8th Annual Curating Performance Symposium

Join the Department of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts for our 8th Annual Curating Symposium. Each year PS organizes a day-long symposium drawing expertise from other NYU departments, visiting artists, and curators in New York City art institutions, to highlight the many aspects of performance curation and promote trans-disciplinary exchanges to meet the rapidly changing practical, critical and theoretical challenges associated with this work.

This year's symposium is co-sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies, the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies, and the Center for Research and Study.

Symposium Schedule:

10:00 AM | Welcome

10:00 AM - 12:00 PM | “Sound Art, Noise, Music, Performance” curated by Allen S. Weiss

Panelists: Marcus Gammel, Jay Needham, Sarah Teraha, and Alex Waterman

This panel will address one of the pivotal issues in contemporary musicology and performance theory, by investigating the boundaries between traditional notions of music and the other sonic and performance arts.

12:00 - 1:30 PM | Lunch Break

1:30 - 3:00 PM | “Cover Songs as a Curatorial Practice" curated Barbara Browning

Panelists: Barbara Browning, Malik Gaines, Sébastien Régnier, and Karen Tongson

Cover tunes - performances or recordings of songs previously recorded and popularized by another artist - are often construed as a sort of fallen genre: secondhand, derivative, even a "poor man's version" of the original. But those of us who care about cover tunes, whether as artists or appreciators, sometimes understand our relationship to them as curatorial. What happens when, in the words of Karen Tongson, "the copy outshines the original in some way; when something in the interpretation, the phrasing, the drama erases its status as copy"? Or what happens when a cover artist fully embraces her own amateurism, but views her contribution as the conceptual art of amassing and juxtaposing compositions such that the lack of virtuosic musicianship allows listeners to pay attention to something else in the songs? What forms of intersubjectivity might be better felt through interpreting existing materials than through performances of originality? And then there are the collectors: enthusiasts who want to attend to every possible rendition of a particular song in order to track its reception and its morphing significance. This panel, composed of listeners and practitioners, will explore the curatorial dimensions of assembling and interpreting covers.

3:30 - 5:15 PM | “Voluminous Arts: Tidal Curation” organized by Jeannine Tang and Gavilán Rayna Russom

Panelists:  Adonis Huff, SJ Norman, and Gavilán Rayna Russom

*** Please note this panel will only be offered in person, this panel will not be available via the zoom webinar. The webinar will end at 3pm. 

This open conversation between Voluminous Arts Founding Director Gavilán Rayna Russom, artist and curator Adonis Huff (aka Mercury Symbol), and artist, curator, and writer SJ Norman explores questions of experimental form, community care and trans culture. The conversation begins with the summer 2023 residency program “bloom how you must, wild until we are free” at the Center for Art Research and Alliances – Russom curated and co-directed the residency, Mercury Symbol was an artist-in-residence, and SJ Norman a visiting faculty workshop leader. Each participant will explore and share the curatorial and creative dimensions of their roles in the residency, as an entry point into the intricacies and overlaps between their wider experiences with curating and sound, and their perspectives on the relationship between cultural materials and the communities they emerge from.

Voluminous Arts is a transgender liberation project that creates space for trans people to explore expansiveness and agency through music, sound, community and experimental art, with a mission to foreground, nurture, and advance the experimental artistic culture of transgender people and communities. In doing so, Voluminous Arts currently bridges the world of nightlife–a critical resource for trans and non-binary people–with institutional arts and academic spaces, and provides access to resources, mentorship, and community-building activities beyond the club. These include artist residencies, community programs, and releases of boundary-pushing music by trans artists.

5:30 PM | Reception 

Photos by Matthew Petres