Choreographing Exhibitions: Curating Performativity in Taiwan

2020 年 6 月 30 日

ISSUE 3 Curating Performativity

I interviewed Stuart Comer and Ana Janevski, curators of the Department of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), as I was working on the special issue Dancing in the Museum for the Artist Magazine in 2016. Comer and Janevski introduce a history of performing arts and mentioned many performances started to take place in the MoMA’s courtyards or gardens back in the 1960s. In today’s art museums around the world, both curators and choreographers are eager to challenge the border between the white cube and the black box. Performance apparently becomes a trend in the realm of contemporary exhibitions. Comer further pointed out that MoMA is particularly interested in the works which either encourage a conversation between performing arts and visual arts or comment on cultural issues via performative approaches.¹ For the past decades, there has been a noticeable change in how people define museums and exhibition spaces, while the roles of museum and the nature of exhibition become drastically pluralistic. Contemporary curators seek to develop a new exhibition strategy through the innovation of space and techniques. I continue to grapple with the encounter of performance and curating, which has become a major interest for many curators today.

¹ I-Wen Chang (張懿文), “Dance Performance in Art Museums: the Case Studies of Whitney Museum and MoMA New York, USA (舞蹈表演在美術館: 以美國惠特尼美術館和紐約現代藝術美術館為例,”Artist Magazine (藝術家雜誌), 2016/06.

As we look back at the history of curatorgraphy, the term “curate” has a Latin root “curare,” which means “to take care.” The curatorial practice thus enables the communication between arts and audience. Art theorist Judith Rugg defines curation as “form of critical intervention into ways of comprehending contemporary culture”² while curators function as editors of every concept who constantly promote artistic and cultural practices, introducing these concepts to audience through exhibition, publication, website, and conference.³ Therefore, the curatorial practice is like a conference which engages to produce artistic discourses to demonstrate an understanding of “the local” and “the global.” The independent curator Harald Szeemann, a pioneer who has greatly contributed to the paradigm shift in contemporary idea of curation, is not just a painter but an actor and set designer. In his famous exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969), the curatorial model shifts its focus onto the interconnection of certain core concepts, creating something new and critical. Szeemann’s background in theatre seems to suggest the interdisciplinary nature, with performing arts specifically, of an independent curator. Indeed, a theatre is to an ephemeral performance is what a museum is to a temporal art installation. The exhibition as an event gathers a wide range of selected artworks at one place, arranges the display for a specific institution, and showcases the exhibits within a limited period of time. The event itself is temporal. In this sense, we can compare exhibitions to theatre performances as well as art curators to institution-based dramaturgs, operating interdisciplinary negotiation in a rapidly-changing framework that transforms the audience demographics to form a different artistic practice.⁴ The role of the curator is thus similar to the dramaturg or producer, predestined to promote high-quality cross-border communication.⁵ In the essay, I will provide a possible observation and discussion on the curatorial shift toward performance, and offer a performative curatorial perspective from dance theories before reaching several case studies of exhibitions in Taiwan, as a point of departure which may further supports the studies of performative curating as curatorgraphy.

A shift toward Curating Performativity

The “Think Bar” project at the 2018 Taipei Arts Festival featured two lectures at Taipei National University of the Arts, “Empty Stages, Crowded Flats. Performativity as Curatorial Strategy” and “Public Space in Private Rooms. Curating in the Public Sphere,” given by Florian Malzacher, the German curator known for his issue-based performative exhibitions, and Joanna Warsza, the Polish curator with a multidisciplinary specialization in visual arts, performing arts, and architecture, while I was the host as well as the commentator. In the lecture, Florian Malzacher explains his exploration of how performativity may innovate the concept of curation, as discussed in his book Empty Stages, Crowded Flats. Performativity as Curatorial Strategy.⁶ He further emphasizes that the colloquial use of performativity can refer to the theatre-like effect, while the two strands are actually the different approaches of the same aspect. From a series of case studies including exhibition planning, street carnivals, and subversive public arts, the speaker raises questions about how theatre-like approaches and techniques uses arts to genuinely “create reality” as well as how curatorial practices are employed as the object to be performed, written, designed, and created. On the other hand, Joanna Warsza begins her sharing with a distinction between “site-specific” and “context-specific.” She argues that the former focuses on the physical/material quality of a space, while the latter includes the dimension of time that involves the complicated historical and social scenario, which can be noticed especially in the East Europe and Soviet where publicity and privateness are inseparable in their historical memory under a highly oppressive governmental rule. These discussions thus establish an interconnected link between the privateness of the performance and how an art-museum deals with its publicness.

² Judith Rugg, “Introduction”, Rugg Judith and Michele Sedgwick ed. (2007), Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, Bristol: Intellect Books. p7.

³ Melanie O’Brian, “Art Speaking: Towards and Understanding of the Language of Curating,” Unspoken Assumptions: Visual Art Curators in Context: ‘Thinking through Curating’. http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2003/mar/09/features.magazine47

⁴ Katalin Trencsényi, trans. Yi-Chun Chen (陳佾均). 2016.

DRAMATURGY IN THE MAKING: A User’s Guide for Theatre Practitioners (戲劇顧問：連結理論與創作的實作手冊), Taipei: National Theatre and Concert Hall at National Performing Arts Center, 76.

