If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution proudly presents its seventh biannual programme of artist commissions and research projects that further its dedication to exploring the typology of performance and performativity in contemporary art. The programme includes new commissions by artists Mounira Al Solh, keyon gaskin, Myriam Lefkowitz and Charlotte Prodger, and research projects by Rhea Anastas on Adrian Piper, Boris Ondreička on Rudolf Laban, and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez on Delphine Seyrig.

While each commission and research project follows an individual trajectory of development and presentation, the programme will also coalesce around the field of research ‘Social Movement’. This will be articulated through If I Can’t Dance’s ongoing reading groups and during the programme’s collective moments. Providing a provocation through which to think ‘performance’ today, ‘Social Movement’ is inspired by the intersecting histories of political activism and performance art, alongside contemporary issues surrounding migration, civil rights, queer communities, feminism and the environment, which have arisen amidst a turn to populist politics. Through the field of research If I Can’t Dance hopes to reflect upon how different modes of perception can restructure representation, and to think through the relations between the body and the social, performer and spectator, aesthetic forms and the political.

Within the commissions Mounira Al Solh will further her interest in biography and oral histories as a means to think through the Lebanese Civil War and the contemporary Syrian conflict; Myriam Lefkowitz will design a place of encounter within a public space where choreographic tools can be shared amongst collaborators and the public; keyon gaskin will create a number of new performances that trouble the discipline’s form, institutions and conventions by investing in the gaps within them, and by pursuing the potentials of gathering; and Charlotte Prodger will further her exploration into the complex intertwining of landscape, bodies, identity and language by looking at how queer lives can be lived within uninhabited wildernesses.

In the Performance in Residence research projects, Rhea Anastas initiates a study of the artist and philosopher Adrian Piper’s Some Reflective Surfaces (1975–1976), a piece in which Piper appears as a disco dancer in modified Mythic Being guise with narration and film, performing for the first time in formal terms for an art audience; Boris Ondreička will pursue a performative exploration of the choreographer Rudolf Laban’s notations of movement and its relevance to interdisciplinary fields of research beyond dance; and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez will undertake a study on the actress, feminist activist, and author of several videos, Delphine Seyrig, including her unfinished film on the American frontierswoman Calamity Jane and her published letters to her daughter.

Introductory events

To introduce the programme over the following months—September, October, November and December 2017—a commissioned artist will present an existing work and a researcher will make an introduction to their project each month. These introductory events will take place at various locations in Amsterdam, with the full details being updated monthly at If I Can’t Dance’s website.

VII (2017–2018), Social Movement is curated by Frédérique Bergholtz and Susan Gibb.

The programme of If I Can’t Dance is financially supported by the Mondriaan Fund, the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts), and Ammodo. If I Can’t Dance is a member of Corpus and Performance Platform.