This online course provides an in-depth look at the renewed rise of performance and participatory practices in curated museum, gallery, and research programs, while also exploring the growing number of global postgraduate offerings centered around socially-engaged performative practices. The course emphasizes the potential of performance as a mode of production and performativity as a method of curatorial exchange.
Participants will delve into critical questions surrounding the potential for performative curatorial activities to both navigate and critique systems that capture intimacy, collectivity, transmission, embodiment, mediation, and spectatorship. Throughout the course, a range of pertinent examples, both practical and conceptual, will be provided to bolster participants' understanding of the topic.
Assignments in the course are designed to support individual insights and foster future projects. By engaging in this course, participants will gain deeper understanding of the current interchange between performance, performance art, live art, and contemporary choreographic practice in what has been defined as the 'new performance turn'.

Dr Sarah Spies is a choreographer, performance curator and senior lecturer in contemporary dance and performance art. She is part of Manchester-based artists-led curatorial collective Accumulations and has led and collaborated on numerous internationally funded public research and performative events and programmes. She is the author of Choreographies of the Curatorial: Performative Trajectories for Choreography and Dance in the Museum (2020) and the co-editor of (Un)Commoning Voices & (Non)Communal Bodies (2021) with Maayan Sheleff. She is also on the editorial board of TURBA – The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation.