[Preamble]

Get Ready, Get Set: Score Generators

I’d like to invite you to get into the thinking space of this project with me. Take these pieces, manipulate them, see how they change your perceptions of space, sightlines, or connections between people and objects. Stand up, shift positions, negotiate the room and each other.

You can’t mess them up or break them, so play around and experiment. Some of you will have pieces that will require another person’s cooperation.

[Hands out score generators.]

While you’re exploring, I may change the conditions of the room from time to time.

[Turns down lights. Open windows.]

Now we’ll come back together. I really appreciate everyone’s willingness to participate.

These pieces are inspired from sources including the dance notation of Lucinda Childs, the textures of waves, and the ways we navigate built and natural environments.

They appear as if they are sculptural objects, but that’s not quite accurate. As Erin Manning notes, “What we call an object is always to some degree not-yet, in process, in movement. In the midst, in the event, we know the object not in its fullness, in its ultimate form, but as an edging into experience.”[1]

While they may not seem directly related to curating, these “score generators” as I call them, are devices that help me imagine a situation, and then reimagine it. They produce what Simon Sheikh calls “spaces for thinking.”[2]

Hopefully, this activity will inform the texture of the next part of this presentation and the discussion beyond.

A Choreographic Curatorial Practice

We curate our playlists, our menus, and our outfits. Urban planning, poetry, and software design have choreographic elements. These phenomena point to the potential of the curatorial and the choreographic to open new space

My doctoral artistic research examines these concepts together as a choreographic curatorial practice. This is marked by an emphasis on movement, arrangement, and open-endedness.

The project is motivated by three main concerns:

1. Contributing to discourses that explore the intersections between the visual and performing arts.
2. Developing choreographic thinking as a methodology through the lens of three of my curatorial projects.
3. Finally, in this project, where I focus on curatorial process, proposing a model of curation that is dynamic, curious, and responsive. This may be somewhat in contrast to more conventional notions of curating.

While I don’t realize all these themes to their full potential, at least this project has given me a start.

Starting Conversations

A number of recent texts on curating focus on how concepts from performing arts inform curatorial practice, such as Assign & Arrange: Methodologies of Presentation in Art and Dance, edited by Maren Butte, Kirsten Maar, Fiona McGovern, Marie-France Rafael, and Jörn Schafaff, and Georgina Guy’s Theatre, Exhibition, and Curation: Displayed and Performed.

This corresponds with the increase in visual arts exhibitions that address the performing arts, including Move: Choreographing You at the Hayward Gallery in London (2010-2011), curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2018-2019), curated by Ana Janevski and Thomas J. Lax, and Objects and Bodies at Rest and in Motion at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2016), curated by Magnus af Petersens.

However, many of the projects that mention ideas I’m interested in, such as orchestration, composition, or dramaturgy, mention them only in passing or in relation to things that are directly performance-related, such as exhibitions about dance history.

Very few discuss what it means to curate through the mesh of a performance concept—to use it to propel curatorial actions and decisions.

This gives me room to maneuver—to imagine a space where the choreographic and curatorial meet.

Terms

Before going further, I want to clarify some terms: curating, curatorial, and choreographic.

Curating refers to the logistics of creating exhibitions, and to the tools, methods, and professional tasks of the curator. Its primary and most visible outcome is the exhibition.

In contrast, the curatorial, as Maria Lind has proposed, is “multidimensional.”[3] It includes the front house activities activities—what’s noticed by the audience, including the exhibition layout, public programs, and catalogues.

The curatorial also refers to the back of house and the unmarked: activities such as negotiating, mentoring, and advocating, as well as curatorial feelings such as frustration and desire.

This expanded field is what Beatrice von Bismarck calls the curatorial’s “constellational” nature.[4]

Like the curatorial, the choreographic promises an expanded field. It draws on some aspects of dance and choreography as they are commonly understood, and at the same time reflects concerns outside of dance.

In practice, there isn’t that much distance between terms. They are broad enough to encompass many ideas.

Except for When I Do

Despite the spaciousness of these terms, some people are still baffled when I explain that I am linking choreographic thinking with curation.

“Interesting!,” they say. “Do you make dances in response to artworks?”

To which I back up hastily and reply, “Well, it’s not exactly about developing choreography for the gallery” (except when it is).

“I don’t dance in museums” (except for when I do).

Even when I position dance as a modernist object—even one with a well-established pedigree like Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A or anything from Fluxus—I hear, “Sorry. I don’t know anything about dance.

While my current project is not directly about making dances in galleries, my involvement in movement does enable my curatorial work to be conceived and implemented through specific methods and mindsets.

For this reason, I shift to the term choreographic thinking.

Megan Nicely notes that choreographic thinking “indicates the ways ideas arise in multiplicity during the process of moving.”[5]

Choreographic thinking acknowledges the centrality of movement in my practice. Actual movements—my own, that of objects, artists, and audiences—as well as the movement of thought.

While I base my research in (and around) the body, it may not always be pictured by a body, or at least by a dancing one.

As Adesola Akinleye observes, choreography happens “in, on and beyond the ‘body’ of the agent.” It “conducts … partnerships, coming to be associated with dance because of the way dance so easily traverses doer, environment and onlooker.”[6]

Research Orientations: Methodology

My methodology is choreographic. It’s a hyphenated movement that both seeks something and at the same time seeks to be open.

To give a specific example: if I imagine an exhibition about the forest, I start by acknowledging that the forest isn’t any one thing.

It’s a place, a smell, a texture. It’s also a symbol, a myth, and an aspiration.

It’s already in motion.

The next step in planning might entail a trip to a forest. I could then read some fairy tales, research topics like forest bathing, forest fires, agriculture, and medicine. I might find an old scratch ‘n’ sniff children’s book where you can rub a drawing of a pine tree to release the scent.

The choreographic-curatorial emerges from this matrix.

Context

The setting for much of this research was at the Lamont Gallery, an academic gallery on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy, located about an hour north of Boston.

Exeter is known for its specific pedagogy called Harkness, where twelve students and one teacher sit around a table and learn by talking. Harkness learning is student-led. It is exploratory, collaborative, and embodied.

The large oval Harkness table positions the instructor as a facilitator, rather than the authority or “head,” of the classroom. Engagement around the table is often mapped through charts or visuals. These help you trace lines of communication and understanding and propose new ones.

The radical openness of a student-initiated discussion-based class does not mean that there is no object of knowledge. But there are variations in how knowledge is constructed, what defines it, and how it is recognized as knowledge.

Former Exeter history instructor Kwasi Boadi remarks:

"Harkness instruction requires patience on the part of the instructor, who trusts that the class will in time reach their destination of self-discovery. It may take a day or two, or even a week. Students may have a hard time getting to know all the trees—as if that were even necessary—but they sure will get to know and understand the forest, which may, in turn, stimulate them enough to go back to look for the trees."[7]

What I Did and What It Did for/to Me: Methods

The SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research recommends researchers define their methods by owning up to the actual things they are doing, especially the mundane and the everyday,[8] which often end up being foundational to the research.

In my case, these everyday activities included: moving, listening, learning, teaching, traveling, feeling, prototyping, and reflecting.

That’s a long list. I’ll give you a few specific examples: movement and prototyping.

Movement takes many different forms.

Inside the gallery, I move all the time. I place myself in relation to the work. I view it up close, from below, from above, from afar, or from outside. I arrange and rearrange artworks, props, lighting, and potentials. I invite others in to arrange. I pay attention to how audiences move: where we linger, how long we stay, whether we talk, draw, or sit.

Movement also includes my experience performing in museums, such as in Trisha Brown’s Floor of the Forest and Heidi Latsky’s On Display.

Shifting positions helps disrupts my habits. It expands my awareness.

Movement allows me to recognize simply that things could be otherwise

Having regular access to the Lamont Gallery for all my projects, on a campus where I not only worked but sometimes lived, was especially fruitful. It allowed me to prototype.

Prototyping requires that you’re in some sense always willing start at the beginning, over and over, throughout the duration of a project. For poet Renee Gladman:

"To enter it, you had to be in motion … not just moving your body around constantly, frantically naming stations … but also naming with impermanence, seeing objects as in the middle of some process, and understanding your seeing as impermanent as well."[9]

The aim of choreographic thinking in the curatorial is not to reach an endpoint but to hold space open. It’s an active, continuous process of negotiation and construction.

The projects included in this research address three aspects traditionally associated with curating:

1. Art objects.
2. The development of an exhibition narrative or theme—and the authoring mechanisms associated with it.
3. The spaces where exhibitions take place.
   
   

Curatorial Project One (Art Objects):
Open House: A Portrait of Collecting

The Open House: A Portrait of Collecting (2015) project started when I discovered a forgotten collection in the gallery’s storage room. The collection included big game trophy heads. Obscure engravings. Empty frames. A pleasant but anonymous group of blown glass fish.

For a curator, I am curiously anti-object. Or, at least, I’m ambivalent.

We were a noncollecting gallery: What was I supposed to do with all this stuff?

Instead of taming these objects into a pre-established taxonomy, I invited other collections to broaden the conversation in order to emphasize the objects’ relational potential.

Through the integration of hundreds of personal and institutional objects, including model horses, records, clothing, wood carvings, and souvenirs, the project put people into contact with each other.

In this way, as Lorraine Daston remarks, seemingly inert “things” are talkative.[10] In turn, they make us want to talk.

The project shifted from “how to do things with objects” to “how objects do things with and between us.”

Curatorial Project Two (Exhibition Narratives and Authorship):
Clew: A Rich and Rewarding Disorientation

Exhibitions are often expected to start with a specific narrative or thesis. However, Sara Ahmed cautions against the consequences “of following lines that are before us … . The direction we take excludes things for us, before we even get there.”[11]

Of course, even in open-ended frameworks, narrative is still important: it is a through line for how the exhibition unfolds.

The Clew: A Rich and Rewarding Disorientation (2017) project addressed:

1. Curatorial dramaturgy and how exhibition narratives emerge.
2. Authorship and the role of the dramaturg.
3. The dramaturgy of materials, textures, and temporalities.

Clew allowed artworks, materials, and disciplines to connect to each other in dynamic ways. Through their intersection, it turned what could have been a singular narrative line into multiple lines. Dance dramaturg Katherine Profeta notes that “Meaning is never carried discretely in one word or motion but in another sort of dance, the one to be found in their interaction.”[12]

The materials, including salt, coal, water, great lengths of audio cable, scrim, and magnifying glasses were also dramaturgical. The materials expanded the exhibition’s scope and range, something Raqs Media Collective describes as a “ripening” within the curatorial process.[13] The project fermented itself into being.
 

[13] Raqs Media Collective, “To Culture: Curation as an Active Verb,” in Cultures of the Curatorial, eds. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 101.

Curatorial dramaturgy thus emerges as a scaffold to notate and support multiple narratives, and a motor to propel the process along. The role of the dramaturg can be occupied by anyone or anything, making it a distributed phenomenon.

Curatorial Project Three (Where the Curatorial Happens):
Being & Feeling (Alone, Together)

Choreographic thinking encourages movement via a multitude of forms.

It became critical for me to mobilize these forms when Being & Feeling (Alone, Together) (2020) was shut down by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

As an embodied and embedded curator, I rely on physical gallery spaces, objects I can touch, and in-person exchanges to motivate my work. When everything closed, I found myself asking what the curatorial was and where it should take place now, without gallery access.

Developing choreographic devices helped to organize and guide my next steps.

Architectural theorist Keller Easterling’s concept of “medium design” was helpful as one such device. Medium design emphasizes what you can learn from being in the midst of a situation, rather than trying to control it from the outside.[14] Despite, or maybe because of, the inaccessibility of the original gallery, one approach was to reconsider spaces and sites.

The curatorial was not a space you would set something into or on (like the gallery)—but a state that was already present between objects, artists, and audiences.

Emphasizing conversations with others reinvented the project in spaces besides the gallery. These conversations became the curatorial. Curating within pandemic conditions required a different type of talking, and a deeper kind of listening. Re-grounding curating in its etymological roots in care helped welcome new spaces that we could all inhabit together.

Conclusion: Futures

Choreographic curation makes the conditions for engagement to flourish without dictating the form the engagement takes.

This research has provided me with a roadmap for understanding curation and movement, curation and dramaturgy, and curation and collaboration, to name a few.

Of course, there are many other pressing questions about the role and function of museums and galleries in terms of equity, social justice, and sustainability. Is curating extractive? Does it take and never replenish? Does it only reinforce problematic power dynamics and hierarchies?

Should we all stop curating?

Maybe.

Yes.

But.

And…

There is potential for curating, if we can shift it from gatekeeping to responsiveness.

Curating is a place where we can collectively ask questions, stage encounters, and offer alternatives. A choreographic approach to curating makes room for other, unexplored futures. I am curious about where it will go next.

(Ongoing) Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to so many. A longer list can be found in the publication. For now, I primarily want to thank Dr. Adesola Akinleye for their careful assessment of my work. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Mika Elo and Dr. Annette Arlander for their mentorship and guidance. I am deeply grateful to my partner, Dr. Kathy Desmond, for many years of support.

Finally, thanks to the University of the Arts Helsinki and all of my colleagues here and in other countries. A doctorate is a collective effort. I truly appreciate the community that makes it possible.

                                                                                                               —Lauren O’Neal, 26 May 2023

References

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

Akinleye, Adesola. Dance, Architecture and Engineering. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

Boadi, Kwasi. “A Meeting Point of Ideas.” A Classroom Revolution: Reflections on Harkness Teaching and Learning. Edited by Jane S. Cadwell and Julie Quinn. Exeter, NH: Phillips Exeter Academy, 2015.

Daston, Lorraine. Introduction. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books, 2004.

Easterling, Keller. “Medium Design.” Presentation, Art, Culture, and Technology Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 29 April 2019.

Gladman, Renee. Calamities. Seattle: Wave Books, 2016.

Lind, Maria. “The Curatorial.” Selected Maria Lind Writing. Edited by Brian Kuan Wood. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.

Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Nicely, Megan. “On Choreographic Thinking.” In Dance. 1 March 2014. https://dancersgroup.org/2014/03/on-choreographic-thinking.

Profeta, Katherine. Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.

Raqs Media Collective. “To Culture: Curation as an Active Verb.” Cultures of the Curatorial. Edited by Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.

Sheikh, Simon. “Objects of Study or Commodification of Knowledge? Remarks on Artistic Research.” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2, no. 2 (Spring 2009). http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/sheikh.html.

von Bismarck, Beatrice. “Curating/Curatorial.” Cultures of the Curatorial. Edited by Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.

Wilson, Mick and Schelte van Ruiten, eds. SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research. Amsterdam: ELIA/European League of Institutes of the Arts, 2013.