In a famous piece that she penned, Belgian playwright Marianne de Kerhoeven once wrote that alongside a “minor” dramaturgy, built in and around each work there exists a “major” dramaturgy embracing that work’s interactions with its audience and with “what is going on outside its orbit”. The theatre, the city, the world and even the sky with its stars are, in de Kerkhoeven’s view, different layers that touch each other, they breathe each other and they are mutually porous with one another.
We might call the dimension of the major dramaturgy the “curatorial dimension” - a dimension that is performative in its own right in the sense that it is characterised by a specific form of action and that its action has a certain effectiveness with regard to the world around it.
In the course of the seminar we will be exploring this dimension using theoretical texts, study cases and artistic, educational and curatorial practices that impart a complexity to it, expanding the relationship between the performance arts and the environment in which they live and work
Silvia Bottiroli, PhD, is an independent researcher who works in the sphere of the performance arts and, in particular, in the intersection between theoretical research, curatorial practices and education. Her research interests are in policies of performance and of spectatoriality and in artistic institutions.
She has been art director of DAS Theatre, international master for artistic and curatorial practices in Amsterdam (2018-2021) and at the Festival di Santarcangelo (2012-2016). She has curated the May Events programme for the Kunsten Festival Des Arts in Brussels and Vooruit in Ghent (2018) and co-curated various artistic, discursive and educational projects, cooperating among other things with the Homo Novus Festival in Riga and the School of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem. She has collaborated with various graduate and postgraduate courses including the SNDO School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, the Corso di Laurea in Teatro e Arti Perfomative at the IUAV in Venice and the Master PACS in Rome.
Since 2011 she has been lecturing in Method, Criticism and Research in Artistic Disciplines / the Theatre at the Università Bocconi in Milan and since 2019 she has been co-curator with Kee Hong Low of a new performance platform for Freespace at the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong.