New York University
Program in Dramatic Literature
Co-Taught with Jay Wegman – Director of NYU Skirball
(Spring 2018)
Course Description:
Debates and dialogues are raging around the “curatorial turn” in theatre and performance. As a result, the performance curator has emerged as a pivotal figure who works to navigate and re-articulate this evolving interdisciplinary arts environment at both the artistic and institutional levels. How might the curator help us to imagine alternative organizational structures in the arts and beyond based on camaraderie, empathy, and love? Or on uncertainty, ephemerality, and chaos? In this course, we will examine performance curation through the curator’s role as researcher, interpreter, commissioner, collaborator, and producer. We will take on a range of theories and performance practices, and invite special guests – curators, artistic directors, theatre makers – to help us think in different ways about the relations between theatre/performance and the institutions that support them. Topics addressed will include: histories of radical performance, contemporary aesthetics, festivals, new forms of experimental organization, and hands-on practical engagement with the nitty-gritty realities of curatorial practice.