Dear artists,
We have been invited by Independent Dance to curate the Autumn (2017) programme and are excited about this as an opportunity to provide a framework for the work that ID already does as well as an opportunity to foreground certain ideas that are currently important to us. The overlap between movement practice and creative process is at the heart of ID’s programme. For the Autumn season, we want to explore and situate this overlap through the framework of curation as artistic practice. We are curious about how the facilitation of movement practice is a creative, curatorial process and how curatorial processes might be intrinsic to a broad scope of dance practices (such as improvising, performing, composing, collaborating, facilitating, relating and organising).
With this in mind, we invite you to treat your class as a research space where you might explore the overlap of movement practice and creative process in ways that relate to an expanded notion of curation. We see this as being present in what you and ID do already, and hope that this focus might offer some space to experiment with alternative modes of facilitation and creative process. Particular themes that we are drawn to within expanded curation include, curation as:
care
giving space
generative
emergent
collaborative
framing
shaping
holding and letting go
harvesting/selecting
returning
scoring
accumulating
arranging
subverting
If you are interested in these themes or in the approach in general we would be very interested to include your work in the Autumn season. Of course you could work independently and interpretively with these themes or we are happy to engage in dialogue. Alongside this we invite you to offer a brief written and / or visual description / artefact of what you intend to facilitate (only if you want to). More about this later, but we plan to arrange these artefacts on a webspace and, eventually, into an alternative-format article for publication (which would be subject to peer review).
We hope that you receive this letter in the spirit that it has been intended — as an offer — and look forward to encountering your work.
Amy Voris & Sara Spies