If I Can’t Dance's programme of artist commissions for Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication (2013-2014) presents new work by Gerry Bibby, Sara van der Heide, Snejanka Mihaylova and Emily Roysdon. Their projects will span diverse methodologies including prose, choreography, painting and song—all extending ongoing facets of the artists’ practice in conversation with the research thematic of Appropriation and Dedication.

Following the success of the dedicated research strand Performance in Residence introduced in Edition IV, If I Can’t Dance continues with four new research projects in Edition V. These projects are structured to approach performance-related practices through production-led research. They are being undertaken by Gregg Bordowitz, Jacob Korczynski, Sven Lütticken and Grant Watson, all of whom presented research and work at the Appropriation and Dedication seminar held in Amsterdam in January 2013.

These new Commissions and Performance in Residence projects are framed by our current edition that takes the notion of ‘appropriation and dedication’ as its field of research. This thematic extends upon the research of Edition IV in re-considering 'appropriation' through the lens of theories of affect. The programme will consider how an understanding of reciprocal investment may reconfigure the 1980s artistic practice of appropriation as an act that is based in connecting, acknowledging and being porous to material. We’re specifically interested in thinking through current re-enactment practices in performance from the perspective of appropriation.

In our monthly Reading Groups and seminars we advance this research field in the company of a diverse group of practitioners. The Amsterdam Reading Group, currently led by Tanja Baudoin and Vivian Ziherl, has been an integral component of our organization since Edition II on Feminism (2006). For Edition V we are joined by three Sister Reading Groups that formed from our conviction that any understanding of appropriation requires a geographical, cultural and politically diverse reading of theory and practice. In Toronto the group is led by Jacob Korczynski at Art Metropole and other venues, in São Paulo by Daniela Castro at Teatro Oficina and other venues, and in New York City by Kelly Kivland at ISSUE Project Room.

In our Reading Groups we will depart from discussions of appropriation as they first arose around artistic practices in the 1980s as part of a discourse that questioned the modernist hegemony of originality and autonomy in art. These were firmly rooted in a Marxist critique of appropriation in resistance to capitalist dispossession. We strive to interrogate the connections between that moment in the 1980s and today, and to think about appropriation in relation to current artistic practice, particularly performance practice.