{"id":120,"date":"2024-05-31T19:33:27","date_gmt":"2024-05-31T19:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/29\/?p=120"},"modified":"2026-05-26T19:19:48","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T19:19:48","slug":"land-ing-dance-of-hosting-and-being-hosted-guest-curating-in-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/29\/land-ing-dance-of-hosting-and-being-hosted-guest-curating-in-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"Land\/ing Dance\u2014Of Hosting and Being Hosted: Guest Curating in Dance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Angela Conquet<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With gratitude<\/em>
to Michelle and Starr for being invited in the circle,<\/em>
to Mirna, for the invitation.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Following Derrida\u2019s take on the etymology of hospitality with meanings of \u201cstranger,\u201d \u201cguest\u201d and \u201cpower,\u201d this essay interrogates what it might mean to be both a good guest and a guest curator in the field of dance, a colonial and colonised field itself. By inviting in Indigenous dramaturgies of inter-relationality, horizontality and accountability, the paper seeks to map out modes of being IN relation with (a) dance of and in a place. The paper proposes a model of \u201cslow curating\u201d dance and extends this model to other intentions of slow-ness in institution-ing, spect-acting and response-ability by paying attention to place as land when presenting dance\/ making dance present.

Keywords<\/strong>: dance curation, place, guest, power, Indigenous dramaturgies, slow curating<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Invitation<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In November 2020, I was invited to be the Guest Curator of the 2021 edition of a dance festival in Canada. I agreed immediately, and somewhat eagerly, for two reasons. I was then in Australia, in the middle of the third (of a total of seven) Melbourne lockdowns, and the possibility of a dance gathering in those surreal times felt like breathing again. Secondly, I was thrilled to be invited to be a \u201ccurator.\u201d It sounded \u201ccool,\u201d most likely because I was thinking of the glamour customarily associated with this job in the visual arts, so glamorous that, sometimes, curators are known simply by their initials, such as Hans Ulrich Obrist a.k.a HUO. This level of recognition, of course, rarely happens in the field of dance. Soon, the initial exhilaration provoked by this two-worded invitation, \u201cguest curator,\u201d faded to make room for a wave of sheer perplexity and deep discomfort. Despite having presented and produced dance for over two decades, I had never been a curator per se. <\/em>I have been an artistic director or a dance programmer but never a dance curator. I then started to ask myself: would being a dance \u201ccurator\u201d be the same as a dance \u201cpresenter\u201d? If yes, why had I never thought of myself or of my work in curatorial terms? If not, what legitimacy did I have in accepting the invitation? Was being a curator something more than being \u201csimply\u201d a dance presenter? And if so, what would this imply? Or demand? And importantly, how might I do a good job if I do not know exactly what it means?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, it felt strange to accept this invitation giving me curatorial carte blanche <\/em>without knowing whether my work would be of a curatorial nature. Faced with the inability to name with precision what I had been doing for the last two decades, I felt like a stranger in my own professional field. These somewhat existential interrogations led me to look a little closer at what dance curating might mean. Perplexingly, more than a decade after the first attempts to analyse and theorise curatorial processes in the performing arts, spearheaded by the Croatian theatre magazine Frakcija<\/em> and its special issue on Curating Performing Arts <\/em>in 2011, arguably the very first publication entirely dedicated to the curation of performing arts, the literature dedicated to \u201ccurating\u201d dance is still sparse and often bundled indiscriminately with theatre or performing arts (Malzacher et al.).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In stark contrast with visual arts and performance, presenting\/curating dance has not constituted a body of discourses, practices or theories and the professionals involved in these processes remain \u201cstrangely undebated\u201d (Malzacher et al. 11). This lack of clarity may be due to a still limited number of dance professionals self-identifying as \u201ccurators\u201d (slightly more regularly in North America or those employed by museums). \u201cPresenter\u201d or \u201cprogrammer\u201d continue to be the terms generically and interchangeably used for those professionals in charge of commissioning, producing, presenting or touring dance, and whose jobs have a plethora of titles such as artistic director, head of programming, creative producer, amongst others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The term curator <\/em>has been