial Master’s Thesis show in 2017. When I asked Brandy to be part of the exhibition all our days are full of breath... a record of momentum, I asked the artists (it was a shared exhibition with artist Jessica Karuhanga) to consider; how could dance and the body take and hold space as exhibition in a gallery? Typically, dance and live performances are part of the “programming” to support an exhibition. Curatorially I was exploring the body and choreography as archives and catalogues of histories, forms, and origins. I was curious about what is left behind after the body’s physical presence is absent from a space it once occupied and energized. 

Brandy’s work explores the practices and processes held within the body with focused intentionality. Employing the body and movement as an active archive, this work challenges the perception that dance is fundamentally ephemeral. It evokes deep rooted histories retained within the body. It unveils stories within the movements and acknowledges and honours the lineage of what came before this movement, this moment, this dance. 

Brandy notes that although each iteration of the work has similar tactics, “at its core is a question around the body as a container that holds and transmits knowledge. The body is the Ephemeral Artifact.”

In 2017, the work was originally created while in deep mourning. Having recently lost her beloved husband Patrick Pendergast to cancer, Brandy was dealing with immense personal absence. It was a tender and heartbreaking time for such a potent work to emerge, and yet beauty, grace and fortitude emerged through practice and presence, as well as profound absence. The performers (including Brandy herself) danced meaningful and courageous questions, filling the space with years of knowledge, wisdom, and experience through their practices and explorations.

Going deeper, Brandy asked the dancers to explore what the body holds. How does this develop over time? Each dancer performed solo for a 3 hour duration, and Brandy details that she “trusted the structure to hold the dancers … and allowed the artists to trust it as a path through the work.” In relation she notes, “It is common to say a work is aiming for authenticity and vulnerability, but there is no magic to attain these goals. These are techniques, and the technique of this piece is choreographically structured to move the performer there. It happens with consciousness and purpose. It is intentional and completely fulfilled with an audience as collaborators.”

This iteration of Ephemeral Artifacts, produced in association with Theatre Passe Muraille, features the ever-mesmerizing tap artist Travis Knights. Brandy and Travis are not interested in the new. They are interested in the deep. When asked about the similarities and differences through the various iterations of the work, Travis passionately says, “It’s all process, process, process! It's remained the same and yet has evolved as I've evolved. As we've evolved, it’s deeper, more specific. It’s daunting… how much can be mined”. Travis goes on to speak about the February 2020 version of the show at Harbourfront Centre as an experience that will go down in his personal history. He says he came in with his plan for the performance and then, “Brandy asked me to bring the people I am referencing in it, into the room with me. To welcome them. My ancestors, my masters. Mary Bruce, Ethel Bruneau, Sammy Davis Jr, Gregory Hines. And woah, that changed everything. The process has been so enriching and changed my process as to how I approach the form itself. Everything has gotten deeper.” He continues and references the multiple aspects of his practice (the podcast, jazz jam, the dancing), “it all crystalized in this show and process.” 

Through this iteration of the work, we see Travis, in his presence, passion, and power. And through him, we see his teachers, his inspirations, his mentors and masters. Through him we see them. Through them we see him. 

Every tap of Travis’ feet is like

a letter

that in turn creates an alphabet. 

that can create

A sentence 

A story 

A language 

A song 

As I write, I am aware that this will be my, and likely many people’s, first outing to a public art event in quite some time and Brandy and Travis both have a deep understanding of how the work manifests at this particular time and space. The restrictions on performance and performers, and the restrictions that all of us have had to endure as we have been choreographing our way through public space and navigating distance due to the pandemic are woven into the work. Working with, as Brandy notes, “space as material rather than as venue”, the piece's relationship to the architecture is purposeful and primary. It is particularly poignant at this time that Brandy’s practice is interested in “our ability to be in spaces together,” and that “liveness is not a genre but a material that we work with”.

Through this work Brandy and Travis find freedom within discipline. Expansion within restriction. An unfolding of time, body, and space. A poetry in the body is mined and the stories unfold.

Travis is music.

Travis is History.

Travis is Heritage.

Through the power of practice.  Through the power of presence.

Through the strike of the shoe to floor.  Metal to wood.  Heel to Toe.  Toe to heel. 

Ephemeral Artifacts reverberates.

THUNDERSTRUCK- at A SPACE GALLERY. Curated by Jenn Goodwin

THUNDERSTRUCK

With Aganetha Dyck, Brendan Fernandes, Angela Miracle Gladue, Jillian Groening, La calq, Michelle Latimer

Curated by Jenn Goodwin

With The works of six artists are brought together to explore ideas of presence through movement and repetition, within site specific landscapes, employing the undercurrent of dance. Through corporeal and material gestures, the exhibition also considers the traces left behind by physical practice. The works illustrate that repetition of an action creates greater resonance and impact: dance moves to a pulsing rhythm, a hand threading beads over and over again, a list of names cycling iteratively to create a community, a field of shrunken sweaters leaning on each other. It is the movements that become the dance, and reveal a visual that is greater than the sum of its parts.

In Angela Miracle Gladue’s work Boombox, the artist fuses her hip hop and First Nations cultures. As an artist who practices b-girling, Gladue combines traditional beadwork techniques with other forms and influences to create this contemporary work. The artist made her first boombox piece after her brother, who also loved hip hop, died in 2006 in the care of Children’s Services. On her website for her Miss Chief Rocka brand and bead work Angela writes, “Beading is definitely a gift of healing, and every stitch that goes into my beadwork is a step towards that.”

Aganetha Dyck’s Close Knit acts as the vertebrae/spine of the exhibition. It suggests a tenderness and strength in togetherness and collectivity and an interplay between the presence and absence of the body. Each sweater is its own character. Together they lean, support, and stabilize each other. The work is rooted in Dyck’s family history and grandmother’s flight from Europe during the war. It continues to speak to the large groups of people around the world fleeing danger and oppression to hope and safety.

Michelle Latimer describes her film Nimmikaage: She Dances for People as a requiem to honour Canada’s First Nations, Métis, and Inuit women. She notes that the film is about “the devastating effects of extractivism — the extraction that colonialism reaps, both on the land and on women’s bodies.” Images of white audiences are juxtaposed with shots of First Nations peoples’ eyes looking back again and again at the viewer, subverting the white colonial gaze. Shots of moving clouds, birds in flight, running caribou, and flowing waters show layers of the sky, land, and water and the freedoms and movements they naturally enjoy that were so violently stripped away from Indigenous peoples, such as the many profoundly significant dances and ceremonies that remain so essential to Native culture and to all of Canada’s past, present, and future.

For What song makes you feel free on the dance floor? Brendan Fernandes works with the dance floor as a site of agency, occupancy, resistance, expression, freedom, and vulnerability. He also understands the dance floor “as a queer space that is variously safe and unsafe — a site for joy and fear, release and reflection.” For this work, the audience can participate by identifying a song using the hashtag #DanceFree, creating a virtual playlist and turning the environment into a dance floor.

La calq is an anonymous artist and a minor institution of dance committed to exploring experimental subjectivities. In their work Names of Dancers, a scrolling list of dancers’ names is sourced by the dance community at large via the website thenamesofdancers.org.