⁵ Peter Karpati, interview with Katalin Trencsenyi (Budapest, 4 January, 2008）.

⁶ Malzacher, Florian. 2017. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy. London: Live Art Development Agency.

Chris Evans, Weather vane on the roof of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum(Home Entertainment), Taipei, 2010. Photo courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

The performing arts in theatre is closely attached to the concept of time, whereas the performance in the exhibition space pays more attention to the notion of engagement. When we talk about the curatorial shift toward performance, it is participatory arts that play the pioneering role. For example, as the frequent presence of dance in an art museum has become a contemporary trend, it is less and less the case for dance to be presented as “ready-made,” but the “on-site” and “ongoing” participatory or interactive event instead. Art historian Claire Bishop also mentions that “the artist relies upon the participants’ creative exploitation of the situation that he/she offers, just as participants require the artist’s cue and direction. This relationship is a continual play of mutual tension, recognition, and dependency more akin to the collectively negotiated dynamic of stand-up comedy, than to a ladder of progressively more virtuous political forms” in her discussion on participatory arts.⁷ It explains the dual concepts of participatory arts: first, it is an event in reality; second, it also has an uncertain quality isolated from reality which needs to be constantly practiced and examined in different spatio-temporal context. This kind of arts expresses the suppressed contradiction in the daily life and evokes an insecure but yet pleasant experience, allowing the audience to physically imagine the relationship between their surroundings and themselves.⁸Additionally, artist Marcel Duchamp brings up the concept of “participatory creation” in his paper/talk “The Creative Act,” where he emphasizes the importance of audiences’ participation in and response to the creative process.⁹ On the other hand, the contemporary practice of participatory arts via performative approaches is similar to the use of “reference” within the context of postmodern dance. Borrowing the technique commonly seen in the American postmodern dance pieces featuring an intertextuality with the masterpieces from the dance history, it shows a higher demand in terms of the spectators’ knowledge – if the spectators do not have sufficient knowledge of art history or dance history, they will find it difficult to decipher the humor or irony from the borrowed references of appropriated masterpieces.

⁷ Bishop, Claire, trans. Hong-tao, Lin (林宏濤). 2015. ARTIFICIAL HELLS: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (人造地獄：參與式藝術與觀看者政治學), Tapei: Tien tsang yi hsu chia ting (典藏藝術家庭).

⁸ I-Wen Chang (張懿文), “Body Disposition, Spatial Choreography: the Live Performance in Contemporary Art Space (身體配置.空間編舞:當代藝術空間中的現場藝術表演,)”, Artist Magazine (藝術家雜誌), 2017/10.

⁹ Duchamp, Marcel. 1957. The Creative Act. http://www.ubu.com/papers/duchamp_creative.html

As for the curators who are trained in visual arts, how should they reflect on the phenomenon of the performance’s intervention in museums? Performance scholar Shannon Jackson offers some of her observation in “The Way We Perform Now:” the training approaches in different artistic disciplines influence the perspective from which people appreciate interdisciplinary arts, but it is also for the same reason that people, with such an awareness of their own limitation, may open up their mind to equip themselves with the background knowledge of another discipline. The way how you deconstruct one aspect of an artwork may become a process of reconstruction within another framework. What an art critic concieves as original can be a cliché for a dance critic; while what a dance critic considers as presumed plagiarism can be an artistic appropriation for an art critic. Between the perspectives of these two different artistic disciplines, the greatest distinction is the technical and physical skill versus the conceptual and cognitive skill relativism. To carefully manage the boundary between skill and concept, artists have to resist and defy their own training through the process of de-skilling to hopefully make it possible to materialize a pure conceptual creation. However, are concept and skill always conflicting by nature? Indeed, one can hardly ignore the hierarchy in the collaboration between visual arts and performing arts. A major visual artist often occupies a more significant position than a performance artist does.¹⁰

Therefore, as Performativity becomes a curatorial strategy, it may lead to the following questions: how the curatorial perspective of performing arts could engage with the field of art museum? How performance or dance can respond to the fine-art based institution? In what way a piece performed in an art museum can bring new stimulation to the “time-oriented” installation or to the spectators who are not familiar with performing arts? Does the art museum become more interested in an art form centering its creation on the concept of time? Apart from providing venues, spaces, and a different group or spectators, how can an art museum propose an alternative imagination for dance or performance creation? How should the collaboration between performance and art museums open up a greater diversity in its mutual communication? What kind of possibilities in politics, society, economics, or discourse we have that makes performance a new hit in the art museum? How does a choreographer or dancer work, as a performance laborer, within the preexisting framework of an art museum?¹¹ As for curators, they also need to ask the same questions like a dramaturg or theatre producer does: who are the spectators? Where does the spectatorial experience begin, how does it proceed, and where does it end? What is the communication channel between an art museum and the spectators? What is the communicational level among these channels? When a performance enters the exhibition space, what is the degree of its architectural openness, transparency, and accessibility? In what way and at what place should the works be presented? For how long should the interactive relationship continue?¹²

Dance theory as the research-based groundwork for Curating Performativity

Before answering these questions mentioned above, perhaps we should first try to point out several theoretical understandings. In this article I suggest two aspects to explore the issue of curating performativity in the art museum: 1.) within the context of dance history and dance theory to talk about how the curatorial shift in today’s world influences and creates the diversity of contemporary choreography. 2.) within the context of visual arts to talk about how the intervention of performance and body enriches the dialogue among exhibition, archival documentation, and collection.

