Curating Contemporary Performance: New York in the Twenty-First Century

On April 17, 2011, a group of curators, artist-curators, and artists, working specifically in performance, got together with Patricia Milder to discuss the landscape of and infrastructure around performance in New York at the current moment. They talked about issues ranging from the economics of cross-disciplinary practice and an artist’s relationship to place, legacy, and formal education, to the evolving role of the curator in performance festivals and exhibitions.

Morgan von Prelle Pecelli has been working on parallel tracks in New York City for the last ten years. One is a PhD at Columbia University in anthropology; her dissertation focuses on many of the artists who worked with Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group when they were young, and then broke away and began their own careers. During her studies, von Prelle Pecelli worked with Richard Foreman as his managing and programming director, and then started the Incubator at the Ontological, which showed and developed hybrid cross-disciplinary work. She was at Performance Space 122 for two years as the director of development. She curated two Prelude festivals and dramaturged one at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center.

Trajal Harrell is a dancer and choreographer whose work, for the last ten years, has been research into the aesthetic relationship between the Vogue dance tradition and the early postmodern dance tradition. He was an artist-curator for Danspace Project’s PLATFORMS in the Fall of 2010; his PLATFORM was called certain difficulties, certain joy. He has also been very involved at Movement Research over the years, including selecting and curating performances at the Judson Church series. He is the head of a program that selects two to three artists of color each season, who have never performed at Judson, to be part of the program. He was also a guest artist editor of the Movement Research Performance Journal.

Travis Chamberlin is a curator and director in New York. Currently, he works as the public programs coordinator at the New Museum where he has been for the past four years. He coordinates process-based residencies at the museum in addition to overseeing all of the events that happen within the theatre context, including lectures, panel discussions, and screenings. He was the artistic director at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn from 2004–2007. Before that, he curated a series at Performance Space 122 called Schoolhouse Rocks, a staged concert series for which he worked with local bands to create performance events with their network of artists.

Ben Pryor is an independent artist manager, curator, and producer who has been working professionally in the arts since 2005. He started at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in the development office, and at that time also began working with Chez Bushwick. Later, he worked at an artist services organization called Pentacle in the booking department, where he was involved in the national touring marketplace. For a short period of time he was director of operations at the Center for Performance Research (CPR). He became an independent artist manager, and then in conjunction with this work, created a festival in 2010 called American Realness, which shows new work that is happening in the U.S., and is focused primarily on New York artists.

Jonah Bokaer is a choreographer, animator, and media artist based in New York. In 2012, he will be ending a decade of choreographing, wherein he mainly looked at how moving bodies and moving images relate aesthetically and kinetically. In 2002, Bokaer co-founded Chez Bushwick, and incorporated it into a non-profit organization in 2006. In 2008, he co-founded CPR with the choreographer John Jasperse. Stabilizing those institutions involved a two-million dollar fundraising effort. He is committed to making sure that artists continue to have a place to work in New York City.

MILDER:

It has become common to write, curate, and think about cross-disciplinary practices —bringing art, dance, and theatre together under one spectrum of history. On the other hand, there are other...