This ever-evolving list composes a collective choreographic field: a landscape of dance and dancers. By naming dancers—be they famous or relatively unknown -- the scrolling list acknowledges their labor and creates a monument in their honour. By being able to add to this list, the viewer becomes a participant and thus becomes an integral part of this work.

In the vitrines outside the gallery, Jillian Groening’s (score for) soft stitches, pink tongue invites the viewer to experience the internal landscape of a moment in time. Groening explores presence through score for movement and repetitious care that illustrate connections between domestic labor, time, and material. She is interested in the temporality of performance and artifacts, as well as expanding ideas around sites of performance.

Each of the works in the exhibit Thunderstruck incorporate repeated gestures either explicitly or implicitly. Using the dance floor, domestic spaces, communities, earth, and the body itself as landscape, these movements create traces and legacies that go deeper with every recurrence. The works act as an archive of presence and resilience. From a repeated individual moment, or repeated movement, a collection starts to form. A constellation of moments and momentum that says I am here. And, I am here again, and again, and again.

.

Thunderstruck: Physical Landscapes- June 20, 2018 to January 27, 2019 at Âjagemô Gallery Ottawa /with The Art Bank

Curatorial Statement

Dance in Canada today is politically, critically and artistically vibrant. Through a choreographic lens, artists, curators, and scholars propose unique perspectives and exchanges which continue to expand the landscape of dance.

Thunderstruck: Physical Landscapes presents the landscapes and layers of multiple dance communities, art practices and dancers from across Canada. It is a look at bodies, movements and dances within landscapes, as well as the body and dance as landscape. It also investigates the landscape in which dance is created, presented and received.

The exhibition title is twofold. In the literal sense, to be thunderstruck is to be struck by a major short-lived sonic explosion. Thunder is sound accompanied by lightning—like dance it is seemingly ephemeral and can have an immense impact. In the colloquial sense, to be thunderstruck is to be astonished, surprised and speechless. This exhibition presents the spirit of both meanings with a deep respect and passion for dance and its practitioners.

Thunderstruck examines and questions the power that an exhibition bestows on its objects through collection, display and archival activities. It also considers the traces left behind in any physical or performance practice—including material, sensorial, emotional, political and spiritual. In the process, this exhibition poses the question: is dance truly ephemeral, or does it stay with us long after a performance has ended?

As visitors explore this exhibition, they will discover works of art, including film-based works and installations, as well as dance related materials. Together, the materials on display emphasize that physical and lived intelligence, corporeal storytelling, body to body transmissions between dance practitioners and between practitioners and audiences are not as fleeting as they are often perceived: they occupy prominent space in galleries, institutions and archives and they inform many physical practices from dance performances to our everyday movements

The exhibition includes a breadth of works from dance artists from across the country, including Deepti Gupta's rehearsal notes for her dance piece SNOWANGELS; anonymous artist La calq's Names of Dancers, a monument to dancers' labour; Laura Taler’s video and photo collages; and Angela Miracle Gladue’s beaded boom box, which combines her practices in both hip hop and traditional First Nations dance. In addition, the exhibition presents works from the Canada Council Art Bank, including Shary Boyle's The Widow and Aganetha Dyck's Close Knit.

This exhibition, of course, presents only a snapshot of contemporary dance in Canada. There are countless dance communities, forms, practices and dance artists across the country doing important research, exploration and experimentation at this very moment. All the same, Thunderstruck: Physical Landscapes hints at the breadth of dance practice in Canada and gives it a tangible presence for visitors.

Abby McGuane at Zalucky Contemporary February 2018

Abby McGuane delves into being. Being in the body. Being in and out of the frame.Being held in time, being held in space. In Tableaux Extant the artist presents a series of new paintings, identical in scale and size, of a singular body: hers. The process involves the artist tracing her shadow in graphite on the linen and then applying a solid monochromatic layer of matte acrylic paint to denote negative space. A third and final layer of oil paint is added in thick layers to form boundaries that frame the figure. To draw her silhouette, the artist’s body must perform a dance; a choreography of placement, positioning and duration. In that moment she is in movement and her body becomes still only once she is prepared to render the image. The final form and shape still retains something of a residual tremor of that movement; still electric, forever dynamic. McGuane’s selection of pastel colours (light yellows, pinks, creams, blue and taupe) create a calming effect, yet the boundaries surrounding each figure allude to a tension that is simultaneously present yet unknowable; what happened just before or just after the work was made? What is left outside the frame? If we view the image as a body frozen in the midst of a performance, do the solid bands mark-out a stage? And if so, what kind of stage? What is being performed? And for whom? The artist describes these works as “sketches”, “fast paintings” and “snapshots” in her attempt to capture movement. Footprints are visible on the canvas; the left hand is present, but the right hand is not (the right being the hand that traces her shadow). The elements displayed test the restrictions of the oeuvre and material itself, creating a conversation between the performative and the painted. By performing shape, she reminds the viewer that she was here. The female body was here; in motion and then in stillness. There is a beauty and softness in the forms portrayed. Amongst the layered borders, distortions and metamorphosis, we see a part of her, but not all of her. Here, a female body gestures, flows and holds space within these multiple frames and borders, while also pushing against them, taunting and evading their confinement. Even with our eyes on her, this dance is her own.

- Jenn Goodwin

all our days are full of breath: a record of momentum (brochure text)

all our days are full of breath: a record of momentum brings together two artists who foreground the body and movement as material in evolving choreographic and installation-based works. Jessica Karuhanga and Brandy Leary transform the gallery into a place of kinesthetic field work: part performance, part laboratory, part choreographed sculpture. The artists utilize bodies, gestures and reciprocal objects as their materials. Their work strives to mine personal, cultural, ancestral, and corporeal archives.

The spectrum of the new archive created in the process offers a multitude of exits from and entrances to the artists’ work. It is not fixed and inert, but fluid and permeable, and constantly breathing. This exhibition explores endurance of the ephemeral and its transmission as a critical aspect of performance, and shows the subsequent creation of information and data that extend and enhance the experience. The performance lives on in the viewer. What we say, think, witness, and dance, leaves traces. Some visible. Some less visible. All real and none more or less actual than the other. The gap between live performance and physical traces of its movements draws attention to the presence and absence of the body, considering “how performance comes off the body.” *

Working collaboratively with artists and objects to create a space of deceleration, Leary’s work explores transmissive expanses of gesture through divergent dance and movement forms that offer spaces of effort and failure, expertise and unknowing, as well as curiosity through a post-disciplinary lens. In Karuhanga’s work, objects and gestures will be collectively determined and negotiated by performers. Mining personal archives and collective digital data, performers utilize these materials as a channel, understanding that all matter carries weight and all objects are both their presence and weight of their history.

* from a conversation with Francisco-Fernando Granados

ESSAY: Tender Skeletons: Choreography in the Cube

Tender Skeletons: Choreography in the Cube.

Walking down buildings

making out with friends

talking to strangers

we dance like no one is watching

we find a roof top to shout from

we find an alley to dance in

we look across the Brooklyn bridge

to see what won’t be there the day after tomorrow

this moment, on repeat

till we sweat, swagger, and make asses of ourselves

but who fucking cares really

this is nothing, except

everything

until its not and we miss it

miss you

Is what I am saying actually getting through?

the math problems are in progress

my body hurts like hell

thinking is doing

times that by countless wishes & wants, aches & pains

and 1 brick wall, 1 black eye, 1 more song

And let’s call it a day

There is a resurgence of interest in dance and choreography in the visual arts and in its related galleries and institutions. We are seeing an expansion of the practice as well as a new found prominence of liveness in exhibitions.  It is imperative to assess how this expanded practice of liveness affects the artwork, the artists, and the exhibition space.  With mutual openness and support between the visual arts and dance, there is the potential for this enthusiasm to grow from a trend to a movement. Through historical examples this essay will show connections between dance and the visual arts, an exploration into the contemporary presence and power of live art, and finally, discuss related issues, concerns and look towards the future in the hope that the relationship between dance and visual art may be an enduring and productive one.

Laying the foundation

An essential aspect of dance is its liveness, which does not lend itself easily to the creation of physical evidence or documentation. From ritual to social and political, expressive to entertainment, dance has been part of most cultures in some form or another and often had close ties to visual art and artists. Art works like the The Peasant Dance painted by Flemish renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1567 show us aspects of social dancing and its related revelry in the 16th century; Degas’s obsession with dance is demonstrated repeatedly in his noted Impressionist works.

Although we know aspects of dance history due to traces of evidence that remain, so much of its history is also lost.  A static painting or a text describing a dancer, does not tell us much about the movements of the body.  It shows us a dancer, but not the dance. Photography, film, and video have helped to change this and to broaden the knowledge and documentation of movement.  These media formats have chronicled a reality of motion, movements and dance styles rather than static ones. 

Looking to some key transformational shifts in more recent years, the early twentieth-century American Modern Dance pioneers Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and Ruth St. Denis, as well as German choreographers Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman, began to break with the strict traditions of the ballet and work with improvisation.  This led to the innovators in the 1920s, such as Doris Humphrey and Martha Graham. Graham’s style was based on the expressive capacity of the human body and her work crossed artistic boundaries and embraced every artistic genre; she collaborated with and commissioned work from the leading visual artists, musicians, and designers of her day. The “Graham Technique,” based on stylized breathing practices, completely changed modern dance and continues to be taught today.

Other notable leaders in the third generation of Modern Dance included Katherine Dunham, Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, and Pina Bausch.  This movement looked to push dance and performance to new places both physically and visually, and each collaborated with visual arts for aspects of their practice and performances. Meanwhile, Merce Cunningham―who frequently collaborated with visual artists and experimental composers such as Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman, and John Cage―used theories of chance to create much of his choreography. Cunningham presented his first solo concert in New York in April 1944 with composer John Cage.

Simone Forti studied improvisation with Anna Halprin through the Dancers Workshop in San Francisco.  She and her husband, the sculptor Robert Morris, later moved to New York. In New York Forti studied composition with Robert Dunn at Merce Cunningham’s studio, where she was introduced to the work of John Cage. She also met Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, and Deborah Hay, among others, who in the early 1960s formed Judson Church Dance Theatre.  These artists were radically examining and altering dance and performance, rejecting the concepts of Modern Dance and creating the principles and ethos of what was to become “Post-Modern Dance.”  This term, coined by Yvonne Rainer, meant simply that “theirs was a generation that came after modern dance” (Barnes). There were many new aesthetic principles that came out of this time, but one thing united them:  the desire to reconceive and redefine the genre of dance.

The Judson Church era rejected many of modern dance’s principles of expression and virtuosity. They worked conceptually and with task-based pedestrian movement and gesture. Rainer’s “NO Manifesto” represents some of the ideas and concepts from this time:

No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.

While the period of the mid-1970s to the early 80s brought the virtuosic back into fashion for dance, it also brought Hip Hop to mainstream culture, while MTV and the music video led dance and cinematography down new avenues of collaboration; this alliance also brought together the corporeal with political and pop culture through music, narrative, and physicality collectively dominated by black performers.

The 2000s have seen a continued expansion of choreographic concepts and production in close conversation with visual art. There is a deeper recognition that dance is not only a flowing, metaphorical, non-verbal art form, done to music and made for the stage, but that it has endless possibilities of concept, form, and presentation. Dance is also reinforcing its relationship with scholarship and the academy, as more and more texts and dance scholars exist, and related courses and academic programs are being offered internationally. We are also seeing performance departments and “dance friendly” spaces opening up in major art institutions such as the Tate Tanks which focuses on live art, performance, installation and film. They have also created Performance at Tate: Into the Space of Art which is an “exploration of the place of performance art and performativity in the museum” with a committee of scholars, writers and practitioners. The Whitney has developed a Performance Committee to foster the curation and presentation of performance of all kinds, and hired Jenny Schlenzka, Assistant Curator for Performance as well as Jay Sanders as Curator and Curator of Performance after he co-organized the 2012 Biennial in which he commissioned a work by choreographer Sarah Michelson among other dance and performance based works. The MoMa, continues to make space for live art and dance such as in On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century in which multifarious connections were made to dance and drawing through performance, installation and drawings. Musée de la danse in northwestern France led by choreographer Boris Charmatz states in their manifesto that

We have reached an exciting period where museography opens itself up to ways of thought and technologies which allow to imagine something completely different from a mere exhibition of traces, faded costumes, models of stage settings, and scarce photographs of shows. We are at a time of history where a museum can be alive and lived in as much as a theatre is, can include a virtual space, offer a contact with dance that would be at the same time practical, esthetic and spectacular.

It is an active time in the exchange between live art and visual art. However, performance in the art institution is not new.  The impact of Judson Dance Theatre, The Fluxus Movement, Marina Abromavic, Bruce Nauman, and numerous others whose performance work in gallery and museum spaces brought together conceptual art, dance, and performance was substantial.  However, many examples of performance in a museum―particularly dance― were typically framed as programmed events, and as such they were seen as secondary to the exhibitions of visual artworks, and metaphorically relegated to the outskirts of the institution.  Because of their ephemeral nature, the performances did not find their way into the archive of the institutions, or into the canon of contemporary art. Jenny Schlenzka, the associate curator at MoMA PS1 seconds this when she says, “There’s been great performance work at MoMA, but it’s been on the side, we don’t want to go back to the 60s, when dance was an alternative to the institution.” (nytimes.com) Historically and by definition, dance seemed to be on the outside of “contemporary art,” which led to the notion that contemporary art was something made by visual artists only. This is noted in Andre Lepeki’s Introduction to Dance as a Practice of Contemporaneity when he notes, “As for the history of ‘body art’, it seems to ignore Western Dance.  For example, we might read in a contemporary art magazine a whole essay on falling bodies without a single mention of this fundamental concept’s history in modern dance” (14).