¹⁰ I-Wen Chang (張懿文), “The Border between Dance and Visual Arts – The Dance Performance within the Context of Art Museum (舞蹈與視覺藝術的分際—美術館脈絡下的舞蹈表演藝術),” Artist Magazine (藝術家雜誌,), quoted from Jackson, Shannon. 2014. “The Way We Perform Now,” Dance Research Journal, Vol 46, Number 3, December 2014. pp. 53-61.

¹¹ I-Wen Chang (張懿文), “The Border between Dance and Visual Arts – The Dance Performance within the Context of Art Museum (舞蹈與視覺藝術的分際—美術館脈絡下的舞蹈表演藝術),” Artist Magazine (藝術家雜誌,), 2016/06.

¹² Katalin Trencsényi, trans. Yi-Chun Chen (陳佾均), DRAMATURGY IN THE MAKING: A User’s Guide for Theatre Practitioners (戲劇顧問：連結理論與創作的實作手冊), 2016, Taipei: National Theatre and Concert Hall at National Performing Arts Center, 77.

Poststructuralist scholar Judith Butler brings up the notion of performativity. Following linguist John Langshow Austin’s “Speech Act Theory,” Butler brings up the notion of performativity as a repeated practices of “doing” of daily behaviors. With performativity, she investigates how meanings are created via human actions, while she also reexamines the relationship among subjectivity, bodily practice, gender and social identity. Butler argues that performativity is the process of a construction of meaning through the repeated practices of doing.¹³ However, the argument sees the body as an object to which the cultural values are applied, and the body thus becomes a vulnerable subject without its agency. To counter Butler’s idea, dance scholar Susan L. Foster proposes her notion of choreography. According to Foster, the term “choreograph” is a verb, which allows us to analyze the agency of a bodily experience in both cultural and individual aspects. Under the rule of technology and repeated movements, choreography can be regarded as the subjective extension of the human body. Choreography can illustrate as a set of culturally situated codes regarding gestures and movements through which identities and social memberships are configured.¹⁴ Performance scholar Ramsay Burt also brings up the idea of “embodied sensitivity” to describe how the postmodern choreographers at Judson Dance Theater employ the daily-life and task-oriented movements to create experimental pieces. The above-mentioned transformation of a deepening concept of “choreography” and its increasing emphasis on the “daily life” seem to suggest an interdisciplinary integration among different art forms. Choreography has been about creativity, choices of combination, arrangement, and negotiation, and now it takes on a new role as a reinterpretation of everyday doings. In this regard, performance pieces are not just a repetition of the past, but also a response to once-existing approaches in the lasting history of performance, and can still be practiced under contemporary aesthetic considerations.¹⁵

¹³ Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

¹⁴ Foster, Susan Leigh. 1998. “Choreographies of Gender.” Signs 24(1): 1-33.

¹⁵ I-Wen Chang (張懿文), “Body Disposition, Spatial Choreography: the Live Performance in Contemporary Art Space (身體配置.空間編舞:當代藝術空間中的現場藝術表演)”, Artist Magazine (藝術家雜誌), 2017/10.

River Lin’s performance, 20 Minutes for the 20th Century, But Asian, Taipei Biennial 2016 “Gestures and Archives of The Present, Genealogies of The Future: A New Lexicon for the Biennial,” Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Photographer: You-wei Chen; photo courtesy of River Lin.

In 2019, I was invited to give a keynote speech, Dance Is Disappearing? Choreographing Diversity in Contemporary Taiwan, for the opening program at Camping Asia, co-organized by Taipei Performing Arts Center and Centre National de la Danse (CND) in France. The talk actually came from my experience in an academic event, where I saw an American choreographer comment that “dance is disappearing in the museum,” with his face betraying his unreconciled sorrow and dramatic discomfort. This choreographer’s strong statement regarding “Disappearing Dance” makes me ponder: what does he mean by “dance”? if “Dance with a capital D” is the dance empowered as a universal aesthetic expression, a cultural hegemony that arbitrarily defines dance with its own definition (in the EuroAmerican context, this Dance with Capital D can be any theatrical dance training following the standards of ballet or modern dance, while in the non-EuroAmerican context, it refers to the same training systems dominated by the Western values), it is not surprising that various interdisciplinary attempts of contemporary dance or the choreographic reformation of the world dance from different cultures, which feature a sense of multiplicity, would be considered “the disappearance of dance” by the advocates of “Dance with a capital D.

In this speech, I explore the two aspects of contemporary dance: 1.) “Cultural diversity” from the perspective of cultural studies in terms of the contemporary choreographies of world dance (which is, for example, how to understand Botoh or Bharatha-natyam within the context of contemporary dance; 2.) “Choreographic diversity,” relates to the question of what can be considered as contemporary choreography. In dance, choreography, as an art of designing and organizing physical movements into sense-making sequences, is also known as dance composition. In recent discourse of contemporary dance, movements can be integrated with different elements such as theatrical settings and surrounding spaces to form new choreographic patterns (for example, how digital technology blurs the boundaries between body and space). Contemporary choreography can turn almost anything into dance by mobilizing all possible constituent movements, processes, and objects. Based on such an examination, it also touches on how to read and identify the cultural matrix from which certain movements and settings derive their meanings. Therefore, I suggest that contemporary dance highlights choreography, to the extent that the “choreographic technique” plays a more important role than the “dance technique.” That is, a paradigm shift seems to have happened so that the configuration of “movement organization” becomes more essential in dance than “the bodily movement itself.” As a result, the contemporary practice of choreographic diversity in fact expands the possibilities of dance – perhaps dance never disappears but appears with different faces through its interdisciplinary transformation?

¹⁶ Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press.

On the other hand, if we bring the discussion into the context of visual art and art museum collection, dance, especially with its bodily liveness, is a perfect “living archive” for an exhibition. In the book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Diana Taylor, a performance scholar at New York University, sees the repertoire as a means to communicate and preserve knowledge. She argues that the different forms of performance – including gestures, orality, movement, dance, and music –preserves the knowledge left beyond the text-based documentation in the inherited bodily experience. In this sense, performance is the “live history,” the “living archive,” which inherits the past, reflects the present, and visions the future.¹⁶ From this perspective, it is more than appropriate to study performance within the context of the history of art-museum.

The case studies of Curating Performativity in Taiwan

In Taiwan, the collaborative and communicative approaches between visual arts and performance arts have already become a much favored trend. The process surely leads to the extension of curatorial practices, or we could say the extended concept of curating, like how the above-mentioned choreography expands beyond the existing framework to proceed its concept-centered discussion and various experimental attempts. In the first half of 2016, Taiwanese artist and curator River Lin organized The Oral Movement Musée de la Danse in Taipei I at Taipei Fine Arts Museum featuring Boris Charmatz, a favorite choreographer in France known for his celebrated Musée de la Danse. The exhibition can be seen as the point of departure in Taiwan for a curatorial shift toward performance, soon followed by The 2016 Taipei Biennial: Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future later in the same year featuring the curator Corinne Diserens who traces the art history based on the notion of the archaeology of knowledge as she also includes a series of performance works of in her curation, such as Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy, 20 Minutes for the 20th Century, but Asian by River Lin,¹⁷ Hermeneutics of Hamlet Machine by Wang Mo-Lin & Au Sow-Yee, Continuous Project Altered Again (2016) after Continuous Project Altered Daily (1969-70) by Yvonne RAINER and Christophe WAVELET, and A conversation about Of Grimaces and Bombs Valeska G., a Travelogue, or: Who’s Afraid of the Grotesque? by Latifa LAÂBISSI, I-Fang LIN, and Christophe Wavelet. These works interpret how the living body could challenge the spectatorial perspective within the context of an art museum to operate the practices of “performing the archives” or “performing the retrospective,” as how the curator puts it, which may open up an alternative possibility for the Taipei Biennial.

¹⁷ The following paragraphs on Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy and 20 Minutes for the 20th Century, but Asian by River Lin is an adaptation from my two articles: “As Experience Replaces Representation: the Bodily Performance that Challenges the Dominance of Visual Arts in the Art Museum (經驗取代再現:挑戰美術館視覺中心主義的身體表演)”, originally published in Artist Magazine (藝術家雜誌), 2017/02; and “How to Make a Taiwanese Body Asian? The Twenty-Century History of Dance in Asia (《台灣人的身體，如何「亞洲」？《二十世紀舞蹈史，在亞洲》”, originally published on the website of Performing Arts Reviews Platform, 2016/11/14 (https://pareviews.ncafroc.org.tw/?p=22025).

River Lin’s performance, 20 Minutes for the 20th Century, But Asian, Taipei Biennial 2016 “Gestures and Archives of The Present, Genealogies of The Future: A New Lexicon for the Biennial,” Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Photographer: You-wei Chen; photo courtesy of River Lin.

Retrospective by French choreographer Xavier Le Roy is a perfect response to the theme of the biennial – “performing the archives.” Retrospective has its materials from Xavier Le Roy’s previous works Product of Circumstance (1999) and Product of Other Circumstance (2009). Product of Circumstance is an autographical description of the artist’s careers, including the background of biological studies, the preparation for thesis exam, and a shift toward contemporary dance, mainly focusing on an exploration of the power of knowledge production and the author’s authoritative subjectivity in both medical studies and contemporary dance. Product of Other Circumstance, on the other hand, describes the fantasy of becoming a botoh dancer by laboring and performing. As for Retrospective for the biennial, the above-mentioned pieces are re-embodied by Taiwanese performers. According to the program note, the work features three timelines: the duration of each spectator’s visit, the performers’ working hours per day, and the time it takes to develop each part of the new choreography during the exhibition. In other words, Retrospective does not have a specific beginning or ending moment. As long as there is one spectator entering the constructed scenario of the work, a series of dance steps will be activated, with the movement composition originating from the performers’ personal experiences. The multiple voices in the exhibition space are juxtaposed in the same spatial-and-temporal co-existence. At the performance, a group of dancers move their bodies around the first-floor gallery at Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Only when they make the loud “hoo-ooh” sound would they gather at the center with one performer, as the main character, telling one’s own story.

