Curating Action: Rethinking Ethnographic Collections and the Role/Place of Performing Arts in the Museum

摘要

Dance involves a set of movements that embody social memory. Such forms ofintangible heritage have presented emerging challenges for curatorship. Thispaper draws from the experience of the Musées de la civilisation (Quebec City,Canada) to address ideas of collecting and curating in the performing arts. Bypresenting the travelling exhibition Rebel Bodies, an international collaborativeproject that highlights contemporary dance and movement as universal modes ofcreativity and expression, the paper reflects on the social role of the museum insustaining creativity within the community as well as on the use of ethnographicmaterial to collectively (through museums and artists) curate the intangible. Intreating notions of natural, virtuoso, urban, multi, political, and atypical bodies,this exhibition brings together performers and creative artists as well as industriesin the museum setting. Such interplays, it is argued, encourage the sustainableparticipation of artistic communities/industries and further highlight museums asdynamic loci for the promotion of social change