Nonetheless, the past decade in particular has seen dance and choreography utilized as a way to think, make, curate, and critique and in which artists, curators, and scholars propose critical perspectives and exchanges through the choreographic.  One example of this would be Blackwood Gallery’s part conference, part workshop, part presentation forum - Running with Concepts: The Choreographic Edition where dance artists, scholars, writers and professors came to together to explore how the body and choreography is used to consider issues from geography, borders, and freedom to capitalism, labor, participation and care.  It is helpful to be reminded that dance employs intuitive tools, devices, and philosophies, and shares concepts and theories that situate itself within the canon of contemporary art. From theories and approaches such as performativity, identity politics, or drawing on minimalism and conceptualism to name but a few touch points to practical or functional tools like editing, improvisation, use of repetition, proximity, and duration. Recent examples of this include exhibitions such as Per/Form; How to do things with(out) words curated by Chantal Pontbriand or A Choreographed Exhibition curated by Mathieu Copeland. Artists like Ame Henderson, Diane Borsato or Brendan Fernandes also use expanded ideas of the choreographic, the archive and dance as their medium and underline that critical thought and the body are deeply interwoven and both dance and the visual arts are expanding this deep connection.  Choreographic tools and the terrain of the choreographic are set up well to be flexible and address the needs of contemporary issues, and many visual artists have worked with dance in their own work. Issac Julien, Mike Kelly, Matthew Barney, Tino Segal, Tanya Lukin Linklater, and Joan Jonas are but a few visual artists who have looked to these devices in their work.  Dance artists such as Boris Charmatz, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Jerome Bel, and La Ribot are just a few also being recognized, shown, and now collected in contemporary art contexts.  The lines between artistic mediums are blurring and the mediums are being reassessed and redefined by both genres in practice and theory, and it is being asked with some frequency: Why dance? Why choreography? Why now?

Do not waste a movement

                                                               Step

off

in to

off of

beside

the stage

in time

and space

we move

Closer

as the world gets further

do not waste a movement

a moment

You own it

I can hear the audience breathing

And bags of potato chips being opened

Laughter at me? For me? With me?

Narcissist

do not waste a movement

a moment

You own it

The presence and power of liveness

Contemporary performance -- in particular, dance -- is engaged in an active and broad dialogue about its position in the art world (its past, present, and future).  We witness more visual artists exploring choreographic work, gesture, and materiality of the body, and as a result, more and more choreographers being invited into visual art based galleries and institutions.

So, why is this resurgence occurring and why is it important now? The modern technological influence likely plays a role as our attachment to machines and devices and a sedentary, busy culture, heightens our desire for presence, kinetic knowledge, and human exchange. This interest in the choreographic has also been encouraged or reinforced by an institutional desire to remain relevant―programming opening and closing events and live performances as a tactic for outreach and viewer engagement; knowing that visitors, on average, spend fifteen to thirty seconds in front of a work of art (Rosenbloom, The Art of Slowing Down in a Museum), live time-based art might give the viewer a chance to slow down, and deepen the relationship to the work through extended observation and kinesthetic connection and experience. Shifting the usual frame of viewing, and combining stasis and motion, allows for the artist, the object, the space, and the spectator to carve out new relationships, lines of inquiry, and insight. We may be witnessing a deepening turn towards the experience economy, and as an alternative to more static cultural exhibitions. Fundamentally, some of the urgency and importance of this “trend” lies in how the body exists in relation to time and space and how we relate to and engage with each other.  Jenn Joy, author of The Choreographic, has noted, “choreography invites a rethinking of orientation in relationship to space, to language, to composition, to articulation and to ethics. To engage choreographically is to position oneself in relation to another, to participate in a scene of address that anticipates and requires a particular mode of attention, even at times against our will” (Joy.1).

In a lecture at the Brooklyn Museum in the Global Feminisms exhibition series, Rebecca Belmore stated that “Performance is personal—it’s my person, it’s my body, with my body I can address history, I can address the immediate, I can address political issues.” (2007) With immigration bans, refugee crises, racism, and related violence, we see that bodies—mainly the bodies of those who are marginalized—are at risk. In their opening editorial on the theme of “Force” in the Winter 2017 issue of C Magazine, taisha pagget and Erin Silver state—referring to Black Lives Matter, the Orlando shooting, Idle No More, and Standing Rock that “as 2016 unfolded and we witnessed bodies exert, resist, and negotiate power, we became concerned to test the value of thinking and making in relation to the body as materially formed, or forming, in the face of these present day political urgencies.”

Dance situates itself in the expansive arena of contemporary art through its ethos of endurance, even while it is also powered by its absence. It is to this that dance owes part of its intuitive and political strength. In his Dance: Documents of Contemporary Art, Lepeki argues that when we consider these features of dance “it starts to become clearer why dance appears as an energizing and catalyzing element in contemporary art and critical thought” (16).

Dance’spresence also has its counter - absence. Performance’s ontology, as Peggy Phelan refers to in her booked UnMarked, The Politics of Performance, is in its presence, and thus also its absence. Phelan famously states: “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance” (1).

Dance and performance’s “ephemeral” history and nature- that it appears and then disappears - is part of its strength as well as its potential transience. That dance work is even all that ephemeral, is something to query further. However, the terminology allows us an opportunity to notice and discuss the impact of its visibility and invisibility, the tangible and the evanescent, its appearance and disappearance. That the artwork is noted for its ephemerality may not always encourage attention also be paid to its other manifestations of presence such as traces and residues. Taking into account reciprocal objects, markings and detritus, to the less discernible material such as sensation, memory and embodied experience (in both the performer and the audience?) for example.  Given that both ends of this archival spectrum bring its own kind of data with substantial information, the latter need not be dismissed as inconsequential or impermanent. Performance gives a significant opportunity to see through the lens of embodied experience.  In Toronto based dance artist Brandy Leary’s work she furthers this as she notes of her most recent project, “Ephemeral Artifacts attempts to unsettle notions of dance’s ephemerality; the perception that it is momentary and fleeting…” She goes on to say,

Examining the friction between ephemerality and tangibility this work unfolds as a collaborative examination of accumulated practice and accumulated presence through the material of the body. Bodies archive dance, history, ancestors and shared practices, collapsing time to render them always present and always contemporary through channeling and summoning.  These bodies and gestures do not disappear the moment after they are performed, they transform into other things, holding a politic, a record, a resistance, and a discourse that continues to work on us long after the moment of contact.

While in visual and performance artist Jessica Karuhanga’s recent work through a brass channel, she showcases how performance both endures through gestures as well as the performativity of objects informed by their previous histories and actions. In this work, gestures are collectively determined and negotiated by performers for the performance, and installation. The performers excavate personal archives with cultural and ancestral history and meaning as well as collective digital data.  They utilize these materials as a channel for their performances, understanding that all matter carries weight and all objects are both their presence and the weight of their history, in the moment, and beyond.

Peggy Phelan proposes that performance offers us a virtual form, a memory; rather than subject itself to the reproduction of its own image, it returns only as the persistence of its trace.  In addition, dance’s ephemerality shows the possibility of creating artworks distant from commodity and fetishization systems like that of tangible objects, indicating the plausibility of establishing alternate economies of objecthood in the arts.