Through the intimate interaction between the performers and spectators, the call-and-response process has turned the exhibition into a medium. The conversation transforms the performance into a social scenario, where both the spectators and performers should be responsible for the work, thus questioning the conventional art theory as a result. In the performance, there is no longer an “inside-versus-outside” border between the body and the space, but a mutually penetrating, co-independent, and interrelated relationship. The space is never objectified. The concepts of black box as theatre and white cute as an art museum have been overturned throughout the interaction between the performers and spectators, revealing a sense of profundity which can only be made possible with engagement. If we bring the art history into the discussion, such a concept challenges what the third dimension reflects in perspective. In this case, the third dimension is “human intervention.” Like how Cubism and Fauvism reject the one-point perspective, the bodily performance in a situation similar to the environmental theatre that brings contemporary arts into a more adventurously pioneering journey.

From my experience as a spectator in this performance, the performer Damien Cheng either walked backward or leaned against the wall, comparing his height with the length of the outstretched arms, as borrowed from Xavier Le Roy’s previous work in 1999. As it approached the end, Cheng took off the shirt to reveal his naked upper body, bending forward to lie down before he even pulled down the pants. The spectators could only see his naked back and a little bit of the contour of his buttocks. The unusual movements neither turn the performers into exhibited objects nor inform the spectators about any specific meaning. Instead, it is necessary that spectators should have a clear knowledge of their “spectatorial position” and an awareness of their “visual focus,” with which they may look into and reflect upon the whole process of how meanings are constructed. The choreographic strategy, where it begins and where it ends, has a clear definition while it also requires the spectators’ participation to create meanings. Every performance is thus different as a customized variation. As it ends, the performers asked the spectators either to stay in the gallery for the performance by other performers or to move to another gallery, where they could see the critiques on Xavier Le Roy’s works as well as the videos and documentations of Product of Circumstance and Product of Other Circumstance. Xavier Le Roy was also among the spectators during the performance to see how audiences interacted with the work, and helped them to have access to the information from the computer at another room, or provided some immediate suggestions to the performers. The artist cleverly makes the concept of “Retrospection” a production model, allowing the spectators to freely choose how they should interact with the work, while the performers use their movements to revisualize each choreographed scenario. The whole process of interpretation, participation, and interaction are finalized by the spectators, the performers, and the artist all together, establishing an informative link between the bodily performance and fine art exhibition.¹⁸

In Retrospective, every dancer demonstrates their individually unique physical vocabulary as they dance. However, if we put the structure of the work within the context of an art museum, the artwork’s independent individuality still exists as a whole entity. The work thus perfectly demonstrates the possibility of dance placed within an art museum – the body expresses the individual history of the dancer’s own body, while it is also an embodiment of all human beings’ collective history when being placed within the context of the museum. In other words, here the museum, within its own context, allows the dancer’s body to become a “living archive” which not only reveals the history of the performer’s own physical training but also provides an intertextual response to the other performances archived in the art history, creating an immediate dialogue with the history at every moment at the performance, like how Diana Taylor illustrates the embodied memories are preserved in the concept of “repertoire.”

Another work intertextually linked with the art history in a “retrospective” way is 20 minutes for the 20the century, but Asian by River Lin, a response to 20 dances for the 20th century (2012) by Boris Charmatzand and Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century (1999) by Tino Sehgal. In the program note, the artist describes how he is influenced by the above-mentioned works. The development of 20 minutes for the 20th century, but Asian can be seen as a critical reflection, through which Lin attempts to provide a Taiwanese perspective within the Asian context to discuss the colonial history in Taiwan via dance movement. On the one hand, he aims to question the dance history built upon the Euro-American Centrism adopted by the above-mentioned artists, on the other hand, he further proposes a new framework for a possible creative methodology.

¹⁸ It deserves our attention that Xavier Le Roy were recruiting Taipei-based dancers particularly for his performance at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, while he also held a series of workshops or training programs for them. Interestingly, how he works and choreographs seem to begin to influence the young Taiwanese choreographers. The recent works by several Taiwanese choreographers (Yuju Lin for example) indeed reveal some implicit traces of Le Roy, and its development should be followed and closely studied.

