In a choreographic curatorial practice not everything is determined in advance. The exhibition is only one part of what will eventually unfold, an unfolding that is collaborative and co-produced with artworks, artists, audiences, and spaces.

During the pandemic, a commitment to this way of working, and a commitment to each other, became especially important.

The “long effort” of producing the project, and subsequently this exposition, has been a farewell to the Lamont Gallery (which I left in the summer of 2020) as well as a type of futuring. The Project Overview delineates the temporal stages of the process: “This might have been,” “This was not,” “This became,” and “This could.” For me, the phrases carry the simultaneous force of falling, sinking, leaning, and reaching. At any given moment, these words could be melancholic or anticipatory, enacted through thick, fumbling movements or bright and directed, propelled by urgency, necessity, or desire.

Futuring, a term I reference in the catalogue essay, is drawn in part from the work of choreographer Ame Henderson and her company Public Recordings. In her piece relay, dancers summon memories of past performances and offer those as future possible moves to be performed with others.

Performer Marie Claire Forté describes futuring as “a method to go where the group is going next so that we may be in unison in the future.” She notes: “within futuring we embody memories of past performances. I live these memories as a generator of a potential future unison, a bringing of our individual pasts into a shared future.” (1)

During Being & Feeling, I was reminded of the future. The inaccessibility of the gallery or in-person exchange required us to find other ways of moving forward: we remembered, and then reimagined, what it was like to be together within past curatorial projects to construct new models. As Forté describes building relay: “The memory is not a rigid unfolding of known events. There is a movement path I think we follow and we are always a bit ahead of it, we are imagining where it is going for all of us together.”

Being Alongside: A Futuring Framework?

As the pandemic wore on, I made attempts to gather my research into a form I could apprehend and share with others. How did I understand choreographic thinking in the curatorial within Being & Feeling? What if its most substantive, foundational effects were invisible? How could I excavate these experiences when curating, artistic research, and daily life were so profoundly challenging during the pandemic?

How can you think about art at a time like this?

In Fall 2020, I had the privilege to participate in a seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Choreographing the City: Advanced Workshop in Artistic Practice and Transdisciplinary Research,” co-taught by Professor Gediminas Urbonas and visiting artist-in-residence Dr. Adesola Akinleye.

Each week, we began with Dr. Akinleye leading us through Gyrokinesis, which we practiced on a chair. It was a way for me to "future" floorwork, from my own solitary practice on the floor to a shared practice in concert with others. We used movement to "sit with something," to tap into its potential and to see how it suggested connections. In my notes, I noted that Dr. Akinleye described that choreography was less about the movements, and more in the relationship between things. (2)

The seminar prompted me to think about the score in more expanded ways. One possibility is of a score being a prescribed set of directions—a controlling mechanism—that reinforces what we don’t want.

Alternatively, a score can be a method of diagramming where we want to go, and a possible—but not proscriptive—way of moving in that direction. Neither a language, nor a grammar, a score brings "something to the forefront," we agreed.  A score can be simply the act of noticing. A score can be productive by enabling participation in systems and structures in a manner that change those same systems and structures. The "Choreographing the City" seminar functioned as a score alongside my reflections and analysis of Being & Feeling.

Along with discussion, movement exercises, and presentations, the seminar included a dynamic selection of guest speakers who extended the course themes in generous and insightful ways. Dianne McIntyre spoke of her early work in connecting dance and civic engagement through her Sounds in Motion company, which hosted numerous performances in public spaces, including on the back of a flatbed truck. McIntyre described the need for openness in making work, as well as a combination of “humility and complete confidence” to imagine and realize what you want to achieve, even if others do not see it yet.

Scott Pratt, drawing from his work on Native pragmatism, discussed how power is a "direction toward the future." Indigenous notions of power focus on “how a thing realizes itself” within a particular place or context: “places are propulsive.” The emplacement of one body in relation to spaces, aesthetic experiences, and other bodies—an aspect of the curatorial—is about making relationships, which are propulsive, too.

The seminar allowed me to be alongside my reflections of Being & Feeling. I used the process of assembling the Research Catalogue exposition to analyze the project and reveal what I could not apprehend while I was in the midst. The aim was not to 'know' it all, but to sit with it. The exposition was a (partial) reconstruction of what had been and a practice of co-imagining the future. Actions today helped redraw experiences from yesterday to generate the next day and the day after.

Being & Mattering

Memory and anticipation are not neutral or untroubled states. The present, which intermingles with both our past and the way we imagine the future, is conflicted, too.

Being & Feeling intentionally addressed these conflicted states of being. The pandemic reinforced and amplified these states. It compounded and complicated people’s ability to respond, engage, and act.

The pandemic illuminated long-standing problems in the field. Institutional decisions, made in response to the crises of multiple pandemics (health, racism, environmental), often felt uncaring or punitive. Arts institutions experienced massive budget shortfalls. The resulting staffing cuts impacted arts workers in the most precarious positions. The remaining staff suffered from collective exhaustion, guilt, and fear. Even now, there continues to be doubt and anxiety around schedules, hours, pay, and healthcare, as well as belonging, motivation, and leadership, among other challenges.

In campus-wide meetings on my home turf, we spoke about “giving each other grace,” “easing up on high expectations,” and “providing empathy for the students and for each other,” but not much changed. In times of fear, when the status quo is upended, organizations often become more hierarchical and controlling, which has profound impacts on the people who live and work within them. I cannot say what I would do if I were charged with leading an institution during such a time. I did think a lot about what institutions do, give, or take away during a crisis, and by extension, what I could do, give, or take away.

