As a dance-maker and scholar I habitually branch out into the realm of curating. While not considering myself a curator, I feel compelled to engage in the process of curating as a response to conditions I observe in the larger socio-political landscape of our times, particularly concerning socio-political realities of inequality, marginalization, exclusion and discrimination, and also as a response to the obstacles that the dance/performance (infra)structures pose to performatively addressing those realities. I therefore engage in processes of curating with very concrete intentions that emerge from my art/dance making practice and my positionality as a politically engaged human being. I see curating as a way to facilitate and offer spaces to come together in temporary collectivities, to share and exchange, to perform, present, and—importantly—to receive artistic practices and approaches that engage with and resist socio-political realities of inequality, marginalization, exclusion and discrimination. I seek to bring together people with allied intentions and open hearts. In this article, I will therefore look at two instances of collectivity: BIPOC alliances as collectivity and a collective space opened for and with the audience based on my reading against the grain of Rasa.

The urge to work toward a more just coexistence is the urge behind my curatorial praxis: how can we use our artistic practice to contribute to the change we want to see in the world? “Praxis”, in this context, is opposed to the notion of “practice”: it refers to an artistic praxis that critically reflects (local, national, and global) social, cultural and political contexts.[1] If critical art and dance making is indeed a space of certain privilege, then let's use that space to imagine and persistently bring into embodiment––bring to life and onto the stage––a seemingly impossible radical togetherness: equality, togetherness across difference, radical self-positioning with humility, radical sharing of privilege, and decolonial practices that seem more and more impossible in our world.

Curating as Hope
Curating as Resistance
Curating as Persistence

This is a slow path but an important pillar of my motivation to curate. This kind of curating takes persistence, both in terms of securing funding as well as finding an audience.

Curating for me has to do not only with inviting artists and featuring work, but with inviting participants, guests and partakers—artists, dialogue partners and audience participants—to spend time, share the space, share their work and their attention, to move together, to mutually engage. It has to do with attempting to create an open space that cultivates the quality of non-judgmental encounters – which I will address via a reading against the grain of the notion of rasa.

Curating as Bringing Together
Curating as Assembling
Curating as Sharing

 

Curating Against the Grain | Postmigrant and BIPOC Positionality as Collectivity

Don’t just follow the latest trend. Follow your critical ideas even when they go against fashion, money and recognition

Take a step out of the artworks! Engage in an ongoing dialogue with all sorts of people

Please don’t treat us like the newest specimen you have discovered. Or, if we are aging, as a forgotten artist you have rediscovered, Treat us with utmost respect as peers. We will treat you accordingly. Let’s develop a new trust.

Today’s weather report: It’s time for Anglo-America and Europe to be quiet. Humble. And listen. Listen to nature and so-called “people of color”. It’s your only possible redemption.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña, excerpts from “An Open Letter to the Museums of the Future.”[2]

In Germany I curate from a postmigrant/BIPOC perspective – in other words from a politically engaged perspective that focuses on social change towards decolonization, equality and justice, equal rights and treatment, accessibility and anti-discrimination. The term person of color/people of color which is contained in the acronym BIPOC, is a politicized, emancipatory self-designation and an umbrella term that refers to "all racialized [sic] people who have different proportions of African, Asian, Latin American, Arab, Jewish, indigenous or Pacific Islander origins or backgrounds. It connects those who are marginalized by the white dominant culture and collectively devalued by the violence of colonial traditions and presences."[3] It gained political agency in the US Civil Rights Movements in the 1950s and 1960s and from its inception includes solidarity with anti-colonial movements across the world.[4].

I explicitly use this term to foreground its emancipatory political roots over a mere identity category, while I am also aware that an easy and direct transposition of this politically energized position to Germany is problematic. In a context which is disconnected from the political movement that gave rise to the position’s political agency (since Germany did not have a civil rights movement), the term runs danger of being rendered non-performative on a larger socio-political level, as the groundwork that the civil rights movement accomplished are lacking.

