João Fiadeiro, Este corpo que me ocupa, 2008, photo by Patrícia Almeida
Points of Convergence. Performance and Contemporaneityconstitutes part two of the research programme carried out by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN) devoted to performance arts, prepared in cooperation with André Lepecki – Performance Studies professor at the New York University.Lepecki’s first lecture in the Points of Convergence series – to be held at the MSN (ul. Pańska 3) on Wednesday, 22 January, at 6 pm – will dwell on a fundamental concept in performance theory, namely corporeality. Going through some key moments in the history of performance, body art and experimental dance over the course of the last sixty years, André Lepecki is going to show how performance annihilates and then redefines generally accepted categories of the body, subject, group, and even the human. On 23 January (4 pm) André Lepecki is going to run a seminar, yet registration has been closed.
The programme Points of Convergence. Performance and Contemporaneity at the MSN is developed in association with the Institute of Music and dance in Warsaw.
André Lepeckiis a dance critic and curator focusing mainly on performance studies, choreography and dramaturgy. He is a Performance Studies professor at the New York University. He has published in a variety of periodicals, and authored or edited a range of significant publications in the field of performance studies. Lepecki curates exhibitions and festivals of performance arts, including a reconstruction of Allan Kaparow’s happening 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, which was awarded at the 2009 Performa festival. In 2010 he co-curated, together with Stephanie Rosenthal, the Archive of Dance and Visual Arts from 1960 until present days, which formed part of the exhibition Move: Choreographing Youheld at Hayward Gallery in London.Lepecki has authored an anthology titled Dance (2013) andExhausting Dance(2006), as well as editing Planes of Composition(together with Jenn Joy, 2009),The Senses in Performance(together with Sally Banes, 2007) andOf the Presence of the Body(2004). He is also member of editorial teams of a few academic periodicals on performance art, including “Performance Research” (UK), “Dance Research Journal” (USA), “Choreographic Practices” (UK), and “Revista Dança” (Brazil). He publishes on dance and performance in “The Drama Review” (USA), “Artforum” (USA), “October” (USA), and “Nouvelles de Danse” (France), among other periodicals.
About the programme:
The programme aims at examining contemporary discourses that analyse broadly defined performance arts – today, such research constitutes asignificant stimulus to the worldwide development of the phenomenon. Performance which, through its emancipative nature, is becoming the key form of contemporary art and arouses growing interest in the world, remains arelatively unknown and unpractised form in Poland. What is becoming more and more discernible is the lack of theoretical reflection or adictionary that would allow to come nearer to the contemporary performance forms which, by means of experiment, enter the areas of dialogue with the theory of art, the new media, politics and the social sphere. And it is performance itself that seems to reflect best the dynamic character of contemporary art and of contemporaneity – in the broad sense of the word. Always happening “here and now”, with its openness to the unknown, spontaneity, continuous emancipation and facing “the current”, it is amedium that causes that questions are being asked about the subject of the art, its material and language, the economy of the artist and the spectator and – first of all – about its political effectiveness. Thus, it extorts the question of contemporaneity and being contemporary – as dynamic as performance itself.
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