Curating and Performance is a nine-session course unfolding over May and June 2016 with the students in the second year of the bachelor degree program at SNDO – School of New Dance Development, Amsterdam. The course considers performance within the framework of its institutional history to think through its contextualisation, presentation and preservation through curatorial practice, and the theoretical and practical implications of this for artists, institutions and audiences alike. 

Through this the course aims to introduce and engage the students in the lively contemporary debates surrounding the curation of performance, and to equip them with the critical and practical skills that they require to think through how they structure and shape their own artistic work in relation to the curatorial structures that they might choose to create, engage with, or respond to. 

The course is structured around three key ideas – space, time and the body – and includes the development of a reader composed of texts and video material suggested by each of the students, and which relates to the development of and inspiration behind their own artistic practice. This material is complemented by reading and writing exercises

Curating and Performance is an SNDO – School for New Dance Development course commissioning If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. In response to SNDO course conceptualization, intentions and general outline, the programme contents has been developed by If I Can’t Dance’s director Frédérique Bergholtz and curator Susan Gibb, and will be co-ordinated by Susan Gibb.