As such – for the German context I do not want to drop the term “postmigrant” which was starting to have currency in the German artistic landscape, but seems to have been somewhat overtaken by BIPOC more recently (could this be connected to the stronger political resonance of BIPOC, which in the case of post-migrant did not come to fruition in Germany on a larger socio-political level?).

Postmigrant became established in the German-speaking world by way of Berlin-based director Shermin Langhoff’s intervention in the Theater am Ballhaus Naunynstrasse (2008–2013) (Maxim Gorki Theater 2021). This so-called post-migrant theater often focuses on narratives emerging from the realities of life for migrants of the second and third (etc.) generations, because they “are in the context of migration but are told by those who did not themselves migrate. Thus, postmigrant.”[5] (Langhoff in an interview with Fanizadeh 2009, n. p.)”

From this politically energized position[6] curating to me means curating against the grain – against canonical patterns, towards attempting to offer alternative visions of artistic practice and audiences, formats of presentation, but also of social coexistence, of a more just coexistence internationally. Curating against the grain involves “reading” the curatorial strategies, statements and patterns of inclusion and exclusion by institutions and festivals curated under white leadership (especially not critically-white curatorial positions and practices). This “reading against the grain” means “to read critically, to turn back, [...], to ask questions [...], to look for the limits of [those curatorial] vision[s], to provide alternate readings [...], to find examples that challenge [...], – to engage [...] to refine it, to extend it, to put it to the test.”[7]

Curating Sequential Collectivity
Curating as Multiplying Voices
Curating toward a collectivity of accomplices[8]

In this article, I also want to invoke a collectivity of curatorial accomplices, committed to BIPOC or critically white perspectives in curating against the grain:

Curatorial projects in which people come together to suspend these power relations––even if only for a limited period of time––have a revolutionary character. If there is a right curating in the wrong one, then it is one that creates spaces in which emancipatory struggles are combined with artistic, curatorial and cultural strategies and become places in which discriminatory routines are interrupted. It is not so much about a finished result, but about a process in which broken connections and lost trust in society and its institutions can be restored..[9]

In order to curate in an anti-racist way, however, it would first be necessary to take subjectivity or subjectivation into account as well as to ensure multi-perspectivity. Basically, there is a need to traverse and question all narratives and pieces in an exhibition in different ways from the outset: Whose story is being told here? Whose perspective is privileged? Which images appear? Who reads these images and how? How were the pieces generated? How are the texts created? Are the narratives and images designed to “empower” groups that have so far been underrepresented or even objectified in representations? [10]

For curating in the field of dance in particular, curating against the grain means working towards a consistent presence of voices, movements, dance forms, histories, stories, approaches, perspectives from historically marginalized communities in all aspects of the field of arts on and off the stage, from creation to curation to production, outreach, PR and criticism.

Dance is unfortunately one of the most closed of all disciplines. I do straddle the visual arts as well, and working with visual art curators is different, probably in theatre as well. Why is dance so behind? It could be paranoia or fear because dance is so intimate and so direct. I mean that’s also why I like to make performance, because it’s very intimate, but in that intense connection in a black box, people tend to be more protective or pre-emptive.

Coloniality is like something we really didn’t know because we didn’t encounter it, but the current dance scene is sometimes like a parallel universe and as a migrant artist, you come and it’s like, how do we find the meeting point? How do we collapse the gap to have some of that communication? I feel it’s also both ways. We shouldn’t take it for granted that because they are hosting this, they have the interest to work this out. We also have to learn how to communicate with them. And that’s how it works.[11]

In the context of CHAKKARs – Moving Interventions,[12] a Munich-based platform I am co-directing with Sarah Bergh-Bieling, for example, we work towards these intentions by explicitly curating and creating formats from a postmigrant/BIPOC perspective. We foreground politically engaged work focusing in an intersectional way against discrimination. We curate around three core topics, 1) antiracist practices, 2) decolonizing turns, 3) forgotten dance histories. CHAKKARs is not a BIPOC-only platform, but our core topics strive to decenter Eurocentrism and whiteness, center BIPOC and post-migrant approaches, while explicitly inviting critical white perspectives.

We curate, of course, to invite audiences to witness the artists and works we invite, but we also curate to collect and tell marginalized stories and to bring (post-migrant/BIPOC) artists and practitioners of dance together and provide space for mutual sharing.

Curating as Oral History
Curating as Community Care

 

Curating to Move Allies | Curating for Consent of the Heart

The audience enters the space. In the center of the space there are buckets full of colorful flowers, along with materials required for designing and making flower garlands – Lei-making.[13]  While walking into the room towards the central flower arrangement, the guests walk through an installation with text and audio-visual material, inviting to linger, sit, read, listen and watch:[14] concepts of decolonization presented in poster format, as well as texts, songs and videos, postcolonial dance and migration stories spanning Germany—Hawaii—South West Africa/Namibia and India are intended to become catalysts of the debate. Genealogies of resistance meet stories of (possible) collaboration. The aim is to enable an artistic examination of identity politics, historically situated migration histories and colonial histories that are not often considered together: German colonial history, the Indian and Hawaiian independence movements, as well as reflections on water, surfing and sailing and racism from South Africa, among others.

While sitting on the floor together, cutting and stringing together flowers, deciding on patterns, comparing, making decisions, dialogues about the works, the colonial contexts, as well as the videos and texts installed in the space were able to emerge in a relaxed atmosphere structured by a collaborative hands-on activity, even if the topics that were then discussed, spanning Hawai’i’s annexation, German colonialism in South West Africa/Namibia, etc. became intense and tackled forgotten histories. The installation days concluded with curated guest performances and a panel. The transitions from dialoguing to watching and listening were initiated by welcome warmups, inviting the audience to dance together.

This is one example of how in CHAKKARs we intend to approach curating and creating spaces and formats of encounter and reception. We strive to get into dialogue with the invited artists early on around the format, as a participatory space, which invites the audience to join in moving together or making something together, which shapes the space and has emerged as a productive approach for us. We want to create welcoming, activating, sensual spaces of encounter, spaces to foster solidarity, for moving interventions.

 

Curating towards a collectivity of allies | the audience as allies

Underlying my understanding of aesthetic communication with the audience and of reception is my training in classical Indian dance, and the way in which the relationship between performance/performer and audience is conceptualized. I draw on the concept of “rasa”, according to Rustom Bharucha “one of the most important concepts in Indian aesthetics”[15]. Central to rasa is an understanding of the open-hearted sensually literate connoisseur – spectator, the so-called rasik/rasika, as theorized in debates on aesthetic experience (rasa) emerging from the Indian subcontinent.

The theoretical vocabulary explicating this understanding of the aesthetic communication is accessible to me as a primarily diaspora-trained dancer via Sanskrit aesthetic treatises available in English translation, such as the Natyashastra and Abhinaya Darpana, which my understanding rests on primarily. It is important for me to mention here, however, that I am also tracing the concept of the rasik – in Baul/Fakiri musical practices[16], which syncretic and anti-hegemonic strive is a continuous source of inspiration for me, even as I am not as familiar with this context. In terms of training, the complexly detailed Sanskrit debates of rasa are the most ingrained in my practice.

As much as an understanding of rasa irrevocably shapes my understanding of performing[17] and audience-performer relationships, I also read rasa and particularly the sahridaya rasika (the spectator who has a similar/open heart) against the grain of my traditional training. In other words, I depart from the distinguished definition of the rasika as “noble, learned, virtuous, impartial”[18], which—parallel to a European notion of taste—has class implications, and assumes the ideal spectator to be a cultural insider, well-versed in the classical (Indian) canon.

There are three aspects as articulated especially in the Abhinaya Darpana Abhinavaguptas 9th/10th century AD interpretation, which I want to highlight to illustrate this “reading against the grain”:

 

1. one-on-one communication

Aesthetic communication in the context of rasa is conceptualized between performer (or in the case of poetry, for example, the author) and each single audience member, not the audience as a group. It is therefore not looking in the first place at the numbers (“as many audience members as possible as a mass”), but the communication of each audience member within the collective of the spectators with the performance as a one-to-one communication, which I believe can and should be considered also in the context of curating.

 

2. the potential non-correspondence of bhava and rasa:

The Sanskrit debates around rasa distinguish the (emotional) intent performed by the performer (bhava) from the flavor (rasa) any single audience member receives, or literally tastes. The emotion performed (bhava) or offered by the artistic producer does not by default mean that the corresponding rasa is necessarily evoked in an audience member. In other words, a performance of love, or rati bhava does not necessarily have to evoke the corresponding sringara rasa (love). Although they are easily conflated and ideally do correspond, they do not have to correspond,[19] rejecting a direct “cause-effect relationship”[20] in reception. The aesthetic response depends on the intersection between the states/conditions and intentions of the performer and the predispositions and openness every individual audience member brings to the performance.[21] In order to receive the full flavor of a given performance, audience members have to actively participate in the act of reception, and the level of enjoyment depends on the level of knowledge an audience member already has.[22]  In the classical understanding of rasa, it is primarily an ideal spectator, “the rasika”, who is knowledgeable about form and content of the performance, in other words – a knowledgeable connoisseur, who is also “sympathetic”, or sahridaya — which means she or he has a similar, or an open heart.“[23] Rajagopalan and Bharucha define the sahridaya as “[a] connoisseur who [...] has been initiated into the full enjoyment of an aesthetic experience. According to the Natyasastra, the sahridaya must be noble, learned, virtuous, impartial, and critically responsive to the structure of emotion in a work of art.”[24]

Because this is the training, in which my artistic practice is grounded, I am drawn to translate these potential gaps of understanding in performance and reception into my current, critical context, which I believe can and should be addressed curatorially. When looking at BIPOC artistic practices in Europe today, for example, the gap between critical artistic productions of artists of color and largely white audiences (in identity terms, a kind of insider-outsider situation), can not necessarily only be bridged by becoming knowledgeable and a learned connoisseur[25]. However, being “impartial, and critically responsive to the structure of emotion in a work of art”[26] can be a crucial basis for facilitating the aesthetic communication, and thereby also respond with an open-heart to a work that addresses e.g. racism from a BIPOC perspective.

As a result, I have proposed in a previous article and talks, a different notion of this ideal, imaginary sympathetic viewer which is based on taking much liberty in rethinking the rasika defined in passed down treatises:

Applying the notion of creating rasa to my diasporic [BIPOC] context, I would like to see the rasika […] as someone who is sahridaya in the sense of being willing to embark on the journey of the performance together with the performer and allow a meeting of their perspective and the performer’s. I see the rasika in a sense as a knowledgeable ally.[27]

How can, therefore, a curatorial framing and the development of formats of reception facilitate such interactions between performance and audience to create a temporary “we” collectively engaged in an act of aesthetic and emotional communication?

 

3. sadharanikaran, the concept of making common

Another fundamental principle that becomes important here is the emphasis on the idea of ‘making common’, in other words, transcending the immediately personal. As Bharucha explains:

It is important, that “tasting rasa” of a particular performance constitutes a heightened experience that transcends temporal, spatial, and personal conditions and constraints. In effect, what one experiences is not just the emotions relating to a character in a particular scene, still less the personality of the actor, but a transpersonal and universalized state of emotions called sadharanikarana [...].[28]

What is interesting to me here for a border- and community-crossing artistic and curatorial praxis is the non-dependence on connections and resonances based on familiarity and commonality and based on identity or positionality. The idea of trying to make common by way of transcending the immediately personal opens in my understanding – the possibility for ally-ship. Rather than presupposing expert knowledge for achievement of the ideal emotional correspondence to “taste the rasa” of the performance, I am interested in the notion of the open, or sympathetic heart, or, in Bharucha`s terms “the consent of the heart”:

Nonetheless, its consensual and participatory pleasure is made possible to connoisseurs of the arts, who are called rasika or sahridaya, whose ‘consent of the heart’ makes the experience of rasa at once immediate and indivisible.[29]