occasionally used in dance in the context of discourse-based festivals, such as In-Transit curated by Andr\u00e9 Lepecki in 2009\/10 in Berlin, or in reference to free-lance professionals. Dance researcher Elisa Ricci points out that the use of the term curator in all these instances affirmed a non-institutional or non-institutionalised process-oriented approach and a desire to work with new critical or dialogical formats and multi-disciplinary invitations for the audience, because also capable of leading to social changes, a process which she calls an \u201cactivating move\u201d (40). Here, curatorial practices are \u201cmodes of doing, ways of dealing with possibilities, a compound of ritual and improvisation, a manipulation of spaces, the development of networks and the art of combining\u201d (Ricci 41). I wondered, then, what possibilities this invitation in Canada would afford, as I too was freshly outside the institution, keen to imagine what those un-usual times of pandemic slowing down might allow to emerge? Although I questioned whether I was a curator, I knew with certainty that I was a dance presenter. I asked myself: if my job is to present dance, that is to make dance present<\/em>, what exactly would this \u201cpresence-ing\u201d mean?<\/p>\n\n\n

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Vanessa Goodman and Simona Deaconescu, BLOT – Body Line of Thought. Photo: Ionut-Rusus<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The second part of the invitation, that of being a guest, was more reassuring as I have often been a guest, as a friend, a visitor, a migrant. Yet, in this case, I was a guest invited to organise a festival, therefore to be also a host, hosting both the artists\u2019 offerings and the audiences\u2019 experiences. I realised the full extent of the strangeness contained by this invitation, as I was invited to be a guest and a host in a place where I was an outsider, a foreigner, a stranger,<\/em> to do a job that I felt strangely<\/em> about. The invitation implied a double layer of hosting, and I remembered the generous ambiguity of the Latin origins of host<\/em>, hospes<\/em>, –\u012dtis, <\/em>which can simultaneously mean \u201cbeing a host\u201d and \u201cbeing hosted,\u201d a meaning that has stayed identical in Italian for instance –ospite <\/em>means both host and hosted.<\/em> I wondered whether \u201cguest curating\u201d dance might reside in this dual hospitality posture?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another semantic interpretation further complicated my conundrum, that of Derrida\u2019s take on the etymology of \u201chospitality,\u201d and his interest less in its Latin roots and more in its farther origins, deriving from two proto-Indo-European words which have the meanings of \u201cstranger,\u201d \u201cguest\u201d and \u201cpower\u201d (O\u2019Gorman). I decided to locate here, in this triangle, my questioning of what guest curating may mean, as a way to also address the question of my being a foreigner to a place and a stranger to the field of practice in question; I followed Derrida\u2019s invitation of starting with the question of the foreigner, the stranger, as a way of placing myself in (the) question by \u201cbeing-in-question\u201d while interrogating the \u201cquestion-being\u201d of what being a good curator and being a good guest may mean (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stranger<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The notion of stranger has coloured my personal and professional career. It is in Australia, where I relocated from France over a decade ago, that I started to think deeply about space as place <\/em>and place as land<\/em>, as well as my own place in this new space<\/em>. I arrived as an \u00e9tranger,<\/em> an uninvited foreigner on stolen lands and as a stranger to these lands. As in any act of migration, there is movement and arrival, and I had to re-orient myself to land and literally ground myself. Sara Ahmed reminds us how the \u201cstarting point for orientation is the point from which the world unfolds: the \u2018here\u2019 of the body and the \u2018where\u2019 of its dwelling. Orientations, then, are about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places\u201d (18). When living in Australia and when working with dancing bodies, it seemed impossible not to start with the \u201chere\u201d and \u201cwhere\u201d of these bodies who have been dancing on these lands for over 40,000 years. As I was arriving and was re-orienting myself, I reflected a lot about my role of making present both the dances of this place, as well as the place in<\/em> and of<\/em> these dances. I wanted to learn to host them by “giving place to the place” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 14), a way of understanding hospitality culture and culture as place, one that is simultaneously given and received. I hoped I would be less of a foreigner if I could learn to be in this place by understanding the dance(s) OF this place. I then questioned whether this meant to be OF place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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