Episode 3 of Edition III – Masquerade takes place in the Projects Arts Centre in Dublin, from June 11 to June 13, 2009. The artists Keren Cytter, Jon Mikel Euba, Olivier Foulon, Suchan Kinoshita, Joachim Koester and Sarah Pierce present new (episodes of) performances or performative projects.

If I Can’t Dance is delighted to collaborate with the Project Arts Centre, not least because it embeds our rolling programme in this institution’s history that tested out the boundaries between the representational regimes of theatre, performance and visual arts, something that If Can’t Dance has made the corner stone of its own investigative praxis. It forms an exciting context for the new episode in the Masquerade trajectory, as If I Can’t Dance will play on all Project’s ‘stages’: the Gallery, the ground level theatre space the Cube and the fully functioning theater space, the Space Upstairs.

The ideas ‘masquerade’ invokes are myriad – questions on the role of gestures, performance and performativity, the essentialisation of the body or its dematerialization, notions of ritual, deviation and the carnivalesque. Most literally masquerade attends to the significance of the mask and its relation to problems of realness and representation. All the while the structure of If I Can’t Dance asks how these artists’ projects are ‘performed’ in the fields of visual art, theatre, film, text and elsewhere… dare we say in ‘everyday life’? All of these stands are explored in a series of events, performances, films and displays. The artists not only map, in their own complex and intriguing ways, a position but also directly unmask the viewer, the participant, and the collaborator in the process.