The phrases "easing up" and "giving grace" have different implications for institutional versus individual leadership. I spent many hours worrying that the gallery staff would be cut and that the gallery would be closed to make way for a purpose that would bring tangible financial benefits to the parent institution. This pressure has always been there, but the pandemic exacerbated this concern.

During Being & Feeling, I felt compelled to produce situations that fostered care and connection, along with objects of knowledge that could provide singular "deliverables" with scalable use value. Look at our industriousness!

My desire to provide generous spaces as well as make sure we "took up space" made for uneasy and sometimes contradictory actions.

Anyone who works in the arts, especially within non-arts academic institutions, understands these moves: we play along, but at the same time we try to resist ongoing institutional mandates to confirm, homogenize, and surrender. Unfortunately, we become territorial in response to the encroachment of territory, despite our best efforts to deterritorialize.

Employing choreographic devices helped me move forward: prioritizing conversations, structuring the project to invite audiences to acknowledge their own various states of being and feeling, and allowing for slowness and stillness. The methods that characterized my research also created a space where being (valued) and mattering (and matter) were reinforced.

Reflections: Flexibility, Expectations, Loss

Using Zoom as a platform required me to frame events and programs much more intentionally. I had to orchestrate activities, conversations, and people in ways that felt cumbersome and pedantic. Even experimental or experiential programs where the point was to critique a hegemonic read, there was still pressure to define the conditions explicitly for audiences.

Despite being aware of the need to scaffold the Zoom experience, I felt conflicted about how to address it without over-determining the program's outcome. Perhaps this will become less of an issue as our familiarity increases. At the same time, I worry that the interface and expectations have become homogenizing forces all too quickly. Something about our viewing mechanism is changing: we do not stand outside of the geometric, abstracted plan of the gallery, the stage, or the landscape, looking into or even over the horizon. Our body is now immersed within the thing viewed. Is this better?

There were other losses that came with moving programs online. The participating artists, from diverse cultural, racial, linguistic, and economic backgrounds, examined complex and often silenced narratives, including stories relating to immigration, aging, and gender. Their artworks addressed belonging, exclusion, hope, and fear through the validation and communication of lived experiences. I had hoped that the gallery could provide a way for these subjectivities to claim space. Even students remarked on this loss, as they wanted to be able to be in dialogue with the artists and to share their own experiences.

Taking up space and time—giving generous support, resources, and a willingness to commit to the duration it takes—was and is an important activity for the gallery. Seeing something occupying space—in person, in front of you—has power. While situating a work in a gallery can be considered unimportant and even frivolous (just "aesthetic"), that assessment really depends on who is making the judgment.

Or it could be the other way around: the online format made the stories and representations, and all of the enactive power within them, more accessible. I am not sure if accessibility in itself is the issue. There is no shared agreement about what constitutes accessibility. Flexible and multi-modal structures do not in themselves guarantee belonging.

"Access" is a complex and problematic concept for other reasons. Online viewing is already associated with high-resolution, in-depth visuality (Google Arts & Culture being one prominent example). Now, that aesthetic is an expectation, even a demand. What is the value of friction within this viewing experience? How do you make room for difference, and the ways that viewing differently (including in nonocular ways that counter vision's knowledge claims) can produce valuable, yet divergent, interpretations? Are there other, nonocular ways of perceiving, presenting, and responding?

In Multiplying the Collaborative, the experiential event with Jon Sakata, we received feedback that people couldn’t hear clearly, or couldn’t see. Those glitches, obscurities, multiple sonic, visual, and haptic layers, and partial-access points were an intentional part of how we designed the event. Perhaps there are times when it is important to privilege the artists’ voices and works in the ways that make sense for them. Perhaps there are moments when it is about the audience. Sometimes these overlap, but not always.

Multiplicity does not always have to engender confusion, of course. Being intentional with a curatorial gesture can support polyphonic engagement. For example, although I was committed to producing a printed catalogue, if I were do it again, I would make each page a standalone, heavy weight piece of paper housed within a portfolio cover. Readers could take the pages and reorder them in the way they wanted to experience the works. I still believe the catalogue is effective, but the portfolio suite format would lend itself more directly to the catalogue’s conceptual aims.

Reappraisals: The Curatorial to Come

Previously, many of my curatorial projects were community-based, often within artist-run spaces, or collaborations. After curating for eight years at the Lamont Gallery, it is possible that I reached a limit. I often feel that the missions of educational and community-based galleries are increasingly at odds with the norms of the neoliberal, arts and educational industries, which are suspicious of anything too open-ended, too experimental, and too joyful. The fatigue of navigating an institutional framework that felt antithetical to the potential of curating became impossible to ignore during the pandemic. At the same time, I remain grateful for the experience. It allowed me the time and space to consider my curatorial practice more deeply.

I vacillate between feeling like I have exhausted the possibilities of the curatorial, at least for myself, and being curious about all of the other forms and formats it could take. Sitting here, now, in 2021, I am not entirely sure that I want to continue to curate. Or, I do not yet know what the curatorial can become.

(1) Marie Claire Forté and Jacob Zimmer, “And in the Future I Don’t Remember What Happened Yet: A Back and Forth on the Experience of Memory in relay,” Canadian Theatre Review: Vol 145, Winter 2011, 7-9.

(2) All references to the “Choreographing the City” seminar and guest speakers were taken from my notes in fall 2020.