Notes on Ecosystem, Care-taking, and Relation: Curating the 53rd Choreographers’ Evening
By Benny Olk
Minnesota is an ecosystem of performers, makers, technicians, viewers, funders, theaters, studios, and institutions that circulate dancing, choreographies, ideas, and energies. Choreographers’ Evening is a clearing in that ecosystem, where artists come to assert and make visible their work at the Walker Art Center. While Choreographers’ Evening continues in its 53rd year, in a literal sense our other shared spaces are shrinking. The wells are drying up. Dancers are resourceful and resilient, but we need a profusion of means and opportunities of many scales, varieties, and forms to flourish. One resource cannot save the entire ecosystem.
As an ecosystem, our existence is already entwined and connected. Relation articulates the meaning of our differences by illuminating the necessity of their connection. Antillean philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concept of relation underpins this thinking in Poetics of Relation: “Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared knowledge . . . In Relation, the whole is not the finality of its parts: for multiplicity in totality is totally diversity.” By understanding ourselves in relation, we can at once insist on our differences, while cultivating our collectivity, and find our interdependence as the source of collective well-being.
Curating Choreographers’ Evening is an act of making space for how Minnesota dance can be, together. Curation, from an etymological understanding, can be an act of care, attention, and nurturing, a way to give time and space for an artwork to become more itself. Choreography activates the relation of people and ideas through time and space, and exists as a frame or container for dancing. Dancing itself is also a practice of relation, a social encounter that offers the opportunity to participate, to witness, and to wonder about what you see, how you feel, how you want to move, and an invitation to move yourself.
Dancing is a way of sensing and making sense. It allows the dancer to continually ask questions, forming an answer while on the way to posing another question, the front ever evolving and changing, the certainty of an answer fulfilled (or not) while the next question is pouring forth, opening up, spilling out. Each moment bridges the known and unknown, and then the next moment arrives and what came before lingers.
This year’s Choreographers’ Evening is a choreographed constellation of artworks. These artworks are whole unto themselves, while their place alongside one another illuminates their relation. Though these works were not made together, they come from a shared ecosystem, and their co-existence in this evening is dependent on one another. Together, this constellation reflects and refracts the questions Leslie, Erika, Gabe, Jamie, Eva, Non, Judith, Hannah, Erin, Naomi, Kae, Melissa, Maggie, Carlo, Joe, and I are asking, through and with one another.▪︎
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