Editor’s Note: Dance in the Museum

Over the past five years, we have been witnessing an ever-growing presence of dance performances and choreographic works “exhibited” in major museums across the globe. A quick survey would have to include the exhibition MOVE: Choreographing You, at the Hayward Gallery, London (2010; Dusseldorf 2011; Seoul 2012); the exhibition Danser sa Vie, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011); the exhibition Dance/Draw (2011) at the ICA Boston; and the exhibition Dancing Around the Bride, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2013). All of these exhibitions, despite their curatorial singularities and divergent approaches, have explored the deep relations and concurrent developments (to use the expression of Yvonne Rainer¹) between dance and the visual arts since World War II (the big exception being Danser sa Vie, which covered the entire twentieth century). However, other approaches indicate that the current interest in dance and its relationships with the development of the visual arts and of performance art are not just a matter of rewriting history and finding parallel lines of development among the arts. Were we to follow that logic, we could see dance’s intrusion into visual culture as parallel to the earlier acceptance of photography, film, and video as arts within the narrow confines of the fine art canon.

Indeed, when the exhibitions LINE (2010) and Inventing Abstraction (2013), both at MoMA, included as objects of display both live and documented choreographies, what appears to be at stake, curatorially speaking, is to consider how dance’s presence in the museum reconfigures the very nature of the visual in the visual arts. Symptoms of this reconfiguration reached their apex in the last Whitney Biennial (2012) and the last Documenta 13 (2013). In the former, the top prize went for the first time in the biennial history to a choreographer, Sarah Michelson, with her piece commissioned for the biennial titled Devotion: The American Dancer. While in the latter, the presentation of two works where dance is central became indeed iconic of the whole, monumental exhibition: Tino Seghal’s This Variation, where, in a large, pitch-black space, the audience is invited to dance in the dark as long as they want to; and Jérôme Bel’s Disabled Theater, where the French choreographer (for whom Seghal danced before starting his own artistic work), having accepted the invitation of the Switzerland-based Theater Hora, choreographed a work for Documenta where actors with cognitive impairments dance their hearts out. Finally, it should be noted that Seghal won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennial 2013, with a piece that can only be described as an extended, long-durational choreography. In this, as in many other cases, dance attempts to rewrite performance as exhibition: what could it mean to exhibit movement rather than to dance it?

Some choreographies venture responses to this question. That these works took place under the auspices of visual arts curatorial projects and spaces indicates how dance at this juncture in history has become all but inescapable for the visual arts. What is dance doing for the museum if not intensifying its drive to accumulate time and extend the boundaries of the visible to ever-widening domains? Is the museum out to accumulate time-based art? Or is it exploiting the uses of time proper to dance in the interest of a different sort of accumulation? What is the museum doing to dance if not simply providing it with venues and audiences hitherto unfamiliar with this art? Where do dance and the museum fruitfully communicate?²

If dance is a force that indeed allows the visual arts to re-imagine the image—as Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica wrote in 1965, just as he was moving away from painting and sculpture and into a deeply participatory mode of working—one question that must be asked is: what does dance have to gain, or what positive changes may come to dance, once it starts to move in museums? Or, as correlated questions, what are the (art) historical, social, economic, discursive, and even political forces at play that predispose dance to appear...