An important aspect of historicizing and archiving live work, asks that space be considered for what and who may go under represented. If we do not expand upon historically exclusive practices in which the art canon and its related archival practices were based in Euro-centric, patriarchal power remains the status quo.  In her essay Archives: Performance Remains, author Rebecca Schneider asks, “If we consider performance as a process of disappearance, of an ephemerality read as vanishment (versus material remains), are we limiting ourselves to an understanding of performance predetermined by our cultural habituation to the logic of the archive?” She goes on to propose “if we consider performance as “of” disappearance, if we think of ephemerality as “vanishing”, and if we think of performance as the antithesis of “saving”, do we limit ourselves to an understanding of performance predetermined by a cultural habituation to the patrilineal, West Identified (arguably white-cultural) logic of the Archive?”

Being seen and being visible, is certainly part of the nature of live work and this possible reciprocal gaze is part of the concern of liveness. Political, economic and social movements have always revealed themselves in art making and cultural practice and through this visibility, presence as well as absence. Dance has built-in tools and apparatus to address some visibility issues facing contemporary society. It is intrinsic through the very nature of the body as device and tool. We are an assemblage of stories, anecdotes, scars and triumphs where practice meets theory. Performing one’s experiences, concerns and politics, connect to one’s visibility, freedom or lack thereof.  Without one’s voice, body, movement and representation, disappearance or vanishing is more likely. How we move, or don’t, matters.  Everyday choreographies are embedded in our daily lives. It is how we move in time, and space, alone/solo and together/duets, trios and groups. How we get to work, gather with friends, communicate throughout our day, lay our heads down at night and ways we come together to celebrate, to protest, to strive and attempt to thrive.  The choreographic is a form that has the capabilities to address present day concerns of the choreo-political. How, where, or when one moves, or has the freedom to move is at stake. Freedom or lack thereof is central.

In Andre Lepecki’s essay Choreopolice and choreopolitics: or the task of the dancer, he refers to this freedom;

Hannah Arendt makes the following observation: “[...] we have arrived in a situation where we do not know —at least not yet — how to move politically.” …As she writes in several of her essays, “DerSinn von Politik ist Freiheit” — a sentence translated into English as: “The meaning of politics is freedom” (2005:108).2/ the loss of knowing how to move politically results in, as much as produces, the loss of being able to find sense, meaning, and orientation, in moving freely…. And yet, performatively, Arendt’s fragment persists, resonates, unsettles, stirs. Its afterlife expresses and beckons a challenge and a provocation that are both political and kinetic — in one word, choreopolitical — a challenge we must answer.  (5)

can you hold this for me?

the archive is sweating

exercising its muscle

daily

we are workers

to the bone to the body

to the band

to the ladies in the back

to all the girls I’ve loved

practicing, action-ing, hustling

hard

to have and to hold

to preserve and neglect

transmitters - dance. it. out.

sweet holders of history

thank you for your work

sweat holders of history

thank you

The choreopolitical also finds connection with historicization and the archival. Due to dance and live arts’ temporality and performances’ identities being partly based on ephemerality or its disappearance, it has often been relegated to the periphery of the object-focused museum, and hence to the fringe of its archives (if archived at all). Fabien Maltais-Bayda and Joseph Henry discuss in their article Choreographing archives, curating choreographers: the dance retrospective that

“Museums induce archivality into their objects under the logic of the collection… Of course, the archival nature of these sites is a source of both potentials, and problematics. Significant scholarship has demonstrated the processes of exclusion and oppression that form the archive, and are perpetuated by it.[i] What is more, academic discourse has often placed the live arts in antagonistic opposition to the material archive (Schneider, 2011, p. 107). We do not suggest that these issues are inconsequential when dance is presented in the museum, indeed they must be considered seriously. Rather we suggest that the historicizing function of museums and other exhibition spaces offers a range of new approaches for presenting dance historically.

The importance of historicizing, and thus curating what contemporary artists are making even if traditional documentation or archiving the work may be more challenging than a static object, is being understood with more depth and frequency by institutions and those in positions of power within them. Although in some cases programming departments rather than curatorial departments have greater agility to respond to immediate concerns of artists as well as emerging artists, though these departments tend to wield different levels of power, budgets, and outreach. Agility and open-minded approaches to curation as well as documentation and archiving are important for the institution to stay responsive and relevant to the concerns and direction of all artists including those working in the live arts.

Artists are finding new ways in and around issues and concepts of documentation and are finding specific approaches that work for their own practice. When Tino Seghal sells one of his “situations”, the work is verbally described in the presence of lawyers and certain details and agreements are made orally. For example, the artwork must be installed by someone trained by the artist; those enacting the piece must be paid a decent wage; the work must be shown for a minimum of six weeks (the length of an exhibition rather than a theatre performance); and the piece cannot be photographed.  Yvonne Rainer works with transmitters to teach her work to performers she is sharing the work with or passing it on to. A transmitter is one who has learned the work directly from Rainer – so is a living archive of the artwork. While other artists document and archive their work through traces, residue, media sources, and related objects and texts.

Asking how does performance come off the body thus becomes relevant. What remains? Should anything remain? As a consequence, what do we do with it? The more visible effects such as materials or objects used in performance like texts, notations, documentation, ephemera, markings and traces, can be displayed and exhibited extending the life, trace, and related discourse of the performance.  While the less visible, yet also significant, ephemeral elements such as experiential tracings, memory, embodied experiences, or body to body transmission between performers or between performer and viewer can be highlighted, discussed, and substantiated. This would also include concepts of body archiving that occurs within one’s own body as a performer or viewer. Traces of what we witness and experience remain with us in varying degrees. The body is a library of sorts. A well of embodied knowledge.  A living archive, carrying around the past, present and future.

Choreography in the Cube

How does the body find its place within the frame of the art institution, whose structure and function can often be at odds with liveness? Within this context, is there a danger that the body becomes drained of life, transformed, and dehumanized into an object or sculpture? And how might all of these considerations in turn transform the nature of dance and movement making?  The possibility of allowing space within the form and body to decelerate, change flow, step away from entertainment economies, alter performer-to-viewer relationships, and change historical and dramatic contexts of spectatorship are but a few potentialities.

As Claire Bishop notes in The Perils and Possibilities of Dance in the Museum: Tate, MoMA, and Whitney, dance has often been presented as “diversion rather than part of a historical narrative.” Bishop observes that the dialogue between dance and the museum is often one-way, and oftentimes solely on the museum’s terms.  Dance animates the galleries of the museum, but the museum’s frame has the potential to flatten and homogenize our experience of dance within it. 

As dance transpires within galleries and museums, shifts in thought and new considerations need to follow. History shows us through recent movements such as Land Art, Conceptualism, and Performance Art for example that opening and shifting conditions within the museum has occurred many times over and the recent interest of dance in these spaces is yet another opportunity to pursue the potential responsiveness of the institution and those running them to create space for contemporary concerns and methodologies.

Presenting dance and live art provides artists, curators, and programmers with distinctive challenges and issues, but none are so great as to make the endeavor insurmountable. Often the economics of performance is discussed as a deterrent.  Issues of value, labour, and payment for time spent/presence can and should be questioned; however, this questioning should be undertaken with resourcefulness, equity between mediums, and clarity of means, and it need not necessarily be an obstacle. Conversations, information sharing, and advocacy addressing labour and compensation in the field is happening at a grass roots level among artists on a daily basis.  Looking locally for a moment at Toronto, institutions such as the programming department at The Art Gallery of Ontario, Gallery TPW, Xpace, and others seek to present more dance and choreographic work, and to compensate the artists fairly (often consulting CADA, Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists) and to create thoughtful spaces for live art to exist in the gallery.  Blackwood Gallery is another institution that has shown interest and activity in curating choreographic practices.  In addition to presenting movement based installations, conferences, and performances, they recently held a forum titled: Don’t Forget about the Money to address best practices of presenting dance, choreography, and live art in various contemporary art contexts. “This forum asks that we not forget the money and that, instead, we develop a collective, open dialogue about the conceptual and logistical requirements of working with artists, choreographers, dancers, and presenters in a variety of spaces.” A report will be created from this and no doubt inform some key next steps to knowledge, awareness and best practices within the fields.  CADA and CARFAC (Canadian Artists' Representation/le Front des artistes) are both in the throes of also assessing and adjusting suggested fee structures to take present practices of dance in the visual arts into account.  Further to this, institutional structures or what sometimes may be considered “non-negotiable” can be interrogated, and possibly even negotiated in attempt to prioritize artistic/ discipline needs. Conceivably allowing to rearrange conditions to create new possibilities, relationships, and spaces where art that moves, can initiate some movement. This might include conditions and logistics ranging from room temperatures, floor conditions, green rooms and access to water to name a few basic conditions that affect choreographic exhibition making and presentation. These are also considerations for methodologies of creation; not all practices and types of performance will transfer well to all spaces. Concrete floors will be hard on dancer’s bodies if the practice involves impact such as jumping, lighting may or may not be needed and available. But beyond these logistics, care, context, proximity and relationships with the space and other art works may come into play. In addition, access to resources such as space, archives, promotions, and staff, will see a relationship with greater reciprocity between artists and institution. Whether a 5 minute or 5-week performance/ exhibition, space itself is often a key element to dance work in creation, rehearsal and performance. Having access to it, the cost, size, safety, warmth etc. As dance spaces likely appear more and more in institutions, whether makeshift or from the ground up, it is crucial that all parties work with the other, listen to the needs and concerns of the form and the artists, to make the exchange meaningful, productive, and enduring. This can certainly come from the top down, though often those at the top are also very focused on strategic plans, donors, and finances. Thus the curators, programmers and other staff of institutions should be empowered to take risks and pursue developments with care at the centre of a house of curation. 

Furthermore, going beyond the “event” of a performance, -as in the show starts and ends at a certain time - to look at dance and performance as “exhibition” also brings forth new temporal opportunities and concerns. How does the body occupy and hold space over time? This can involve a durational practice or there are other types of proposals we are witnessing depending on various artistic practices, such as asking how performance comes off the body and how it might manifest in the body’s absence. This certainly changes the nature and potential of performance and queries approaches to tracings, markings, and how absence and presence are embodied.

Claire Bishop notes in her essay Dance in the Museum, four points to problematize when looking at dance in the museum: Historical, audience and accessibility, pressure and finally, the financial. The historical refers to acknowledging the longevity of the relationship between dance and visual art and “the reinsertion of dance into the museum acknowledges this long history, and allows it to be made visible again.” However, she notes that within this history, dance has still remained on the exterior of the collection and often as programming and entertainment: “a way to enliven its mausoleal atmosphere and play into the demands of an experience economy. Resolving the temporalities of these conflicting demands— i.e., finding a way to present dance as part of a historical dialogue with visual art, not just entertainment— is one of the main challenges the museum now faces.” (72). Regarding audience and accessibility, there is potential for new audiences and in some cases for a less expensive ticket price than one may pay at a theatre. Yet she notes the downside of this is the potential “transience and lack of attention” from the viewer and the reality that viewers may be more likely to walk away from the work if they are not bound by the contracts of a theatre construct.  The third point referring to pressure, suggests that museums offer the potential to reconceptualize choreography in the context of the landscape, in form as well as in relation to the historical, political and social contexts offered. Naturally, not all work will translate to connect with these opportunities as with the museum’s conditions such as architecture, lighting, sound, visuals and thus some aspects of the form may continue to feel othered by the institution. Finally, the financial considerations may be prohibitive. Bishop notes that “Unlike ticketed blockbuster exhibitions, performance is expensive, has no stable source of funding and does not recoup its costs. and we need to find a way to develop new funding models for dance.” It is correct there is need to develop these models but as mentioned previously, it is also necessary to reassess our presumptions about it being prohibitive. Developing new partnerships, reassessing how budgets are determined and delineated, working with granting bodies, and meeting with the dance and live art communities are sure-fire ways to expand financial rationale and capacity. In addition, invitations to artists to create within given budgets, laboratory or residency situations, or access to the museum’s cultural capital such as space, archives, and audiences spoken of earlier, all have potential to bring fruitful developments for all involved. I would add to this the curator and institutions ability to introduce the artist and their work to others in the field. i.e.: networking or longer term consideration to an artist and the work presented is something that can be an aspect of curatorial care and longer term resonance of the relationship between artists and institutions.

Asking you to stay

talking archives with a widow

how do we hold on to what we can not hold

how do we let go

when every part aches

for the present

to be the past

in this moment

that is already gone

before the breath can catch up

I’m breathing in

You’re breathing out

please

don’t

leave a light on

a token, a trace, a trail

a footprint

not like in the book

though I would carry you anywhere

I am strong. I am in training

though never prepared for this day

though I am as ready as I will ever be

leave your mark

your hat on,

love

I’m leaving

Please don’t ask me

I will carry with me what is supposed to

you know

stay

with me

how do I

you know

I’m breathing in

You’re breathing out

I wrote it all down

missing (you) so much

so many details. lost

a cage of data. I capture you. I’ve got you now! I demand you

god damn you

stay

Conclusion

UK artist Rosalie Schweiker said during her talk No more fake orgasms: stop boosting the art world’s self-esteem “Most art institutions are completely and totally irrelevant for us now. They don’t support how we work, they only re-discover us when we are long dead, they defuse our art and politics with their evil infrastructures, which rely on unlimited unpaid labour to function.”  The institution has an opportunity right now through liveness to do the exact opposite. Through the challenges and opportunities that the art form presents, art institutions have the possibility to stay relevant, support artists’ work, recognize artists who are alive and making this work now - while also looking at the history of the art form, while seeking to bolster art making and risk taking and elevate rather than flatten the work. 

The voice of the body and its insistence to be seen, heard, and felt is strong. More and more spaces are further opening to the body’s power to persist, resist, and create new connection to the poetic and political through corporeal means. The progression and evolution of dance as a form in relation to exhibition spaces, time (historical as well as present day) and material (the body- who’s) has a light shining on it that is long over due.

...current debates about “dance in the museum” will probably seem like a brief blip that was finally resolved by the presentation of flexible, hybrid spaces... With practical problems likely to be resolved in the near future, we can then turn to the question of how dance’ s history might be presented as part of a museum’ s collection, and not simply in the form of temporary events and exhibitions. (Bishop)

The body is pushing beyond event, to exhibition, beyond entertainment to experience, no longer content to be on the outskirts. We are at a critical time in these openings where institutions can assist to support directions artists are moving.  It is a time to share resources. There is an opportunity for spaces to become places of ritual, experience, and embodied and kinesthetic research and fieldwork.  Within this framework questions of value, labor and payment for time spent and presence can be explored and addressed. As artists are showing us, the time for this is now. Space and structures needs to be extended for artists’ concerns and urgencies to guide, shift and open institutional arrangements and frameworks. From who gets curated and why, to details like spatial conditions and structures and use of resources. We are in the midst of an exciting and essential time of inquiry in contemporary art. Let the political, intelligent and radical body express itself beyond the stage.  Let us move and be moved.

Stillness is for the dead

pause for a moment

perhaps for the cause

and a time that eludes description

but is creating movements

movement movements

there are no words

yet we talk back

even though failure

mocks us

bruised knees

blue today, purple tomorrow

tender

skin and bones

tender skeletons

raw casing

delicate hearts

tenderhearted

bravery

stay brave, not still

Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. 53. Duke University Press. 2006

Barnes, Sally, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance, Mariner Books, 1980

Beaumont, Cyril W. Ballet Design Past & Present. The Studio Ltd. England. 1946

Belmore, Rebecca.  “Speech for Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum.” 2007. Accessed February 20, 2017. youtube.com/watch?v=YhWkrHDZue4

Beauchamp, Pierre. Chorégraphie, ou l'art de décrire la danse. Paris, 1700

• Bishop, Claire. The Perils and Possibilities of Dance in the Museum: Tate, MoMA, and Whitney- Dance Research Journal, Volume 46, Number 3, December 2014, pp. 62-76 (Article). Cambridge University Press

Butler, Judith. The Force of Fantasy, Feminism, Mapplethorpe and Discursive Excess. 1990. p106

Butte, Maren, Maar, Kirsten, McGovern, Fiona, Rafael, Marie-France, Schaffaf, Jorn. (eds.) Assign and Arrange- Methodologies of Presentation in Art and Dance. CITY Sternberg Press. 2014.

Charmatz, Boris- Manifesto for a Museum. http://www.museedeladanse.org/en/articles/museum-s-manifesto-1

Clausen, Barbara. Performing Histories: Why the Point Is Not to Make a Point… After All Journal. Spring 2010.

Copeland, Matthieu, Pellegrin Julie. Choreographing Exhibitions. France. Les Presses Du Reel. 2014

Davida, Dena, Gabriels Jane, Hudon, Véronique Pronovost, Marc. (eds.) Curating Live Arts: Global Perspectives, Envisioning Theory and Practice in Performance. 2017. Not yet published

Ellenwood, Ray. The Complete 1948 Manifesto of the Montreal Automatists. Translation and Introduction by Ellenwood.1985. Exile Editions Ltd.  Toronto/ Dance Collection Danse)

Grata, Agnieszka. Shall we dance? -If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse. 2 December 2015. Tate Etc. issue 35: Autumn 2015. tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/shall-we-dance

Jones, Amelia. Presence in Absentia, Experiencing performance as Documentation. Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 4. College Art Association. 2009

Joy, Jenn. The Choreographic- 2014. MIT Press

Kassing, Gayle (15 August 2014). Discovering Dance. Human Kinetics Publishers. p. 132. 

Khokar, Mohan (1984). Traditions of Indian Classical Dance. India: Clarion Books. pp. 73–76.

La Rocco, Claudia. Museum Shows With Moving Parts, New York Times. New York City, August, 2012

Lee- Elliott, Theyre. Paintings of the Ballet. Cathedral Street Publishers Glasgow. 1947.

Lepecki, Andre. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. Routledge, 2006 

-Choreopolice and choreopolitics: or the task of the dancer. Theatre Dance Review Winter 2013, Vol. 57, No. 4 

- Dance. Documents of Contemporary Art. (ed) White Chapel Gallery London,. MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts. 2012

Maar, Kirsten. What Can a body do? Reconsidering the role of the moving body in exhibition contexts. stedelijkstudies.com/journal/what-a-body-can-do/

pagget, taisha and Silver, Erin.  “Force” C Magazine. Editorial, Winter 2017 issue.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Routledge. 1993

Rosenbloom, Stephanie. The Art of Slowing Down in a Museum. October 9, 2014. nytimes.com/2014/10/12/travel/the-art-of-slowing-down-in-a-museum.html

Schneider, Rebecca.  Archives: Performance Remains, Performance Research, 2001, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 100 – 108.

Schouvaloff, Alexander. The Art of Ballet Russe. The Serge Lifar Collection of Theatre Designs, Costumes. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 1997

Schweiker, Rosalie. No more fake orgasms: stop boosting the art world’s self-esteem Art is not a Commodity: Examining Economic Exceptionalism in Art’, ICA, London, 18 February 2017

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A Brief History of Ballet. Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. https://www.pbt.org/learn-and-engage/resources-audience-members/ballet-101/brief-history-ballet/

Performance at Tate: Into the space of art tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate

Dances of the Early Renaissance (15th Century) - socialdance.stanford.edu/Syllabi/early_renaissance.htm

 

 

 

Mafa Makhubalo

Lentswe la Setjhaba (Voices of the Land)

Mafa Makhubalo

I visit Mafa Makhubalo’s rehearsal on a sweltering September day at Collective Space, in the Junction of Toronto, where the dancers are literally dripping with sweat.  It is 30°C and they are dancing hard.  Mafa and three dancers, Kimya Hypolite, Tamla Matthews and Roushelle Reign, prepare to show a section of the work. The drummer, N’dere Nimon, has a djembe between his legs and is ready to play.  Music begins and Mafa snaps his fingers to count the dancers in, while one of the dancers second that with heavy hand claps, and they kick into an incredibly physical combination with intricate footwork, impressive upper body strength, and pulsing rhythms.  I think I stopped breathing for a moment as I took in their percussive and intense movements.  Calm and strong, the dancers seem as comfortable on the floor as they are in their feet. Their dance is at times accelerated and sharp while other moments find a flow like a wave washing over them.  Smooth meets staccato in these skilled and versed bodies.

The highly athletic section ends, and once they catch their breath – which doesn’t take long –  Mafa asks to see it again, working to refine and nuance aspects of the combination.  The dancers take a moment to let the beat soak into their bodies, counting in, preparing mind and body.  The pulse in the room between bodies and beats is riveting.  A fusion of contemporary, African, modern, breakdance movement, and gesture are being explored.  The individuality of each dancer shines, yet they are united by the movement and their push to accomplish their very tasks.  At times, it seems celebratory, raw, and full of release; at other times, it is controlled, defined, and rigorous.

As they prepare to show another section of the work, they all put on socks and rubber boots.  This preparatory ritual is as performative as it is transitional.  The performers, along with Mafa, stand straight together, then bend their torsos in a hunch so that their hands reach their boots.  The music begins, and they clap hands together and on the inner and outer boot with tempo, speed and accuracy.

“I was born playing gumboot,” Mafa says.  I speak with him over the phone days later, as he cares for his daughter. Mafa is a father of two.  He has a 3-year old girl and the recent addition to his family – Azania Susumu Mohau, whose name means “Africa moves forward slowly” –  was born five months ago.  If he is under-slept, it doesn’t show.  Mafa has energy to spare.

Mafa Makhubalo was born and raised in Sasolburg, South Africa.  Growing up, gumboot was part of the fabric of his birthplace, and came to be an integral part of his practice, career, and way of life.  Gumboot was born out of South Africa, created by miners who were denied the right to talk to each other while working. The different sounds created were distinct codes and messages to other workers.  A physical language, form of protest, and dance form was born from their oppression.

Mafa grew up during the time that apartheid was being dismantled and transitioning to a new era. “Most of us were gangsters, and art helped us to move away from this.”  He notes that many of his friends from his home town ended up in jail, and many of them are no longer alive.  He reflects that dance and art came as a calling to help him and others move away from the harder lifestyle they were living.  “We began asking: how can we fight without fighting?  Art taught us to love. We had forgotten to love, because we grew up angry, we didn’t know why. It became normal.”

Mafa tells me that through his art form he found he could express himself, find possibilities, and the hope that life was not so narrow.  “We stopped fearing our lives and ourselves.  We found courage.”  When he first applied to emigrate, he was rejected, as he didn’t know where Canada was, and he had confused Canada with the United States.  He then did his research and got a letter of support from Toronto’s Ballet Creole.  At that point, Mafa had to find his way, with no money, no friends and nowhere to stay.

Today, Mafa speaks of the long desire for a space, or a series where work can be presented without classification.  “Without saying because I am from Africa, whatever movement I do is African dance.  Give us an opportunity to explore what is our own voice, how to communicate with an audience, and how we relate to their presence.”  Mafa notes that his voice and practice come from various influences and forms, and need not be classified under one umbrella.  “We want to decolonize the art, but we need space to do this.  We need to start from within for it to go beyond.  We need to explore how one form relates to the other and learn to trust our own form so we can also open it up.”  Mafa mentions that a series like Contemporaneity gives resources to explore facets of the many forms and influences of contemporary artists working in contemporary times.  Allowing the artist to break out of old definitions, barriers, and taxonomies.

The project Mafa and his team are working on is titled Lentswe la Setjhaba (Voices of the Land).  A section begins with the song Working Hard.  Each in their own world, the three dancers seem to be getting ready for something.  To go to work, to meet someone, to work up their courage. Their distinct worlds blur as they meet and come together in movement and motion.  Mafa notes the song is “Afro-house, that’s what I’m exploring, that energy. When I listen to this lately, I become myself, more of myself.  Also I wanted lyrics to be obvious.  I don’t need to hide.  I am creating living art, living experience.  We are workers.  What are we working for?  Is it purposeful, or for the sake of work?”  He goes on to explain that the dancers are each working with their own stories & struggles in the piece. “Being lost in aspects of ones’ struggle, when do you find yourself?  When we let go, the nuance comes in and we can move forward.”

As they dance, rhythms meet movements, each a separate entity, but also layering over each other to create complex patterns and narratives. “Together we find that rhythm that moves us. Rhythm is a human internet, we are able to send signals to each other, connect, and Iisten to each other.”

Through these rhythms and connections Mafa is interested in questioning, “How does one adopt their own culture into different cultures, and still be able to have a sense of comfort in who they are?  Gumboot tells stories, stories from those who came up with this form, it came from the pain of the miners. It is a revolutionary and protest dance, and we are using gumboot as a way of retaliating in our own field and world.”

Through themes of work, rhythm, and pattern, conversations are created between body and spirit, protest and resilience. As these songs, stories and histories radiate, they land us very much in today. In the moment. And very much in contemporary times.

-Jenn Goodwin. October 2017

EXCUSES

created for the dance "Accidents for Every Occasion"

I'm Sorry…

I didn’t mean it

I wasn’t thinking

Im embarrassed. I cant believe I did that. It’s a fine line really isn’t it. I ignored the signs.

I didn’t understand the instructions

I had no idea

I was framed

I was drunk

I was hurt…

I had other plans

I deserve it

Im cleansing

It was too late to call

I needed to feel something

You were away

It was cold out

I didn’t want to sleep alone

Im holding it for a friend

Im not from here

I was Pre menstral

It was a spur of the moment decision

I didnt know you would take it like that

You can be so sensitive

I was Nervous

I didn’t want to send the wrong message

The networkwas down 

The sun was in my eyes

I went out on a limb

I have to go

I was faking it

I don’t know when to stop

I cant say no

I got sick of waiting

I listened to my gut

Hey…I was misquoted

I was brought up catholic

I did it for the money

I did it for love

I didn’t know it was my last chance

I didn’t know it meant so much

I don’t own a watch

I haven’t slept

I was bored

I was in heels

I could not control myself

It wasonly 1 night

I blame myself only. And maybe you alittle bit.

I fell asleep

I fell of my bike

I was falling in love

I felt ignored

I was falling apart

I felt confused

I just fell into it

I didn’t think it would actually hit you

I didn’t know it would hurt

I was at my wits end

I was fucking pissed off

That song was playing

I couldn’t sleep

I pressed snooze

I pressed send

You pushed my buttons

You pushed your limits

You pressed play

I was distracted

I lost my patience

I lost track of time

I lost my confidence

I lost your number

I lost my keys

I lost my phone

I fucking lost it

He was greek

the lighting was perfect

He told me what I wanted to hear

I was on vacation

I left it at home

Im on my way to a wedding

Ive just come from a funeral

You looked at me and I melted

My defences were down

My parents were teachers

I am the youngest of 3

I am spoiled

I was lonely

I was high

I was listening to public enemy

I was between a rock and a hard place

you said you loved me

I thought I could handle it

It was highly recommended

It was cheap

I was young

It seemed poetic at the time

I didn’t ask questions

I didn’t understand the directions

I believed the hype

It was on sale

I believed you

I hoped for the best

I hoped to for something else

I was star struck

It was a 2 hr special of the simpsons

I forgot
 

I was taken for a ride

He took me for someone else

I took it standing up

I took it for the team

I was taken by him

I took the brunt of it

I took the heat

I took what I could get

I don’t know what its going to take

I don’t know when to stop

STOP

Care: Summerworks 2016 Curatorial Statement

A button I once owned declared, “Kindness is an act of rebellion”. Kindness, and notions of care, are associated with nurturing, tenderness and softness, and sometimes need to be just that. Yet care can also be harsh, tough, combative, conscious and loud. Care can be an agitator that embraces criticality. We care, so we make art, speak up, see shows, hit the wall, tread gently, go it alone, and come together. Care as a concept and philosophy has a deep rooted history in the ethics of early feminists and continues to be considered and rejected. In my opinion, care is needed more then ever, both as a response to minor quotidian dramas and the overtures of the catastrophe present in all of our lives.

Our bodies carry us through our lives.  The power of dance as a medium is its ability to connect us to our own bodies, and in turn, to the bodies of others. Throughout my life with dance and through the curation of this series, I have encountered artists who bring care to their craft and their community through the large and small issues that fuel their work. There is always potential for a reciprocity of action and intent between performers and viewers. We care that you are here, that you care enough to come, to buy a ticket, to applaud or leave, to discuss or dislike. The works in this series provide access to what each artist cares about. Care takes time. Thank you for placing your attention on these exceptional artists and this work that they care to make.

-JENN GOODWIN