Together with my colleague from the Post Natyam Collective[30], Cynthia Ling Lee, I have expanded this understanding by invoking the rasika as a political ally, who can be sympathetic without being deeply knowledgeable in the art form, without directly identifying with the performer/protagonist, but to receive and be moved by what they are not familiar with, do not understand. Drawing on Jose Esteban Munoz[31] we concluded that “[p]oliticizing the rasika potentially informs ‘an anti-identitarian identity politics’ in which commonality is not forged through shared images and fixed identifications but fashioned instead from connotative images that invoke communal structures of feeling.” [32] (Esteban Munoz 1999: 176, original emphasis).

[...] A politically re-appropriated rasa would, to recontextualize David Halperin’s words, entail ‘cultivat[ing] that part of oneself that leads beyond oneself, that transcends oneself’; as Jose Esteban Munoz states, ‘[t]his moment of transcendence is the moment in which counterpublics become imaginable; it is a moment brimming with the possibility of transformative politics’  (1999: 178, 179).”

When setting out to rethink the open-hearted spectator in curatorial and critical artistic praxis, I intend to re-think the relationship between moving (affect),[33] emotion, and solidarity. How do I/we need to curate to move audiences to become allies? What formats do we need to develop for white audiences to taste the rasa of critical work by BIPOC artists? How can we curatorially awaken or facilitate a non-judgmental, open-hearted, sensual encounter between audience members and the performers, performance or installation, for example by creating welcoming, sensually engaging, and, at the same time, challenging spaces of encounter and engagement, which intend to set the tone for the aesthetic communication––for the meeting ground of this temporary collectivity of potential allies.

In line with anti-canonical and anti-discriminatory approaches at the intersection between art, activism and curation, I focus my re-interpretation of the rasika on the idea of being “critically responsive to the structure of emotion in a work of art”[34] and the notion of “consent of the heart”.[35]

Creating formats that facilitate the reception of BIPOC, anti-classist, anti-racist, decolonizing artistic positions stays primary for me: how can we invite audiences in and create spaces of exchange, spaces where allies in the guise of rasikas can emerge? How can we curate to move the witnessing guests of the performances to grant ‘consent of the heart’ and become allies?

How can we move the allies to contribute towards anti-discriminatory change. How can we gain consent to affect audiences to act against racism and discrimination and the continuity of (neo-)colonial connections?[36]

Curating in solidarity

Curating spaces of reception — rather than merely spaces of (re)presentation
Curating to build lasting community relations around an intention (not a topic)

Curating as Hosting
Curating as Hospitality
Curating against Racism
Curating against Classism
Curating as a Gesture toward Decolonization

Sandra Chatterjee is a choreographer and scholar (Culture & Performance/Dance Studies). In her artistic work she is interested in direct exchange with the audience and wants to involve senses less considered in dance (e.g. smells and their political dimensions). Recent choreographic projects include: Dance with the Stars #1, SWEAT – Smells of Labour, Smells of Racism und Smells of Coexistence - The Bee of the Heart, as well as Noor Inayat Khan: Performance Miniatures. She is co-organizer of the platform CHAKKARs – Moving Interventions (www.chakkars.de) and co-editor of the eZine Moving Interventions (https://chakkars.de/de/ezine/). Recent publications (selection): with Haitzinger, Nicole: “Evocations of the Sun in Modernity. Performing Egypt between Egyptomania, the Avant-Garde, and Identification.” (In Journal of Avant-Garde Studies 4, 2024); “Writing for Change: Critical Perspectives in Artistic and Scholarly Practices as Calls to Action.” (In Routledge Handbook of Music and Migration: Theories and Methodologies, eds. Wolfgang Gratzer, Nils Grosch, Ulrike Präger and Susanne Scheiblhofer. Routledge, 2023); “Von Spannungen, Widersprüchen und einem double bind”. (In Double Bind postkolonial: Kritische Perspektiven auf Kunst und Kulturelle Bildung, eds. María do Mar Castro Varela and Leila Haghighat. transcript Verlag, 2023); www.sandrachatterjee.net.