“My name is Wen Chung Lin. I am a dancer. This is the 20 minutes for the 20th century”– Wen-Chung Lin, the dancer in his white shirt, black suit and trousers, and a pair of athletic shoes, made this self-introductory opening in English before he began to perform the radio calisthenics. We saw him thumping his chest and stamping his feet, following his counting of the somehow familiar rhythm and beats (it seemed that everyone here all knew this kind of compulsory radio calisthenics back in the elementary school days). It reminded us of the history of rhythmic gymnastics which began in German and was introduced to Taiwan via Japan, revealing the nationalist ideology to build a strong and militarily powerful state through the physical discipline.¹⁹ Starting from the radio calisthenics, the dancer proceeds with the basic ballet movements, from the five basic positions to Plie (bending), Demi Plie (slight bending), Saute (jump), Attitude (standing with one working leg lifted), and Arabesque (standing with one working leg extending behind the body) . The transition from the radio calisthenics to the basic Ballet techniques seems to suggest how the technical training is manipulating the body. Later, Lin begins to play a thread of gestures of Chinese martial arts, pointing toes, flex toes (勾腳繃腳), arch and hang arms properly (山膀手), cloud hand (雲手), punctuated by the front kick, side kick, piann toei leg movement(片腿), toes tapping, Shuangfeiyan movement (雙飛燕) in one rapid and efficient breath. In the following part, with a sense of ease, Lin transforms into a shy and self-conscious folk-dancing girl, coquettishly running around with short quick steps and his pinky raised in lotus gesture, while the intentional eye contact with the spectators aside occasionally triggers laughter. Not giving the spectators enough time to get used to the girlish look of the dancer, Lin makes another turn to energetically imitate the dance as seen in Aaron kwok’s MV, like the similar dance in the movie Para Para Sakura, with simple steps alternating between right and left and some free arm-waving. Then, Lin dances into the context of modern dance, featuring the basic Martha Graham techniques such as contraction and release, accompanied by her famous upward hand-extension with side-banding to move around the space, followed by the physical technique of Bill T. Jones whom Lin used to work with as the company dancer, unveiling a strong sense of extension to occupy the space that characterizes the body of modern dance. After that, Lin is dancing Taichi Dowing as practiced by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, transforming the fluidity of his movement into a flowing physical language. The dance performance eventually concludes with Lin’s slow breathing and gentle stretches as he is doing some physical exercises reminiscent of the Eastern yoga and Pilates.

The whole process is a test for the spectators to see how many dance moves they can “identify,” while it also suggests that the postmodern conceptual dance is a great knowledge challenge to the audiences. As Lin stands next to the lemon tree installation at the corner and begins to take off his suit, shirt, socks, belt, and pants, we also get to see the knee pads on the dancer’s legs. He removes the knee pads and returns to the starting position of the first section with his body naked, starting it all over again with the English self-introduction. But this time, what he introduces to us is no longer the twenty-minute dance history of the Twentieth Century, but the twenty-minute body history of his past twenty-years of dance training (“This is the 20 minutes for the past 20 years of my dance practice”). His naked body repeats the same movements which he has just danced in suit. Strange enough, although the dance movements are exactly the same, the dancer’s naked body has changed the atmosphere of the space to the greatest degree. The dancer without clothing should have allowed the spectators to have a better look at his muscle textures and movement contours, but what really happened was that most of the spectators had to force themselves, out of some subtle embarrassment, to look at the dancer’s face, and their ambiguous smile (if there was any) seemed to become a shield against the awkwardness of peeking at other’s private part. A strong sense of physical labor in the close gaze further highlighted the exhaustion of the dancer’s mind and body in an extremely intimate way. Lin’s body was like a living sculpture, showing us a dancer’s bodily energy. When the dancer began to interact with the spectators around them through his folk dance moves, we also noticed how the eye contact created a somehow amused but yet nervous facial expression of uneasiness, if not too much, on their faces. Occasionally, some spectators would want to turn back and move away when the dancer approached them, or some of them would stand like staked with their bodies rigid and faces awkward, not daring to move an inch. Throughout the whole process, we not only got to see the delicate and subtle movements of the dancer from a close distance, but could also clearly acknowledge the huge difference of dancing with or without clothing within its cultural context.

¹⁹ See Manning, Susan. A. Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; and my periodical essay “Modernity and Formations of the Female Bodies: Dance Hall Culture in Taiwan during the 1920s-1930s ,” Body Politics – Zeitschrift für Körpergeschichte/Journal for the History of the Body. Berlin: Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development. 2016.

Rama’s House, a collaboration between Wu-kang Chen from Horse Dance Theatre and Pichet Klunchun, a renowned contemporary Thai dancer and choreographer. Photographer: Yi-tang Chen; photo courtesy of Horse Dance Theatre.

In the third part, Lin returns to the beginning of the previous two acts and repeats his self-introduction: “this is the dance history of the Twentieth Century, a twenty-minute performance for the Taipei Biennial, but Asian.” The following performance shows a physical touch reminiscent of the Japanese Botoh, with the dancer moving and breathing slowly. At every turn of the dance phrases, we see the silent scream on his face which seems hideous and full of pain. The absence of sound does not eliminate the power of a twisting face. The energy slips away from the voiceless face and the slowly trembling body to disperse into the air. It is a completely different physical capability from the above-mentioned aesthetics of the Western dance. In the very end, Lin is lying face down with his limbs stretching open. The silent and naked athletic body has left the art-museum white cube a dramatic intensity. Looking at his back on the ground from above, we almost see a live painting.

