Performance, Choreography and the Gallery

Edited by Erin Brannigan (UNSW Sydney), Hannah Mathews (Monash University Museum of Art), and Caroline Wake (UNSW Sydney)

This issue of Performance Paradigm takes the 2016 Biennale of Sydney as a starting point for a broader discussion about the relations between performance, choreography and the gallery. Of course, the appearance of performance in the gallery and in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector more broadly is not new. Indeed, the Biennale’s 2016 artistic director Stephanie Rosenthal and two of her ‘curatorial attachés’, Adrian Heathfield and André Lepecki, have been working at this intersection for years. So too have scholars such as Claire Bishop (2012; 2014), Shannon Jackson (2011), and Susan Bennett (2009). 

What is new, perhaps, is the visibility of artists, art works and institutions from the Global South. The Biennale featured scores of performances that ranged across of a variety of genres (one-to-one, live art, theatre, dance, opera, installations, walks, talks, and tours) and a variety of sites (libraries, galleries, post-industrial halls, inner city streets, and harbour islands). We invite papers from artists, curators and academics that investigate all of these genres and more, across these three themes:

• Performance: Performances in galleries, libraries and art museums; Black boxes, white cubes, grey spaces, and green rooms; The theatricality of exhibition and display (Guy 2016); The twin, yet distinct, anti-theatricalities of visual art and performance studies (Jackson 2005); How does moving a live work from one locale to another change it and what are the problems and possibilities for the work, its analysis and its audiences?

• Choreography: Why do museums seem to prefer dance to performance? Is it only to do with the silence, or is there more to it? How does the gallery reconfigure relations between dance and performance (studies)?  What do we gain and lose in expanding ‘choreography’ towards the visual arts (Brannigan 2015)? How does the dance-museum relationship navigate the problematic power relations surrounding the choreography of institutionalisation?

• Gallery (Libraries, Archives, and Museums): How do dance and performance alter the terms of spectatorship in the gallery and vice versa? If ‘choreography’ and ‘performance’ are mobile frames for making and experiencing art, how does ‘gallery’ circulate as a frame beyond its recognisable sites? How do GLAM institutions bring themselves into being via the ‘choreography of bureaucracy’ and the associated genres of grant applications, sponsor events, and collaborations with other institutions such as universities?

Please send proposals of approximately 300 words to Erin Brannigan (e.brannigan@unsw.edu.au), Hannah Mathews (hannah.mathews@monash.edu) and Caroline Wake (c.wake@unsw.edu.au) by Friday, 24 February 2017. Full articles will be due on 16 June 2017 for publication in December 2017.

Works Cited

Bennett, Susan. Theatre & Museums (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Bishop, Claire. “The Perils and Possibilities of Dance in the Museum: Tate, MoMA, and Whitney.” Dance Research Journal 46.3 (2014): 63–76.

———. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012)

Brannigan, Erin. “Dance and the Gallery: Curation as Revision.” Dance Research Journal 47.1 (2015): 5–25.

Guy, Georgina. Theatre, Exhibition and Curation: Displayed and Performance (London: Routledge, 2016).

Jackson, Shannon. “Performing Show and Tell: Disciplines of Visual Culture and Performance Studies.” Journal of Visual Culture 4.2 (2005): 163–77.

———. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London: Routledge, 2011).