Revisiting

TURBA in conversation with Florian Malzacher, Tea Tupajić, and Petra Zanki

Coming to Our Senses

In order to grasp the significance and potential of live arts curating, I claim it is essential to understand the coming-to-visibility of the curator function in the artworld from the 1960s. This helps to navigate the question of whether the arrival of this discourse and practice for performance in the last decade is an extension of a curatorial remit founded in the gallery arts. Has the scope of curatorial work expanded, or is there a parallel operation for live arts? I argue that a third possibility remains, that it signals a mutation of curatorial practice that bears on both the formerly visual arts and on the shift ing ground of live arts. What becomes possible when curatorial work lays aside its visual privilege, its expert eyes and the authority of its insights?

Editorial

The call for papers for this inaugural issue of TURBA opened with two truisms: “Live arts have existed long before history. At all times, and in all cultures around the world, people have performed for others.” Yet we have just lived through more than a year during which the second of these assertions was falsified almost everywhere on the planet. When performing for and near others was not only, as it oft en is, precarious or subversive, but outright life-threatening. Was it wise or necessary, at such a historic juncture, to embark on a new journal that focuses on how cultural communities around the world foster and debate live performances? We obviously believe so.

From Cabaret to International Festivals

I write not as an academic, but as a singer, writer of works for the stage, festival director, and arts advisor. The word curator first entered my understanding as the role of those working in art galleries and museums: those skilled individuals who “cared for” their collections. The word has now spread to many of the things that I do, including the way I have “put together” large international arts festivals.

Enabling Entanglements to Emerge

From October 5 to 10, 2020, Performance Curators Initiative (PCI),1 a network of artists, curators, performance-makers, cultural workers, educators, practitioners, and enthusiasts based in the Philippines, held their third conference online via Zoom and streamed it on YouTube. Entitled “Conversations on Curation and Performance in the Time of Halting and Transformation,” I participated in this conference that opened a digital space for curators and performers around the world to talk about the effects of the global pandemic on the live arts. Connections, conversations, creative research, collaborations—as PCI founder and conference organizer Roselle Pineda notes—are the main focus of the network, which seeks to look at the relationship between “[p]erformance and curation, the role of curation in performance and role of performativity in curatorial practice” (from the network’s website). Pineda had invited me to register for the conference, which was focused on the role of curator as one who activates enabling spaces.

There Will Be Trouble

It is perhaps more relevant now than ever before to prepare the ground for a pedagogical discussion on theater curation. Theater festivals have recently become prominent in India. It is true that India has cherished a ubiquitous tradition of festivals—utsavs and mahotsavs—for hundreds of years. Take, for example, the staging of Kudiyattam at ancient Sanskrit koothambalams, which would last several weeks in a festival atmosphere; the touring circuit of Assam mobile theater, which has created festival-like events since the 1950s; or the Marathi (political) theater, which has an active culture of more than a century of traveling and festival-like events. These are not the kind of festivals I am interested in for the purpose of this article—they have a “traditional” logic built into their purpose—but the kind that have emerged along secular lines in post-independent and urban India. These “new” theater festivals are primarily sponsored by the state, are supported by public funds at the regional and national level, and are therefore open to public participation and scrutiny. These festivals, wherever they are held, commonly include a multilingual and multicultural itinerary of plays. The intent behind the selection is largely driven by the post-colonial project, which is to “put together” an idea of modern India by including plays that have a critical outlook—these could be contemporary scripts, modern adaptations of classical plays, and works that explore contemporary vocabularies of performance (body-based, post-dramatic, experimental, etc.). Currently, India has over a dozen of these new theater festivals of varying scale; each running annually, each claiming to show the best of contemporary theater. In the absence of a touring circuit, these festivals provide artists with the opportunity to travel, to seek new audiences, to mingle with peers and masters, to be written about, and to woo award committees. Festivals are now doing for theater what exhibitions have done for visual art; they are highly visible events that offer immense resources and the promise of further influence. Festivals seem to bestow legitimacy on artistic work of a kind not seen before.

Common Purpose

The relationship between performance and curation has shift ed. A new attitude of fluid and pragmatic alliance has evolved as the sense of an essential antagonism between performance and curation recedes and the two fields discover a shared focus on aspects of social engagement and agency. This article considers an Australian socially engaged art project, the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA), which meshes curatorial and artistic practices in its efforts to reimagine and reanimate the future of a small country town. Employing a wide range of strategies, KSCA works closely with the local community to facilitate collective memory, reflection and social and environmental transformation. Deliberately avoiding traditional lines of artistic and institutional tension, KSCA employs an impure and inclusive approach that is emblematic of emerging forms of activist contemporary art.

Book Reviews

Brandon Farnsworth, Anna Jakobsson, and Vanessa Massera, eds. 2021. Taking the Temperature: Crisis, Curating, and Musical Diversity, 2nd edition. Zurich: OnCurating.org.Eckersall, Peter, and Bertie Ferdman. 2021. Curating Dramaturgies: How Dramaturgy and Curating are Intersecting in the Contemporary Arts. New York: Routledge, 201 pp., Ebook available.

What it Means.

To be the host of so much vibrancy. To be the shadow that watches over. To be the privileged to be immersed in so much thinking in the making, To wonder what you have not done yet. To doubt. To falter. To try again. To fail even better. To stay creative yourself. To be a leader. One has to. To write yet another grant. To hold your breath as you press submit. To work nights and weekends. Many. To not be allowed a bad day. To deal with everyone’s bad days.

A Precarious Balance Between Disaster and Miracle

We got inside making our way through debris. There were a lot of pieces of things that had been whole until recently. A lot of aluminum furniture stood side by side with large, dark, wooden armoires and frosted-glass dressers with zoomorphic paws. There were disconnected hoses, very big pots and pans, and a lot of chairs and plastic tables with folding legs. Everything was carelessly piled up at the entrance, concealing almost completely a dismal reception.