The dance history never lacks the kinds of works that intertextually manage and respond to the existing pieces. One of the most famous examples is probably Rite of Spring by the Russian modern Ballet choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky with music by Igor Stravinsky, in which numerous choreographers later adopt the somehow different choreographic strategy as a response to the masterpiece.²⁰ 20 minutes for the 20the century, but Asian apparently adopts a choreographic approach which is rather similar to 20 dances for the 20th century and Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century: Charmatz’s dance has been performed at art museums, libraries, parks, and other public spaces. The twenty dancers in a specific space would simultaneously perform the movements characterizing different dance schools which constitute the history of the Twentieth-Century physical vocabulary — from Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch, contact improvisation, Botoh, to pop dance — as we see a history of dance in the Twentieth Century preserved within and performed by the body of each solo dancer. As Tino Sehgal in his naked solo demonstrates the dance pieces by the iconic choreographers of the Twentieth Century, including Isadora Duncan, Vaslav Nijinsky, Merce Cunningham, and George Balanchine, 20 minutes for the 20the century, but Asian on the other hand features only one solo dancer (clothed and naked) for the whole piece. With his fascinating physical techniques, Lin brings us back to the development of the contemporary dance in Taiwan and a history of body greatly influenced by the social and political changes. Through the various physical techniques ranging from radio calisthenics, the Chinese folk-dance, martial arts, the Taiwanese folk parade (tshia-kóo-tīn), to the American choreographer Bill T Jones, the bodily skills become the performance text not only presenting the history of dance in Taiwan but also, more importantly, allows the choreographer to directly illustrate the connection between the contemporary dance in Taiwan and the West by performing it, as it also dances about the different disciplines grafted into a Taiwanese body by the numerous cultural and political colonizers (Japan, China, and the USA, for example) for the past century. The dance piece indeed suggests a history of body that characterizes how Taiwan, as a colony, struggles among the multiple imperial powers. It also embodies the theme of the biennial that attempts at a body to preserve the social and political history.

However, we should not ignore the fact that a direct translation of its Chinese title is actually “20 minutes for the 20the century IN ASIA,” as listed in the program, rather than the English title “20 minutes for the 20the century, but Asian.” It thus makes us wonder how the “Asia” in the Chinese title is related to the “Asian” (but Asian) in the English title. The artist claims that the intention of the work is to question the Western Centrism which has dominated the dance history, but should the history of a Taiwanese body fully represent the history of a colonized body for the entire “Asia?” Or perhaps, should we say that the work brings up an alternative possibility to examine whether Taiwan can provide a unique Asian perspective with its history of being repetitively colonized by multiple empires and cultural hegemonies, and particularly with its undecided status as a nation of uncertainty? Meanwhile, as the performer Wen-Chung Lin introduces himself to the Taiwanese spectators in English, I also wonder: Does it mean that if a Taiwanese wants to represent “Asia,” one has to speak in English, and English only (even when one is performing at an art museum in Taiwan), to be accepted by an art biennial which is “internationally-operated in an international style?” Who is the target audience when using this language to communicate? Is it because this “Asian” still wants to be visible to the Western eyes to “fulfill the mission of representing Asian?”²¹

Curating Performativity in Taiwan and Asia

In Taiwan, we see a vigorous growth in curating performativity in exhibitions. Apart from the above-mentioned performative exhibition projects, it has also developed its own local narrative. One of the most noticeable attempts is probably a series of interdisciplinary performative curating projects by the previously mentioned artist River Lin. As an artist and curator crossing the border between performing and visual arts, Lin makes body his main creative materials, through which he explores the diverse artistic expressions of choreography, person-to-person performance, and performative installation. His works can be seen at both exhibitions and art festivals. The now Paris-based artist has also produced several theatrical projects that enjoyed both critical and commercial success when he was still in Taiwan, and he is ambitious in vision, management ability, and critical response to contemporary issues. What he did in “Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance” (abbreviated as ADAM), his curatorial project for Taipei Performing Arts Center, may be another case study related to the development of curating performativity in Taiwan that deserves our attention.

²⁰ The premiere of Rite of Spring caused a riot, with the audience throwing everything at hand onto the stage, and the noises they created were so loud that Nijinsky had to go to the stage to count beats for the dancers so that the show could go on. But the dance piece has always remained fresh. Since its first performance in 1913, numerous Ballet and modern dance choreographers, one after another, have experimented on their own versions of Rite of Spring with the same music by Igor Stravinsky: these pieces include Pina Bausch, an iconic figure in the German dance theatre, whose Rite of Spring explores the dreadful conflict and resistance between the individual and the mass as inherent in the German nationalist spirit; Hwai-min Lin, the founder of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, who adopts the form of dance theatre in his Rite of Spring, 1984 to describe a life of confusion in a decade of extravagance which characterizes the 1980s in Taiwan; or the more recent Emanuel Gat, a France-based Israelite choreographer who uses the salsa steps between two people to discuss the erotic and flirtatious struggle between death and desire of the dual-dancing bodies in his brilliant work. These pieces continue to evoke the artists’ emotions and imaginations created in different times and spaces, especially the imagination of the rituals. With each artist’s own artistic uniqueness, a contemporary dialogue with the masterpieces is made possible through its choreographic variations.

²¹ I-Wen Chang, “20 Minutes for the 20th Century, but Asian(⼆十世紀舞蹈史，在亞洲)”, Performing Arts Reviews Platform 2016/11 (https://pareviews.ncafroc.org.tw/?p=22025)；meanwhile, we cannot deny that the only way for an artwork from the marginal realm to become more accessible and acceptable in the Western-centric international market is to speak, or to be able to speak in English.

