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 to explore the notion of curating within the performing arts field, with students in the second, third, and fourth years of its bachelor degree programme. The course offers the students both theoretical and practical instruction, and is developed and taught by If I Can’t Dance director Frédérique Bergholtz and curator Susan Gibb.

Curating and Performance with SNDO2 is a nine-session course unfolding over May and June with students in the second year of the SNDO programme. This theoretical 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. The course has a contemporary focus, and take as it’s starting point the recent trend for including performance within museums, galleries, and festival programmes, and the emergence of alternative contemporary arts organisations and initiatives that are dedicated to curating and studying performance, and of which, If I Can’t Dance, is an example. This course aims to introduce and engage the students in the lively contemporary debates surrounding curating and performance through case studies, field trips, reading and writing exercises. It does this to equip the students with critical and practical skills that they can use to think through how they shape their own artistic work in relationship to the curatorial structures that they might choose to create, engage with, or respond to.

Curating and Performance with SNDO3 furthers the nine-session theoretical course for SNDO2, by providing students of the third year with the opportunity to apply ideas around curating and performance within a practical setting. In the third year course the students work in conversation with If I Can’t Dance director Frédérique Bergholtz and curator Susan Gibb to think through curatorial methodologies and concerns in the programming, production, presentation and communication of a public presentation of new work in the context of the dance theatre at the Theaterschool, Amsterdam in November. The course will unfold over eight-sessions placed at selected intervals across the presentation’s development, and the two public programmes of performances in the dance theatre. It will also include a final evaluation meeting.

Curating and Performance with SNDO4 builds upon the students’ engagement with ideas of curating and performance within a practical setting commenced during the third year of the SNDO programme. In the fourth year, the student work in conversation with If I Can’t Dance director Frédérique Bergholtz and curator Susan Gibb to think through curatorial methodologies and concerns in the programming, production, presentation and communication of their first public presentation of graduation works. These presentations take place across two programmes at two venues in Amsterdam, which are located outside of the Theaterschool in order to provide the students with professional working conditions and artistic contexts. The performances are presented in Amsterdam in March and April, and travel to Berlin later in April for presentation at Uferstudios within the context of an ongoing exchange between SNDO and the Berlin based bachelor programme of Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz (HZT). Following this course, the students are responsible for working together to curate their final graduation festival in June at Frascati Theater, Amsterdam.