Kelim Choreography Center in Bat Yam is pleased to host researcher and curator, Professor André Lepecki, Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University (NYU). Supported by ARTIS (www.artis.art), the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) Tel Aviv, and Outset Bialik Residency Israel.
Kelim Choreography Center is happy to host Lepecki, who will lead, for the first time in Israel, two seminars for choreographers, researchers, and curators, as well as a lecture for the general public. This is a rare opportunity to have an in-depth meeting with one of the leading world voices in performance, and specifically dance.
During his visit to Israel (February 18-25, 2019), Lepecki will discuss contemporary choreography strategies in a lecture for the general public, will lead a seminar in curating, which will focus on curating as an act of shared imagination with invisible forces that design the field, drawing on several exhibitions Lepecki curated at art institutions around the world. He will lead a five-day-seminar for choreographers and researchers, which will deal with the current relationship between choreography and politics. Through collective reading of texts by leading theoreticians, the seminar will offer an expansion on these two concepts through a special focus on contemporary works that incorporate this line of thought.
Professor André Lepecki is the editor of several dance and performance theory anthologies, the author of the book “Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement” (translated to Hebrew in 2013) and of “Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance” (2016). He is a curator of dance and performance events, among them the revived exhibition and performance “18 Happenings in 6 Parts” by Alan Kaprow, for which he received a special prize from the International Association of Critics United States.
In 2006, Lepecki’s first book, “Exhausting Dance,” was published. In it Lepecki examines the works of contemporary choreographers in Europe and the United States from the beginning of the 1990s onward. In his encompassing and extraordinary research, Lepecki depicts the way in which a new generation of choreographers challenges the understanding of dance by exhausting the concept of movement. Further, Lepecki clearly noted the intrinsic dialogue within the fields of performance arts, visual art, and critical theory over the past thirty years that caused nothing short of a revolution in the way in which contemporary dance is perceived. His work as scholar and curator in the decade since has had a significant role in the presence of contemporary dance in leading museums and galleries around the world, and influenced the curatorial approach of festival directors as well as contemporary discourse about dance research and creation.
Photo: Malthe Stigaard. ©Studium Generale Rietveld Academie