Starting from 2017, ADAM as a curatorial practice, like what its name suggests, aims to bring the artists of the Asian-Pacific region together and to establish a new network with performance venues and art festivals. The project includes the two-week Artist Lab for selected artists and the annual meeting open to all (for new work exploration, conference, forum, and the open studio showing of the creations from Artist Lab). Here at ADAM, the professional art institutions are gathered to provide their service for the artists, bridging artists and curators with a sense of freedom and openness for the seeds of artistic exchange to grow in the interdisciplinary networked platforms and institutions, where the pluralistic cultures and politics of the Asian-Pacific region may be embodied and performed (issues to be touched upon include: a critical examination on indigenous or indigenous-themed arts festivals, Queer and Feminism as practiced, a dialectical discourse on the contemporaneity and performativity of contemporary arts, erotic culture and the tourist’s gaze, the institution of art education and talent cultivation, the dialogue between art activists and hegemonies, the threat to the environment, etc.)²² Interestingly, because of the choices of its curatorial team, the participators are not limited to performing arts but instead welcome a great amount of interdisciplinary visual artists (Ruangrupa, for example, the newly appointed artistic director for the 2022 Documenta in Kassel, Germany, was one of the participators at the 2019 ADAM). Meanwhile, the artistic exchange made possible during the event also has resulted in several work-in-progress presentations which are impressive in their cross-border and intercultural attempts (for instance, the collaborative project Rama’s House by Wu-kang Chen from HORSE Dance Theatre and the Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun had its first work-in-progress showing at ADAM). River Lin has mentioned in a private occasion that ADAM has a continuous residential project that attempts to create a curatorial system for artists. Based on the experiences of the past four editions, it began to invite the previously participating non-Taiwanese ADAM artists (mostly from Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia) to curatorially elaborate their social research and conversation in Taipei. Placing Taiwan in the Asian-Pacific network, it also welcomes an enthusiastic engagement from the state-owned art venues or art institute professionals not only among the Southeast Asian countries but also around France, Australia, and New Zealand (such as Centre National de la Danse in France, and Performance Space at Liveworks Festival in Australia, and these venues are also dedicated to the so called “non-dance” interdisciplinary artistic practices).

²² Please see https://adam.tpac-taipei.org/ for detailed information about ADAM.

The Taiwanese artist Ding-Yun Huang, a guest curator at the 2nd ADAM project (Artist Lab), has also mentioned in private that “the framework and long-term vision of ADAM is very “Taiwanese.” For, historically, Taiwan artists have been eager to seek exchange and collaboration only with the EuroAmerica, North Asia, and the Sinophone world, ignoring the rest of Asia. As a result, a sense of both inferiority and self-indulgence was developed from such a ‘comprador²³’/‘agents’ culture. By connecting local artists to those from other parts of Asia, ADAM effectively responds to this limitation of a Taiwanese-ness characterized by cultural relativism.” From a participating artist to the guest curator, Huang thinks of ADAM as a project “using Taipei (or Taiwan) as its text,” adopting an attitude against centrism in its artistic production to explore how to position Taiwan in response to universal issues, and further questioning how Taiwanese artists position themselves in Asia or in the world. In other words, “it never loses its agency due to an individual’s familiarity with the regional experiences, but in fact discovers the framework of differences via the process of repeated narration and translation.”²⁴ Perhaps, the expectation of the above-mentioned curators also suggests that, ADAM, aims to adopt a more radical approach in the future to propose a specific practice and discourse of curating performativity as a critical feedback to the local Asian context?

On the other hand, ADAM, the abbreviation of Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance, has a strong Biblical connotation which can be easily linked to European or Western-centrism, not to mention how it may imply a male hegemonic perspective. How should it avoid the risk of being politically incorrect? Or, the insensitivity to the Western political correctness in Taiwan can somehow ironically be read as an alternative postcolonial situation. The subtlety seems deserve further observation and studies. Nevertheless, a discussion on the curatorial shift toward performance within the context of the interdisciplinary collaboration between dance and visual arts is not merely a universal awareness. On the contrary, when such a discussion departs from EuroAmerican-Centrism toward the local studies in Taiwan, can the practices and theories of curating performativity offer a decolonized view far beyond the conventional mutilculturalism in the West? Situating between the center and the marginal, curating performativity discussion from Taiwan is reflecting upon its unique historical and geopolitical position through bodily choreographic expressions, and unique living memories. We can well expect the curating performativity to open a new and different discursive practice.

* The quoted reviews on “20 Minutes for the 20th Century, but Asian and Retrospective” were first published on Performing Arts Reviews Platform (表演藝術評論台) and Artist Magazine （藝術家雜誌）.

²³ Translator’s note: comprador is the term from Qing Dynasty which referred to the businessman cooperating with the Western colonial empires.

²⁴ The bracketed text is quoted from Ding-Yun Huang’s personal Facebook post.

² Judith Rugg, “Introduction”, Rugg Judith and Michele Sedgwick ed. (2007), Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, Bristol: Intellect Books. p7.

⁴ Katalin Trencsényi, trans. Yi-Chun Chen (陳佾均). 2016. DRAMATURGY IN THE MAKING: A User’s Guide for Theatre Practitioners (戲劇顧問：連結理論與創作的實作手冊), Taipei: National Theatre and Concert Hall at National Performing Arts Center, 76.