For this sixth issue, TURBA has assembled thirteen narratives and conversations from multiple generations of institutional and independent curators, festival makers, artist-curators, art historians, dramaturg-curators, arts educators, and researchers. Various forms of dance, music, theater, circus arts, conceptual art and performance art are represented in this collection.

These authors recount and analyze how live arts curators attempt to navigate the crosscurrents of their own and others’ identities, negotiate the ancient and traditional with contemporary forms and engage with the notion of identities in productive, creative, quirky, wistful, serious, partisan, revolutionary, and elegant ways. We were interested in the practices, strategies, and creative responses of those who must reconcile lofty ideals with local conditions: with concrete persons, power structures, debates and beliefs, local and global politics, money, resources and audiences.

Some position the discussion in view of the urgent necessity to recognize and maintain one's “authentic” (often cultural) identity, while others explore the immense complexity of multilayered identities. And in an unexpected twist on this issue's thematic framework, two authors turned to the question of “aesthetic identities”—one providing an illuminating primer on the character and historiography of contemporary circus arts, and another proposing an “ethno-aesthetic” reconfiguration of the curator's subjectivity in the music world.

Among these pages are insightful and contentious narratives of both the intricacies and certitudes of identities. On the one hand, in his article on “flickering identities,” composer/curator Alexey Munipov vividly illustrates one perspective of this predicament for those who, whether out of necessity or choice—have learned to negotiate differing geopolitics, cultures, societies, world views, vocations, art forms, and intersectional affiliations:

Let's say this composer is living in Barcelona with dual citizenship, born in Uzbekistan, educated in New York, composing electroacoustic music on politically charged texts, a Buddhist, a queer artist, an amateur somnologist, a Central Asian dissident, a student of Beat Furrer, who loves playing the viola da gamba and experimenting with AI—which of these is most important? What should a curator include in a short bio?

On the other hand, for artist-curator Aguibou Bougobali Sanou, expressive forms like dance are more than “just artistic expressions; they are cultural narratives that embody a community's history, values, and spirituality.” He avows absolute clarity about his own identity in the world, rooted in ancestral traditions, as he declares with certitude:

I am, above all, a SANOU, a Male of Bobo-Madarè ethnic from the village of Kuinima embedded in the current city of Bobo-Dioulasso, the second largest city of Burkina Faso, therefore indigenous of the town of Bobo. I am a Numu—blacksmith, a Dozo, a Mandeka from the Madingo kingdom, and a Burkinabè, an upright being before being an “African.”

With all of this in mind, to begin at the beginning, five voices in this issue present and represent distinct Indigenous artworlds and ethos from distant corners of the planet. Acknowledging ongoing global movements toward reconciliation, restoration, and rebuilding with First Peoples, it is imperative for these authors to uphold traditional practices despite the fact that they inevitably, invariably change over time. It might even be said that most cultural expressions are “traditional,” even in their contemporary forms, in the sense that they rely on transgenerational transmissions of practices and identities, and on their own relevance to certain geographically, sometimes even ethnically, circumscribed audiences. Should such cultural practices equally diversify, decolonize, disidentify? How are they perceived by global audiences and critics when they seek to craft contemporary art works in response to those artists with creative orientations or to the (perceived) demands of an international art marketplace? Norwegian performance studies professor Knut Ove Arntzen focuses his attention on the curation of Indigenous and coastal people's artforms in the Arctic and North Atlantic through a postcolonialist, decolonizing lens, and on finding identity “in-between different identities” and “dialogic spaces.” Arntzen draws on Danish-Greenlandic visual artist Pia Arke's notion of a “third place,” put forward in a recent version of her essay Ethnoæstetik (2010)—an excerpt of which is reprinted in this issue—to explore how an ethnology-inspired modernism has spawned forms like Sámi experimentalism and Indigenous futurism. In a similar spirit, curator-composer Felicity Wilcox offers a series of personal reflections about her own “troubled identity” as a white Northern European settler growing up in Australia. Wilcox seeks what she calls an “ethos of exchange” in her artistic and curatorial work that are guided by First Nations knowledge-building and logics as she implements various strategies such as: bringing Indigenous musicians and their languages into her performances, speaking/listening and truth-telling, and carrying the “sounds of Country” into her artmaking. Festival makers Mané Touré from Sénégal and Thobile Maphanga from South Africa, who met at the Festival Academy Atelier in Montréal in 2022, sparked an informal WhatsApp exchange composed of “gentle reflections” on topics like exoticism, nudity, and traditional dance. They take us with them as they travel to several festivals on and off the continent, sharing their pointed insights about African art as “confused exhibitionism” and their observation that African identity is so central to so much recent African performance work. They ask (and answer) the question: “who do we curate for when we curate African art?” Yet another first-person account brings further insights from the African continent. This elegant essay is written by self-identified edu-curator and dancemaker-curator Aguibou Bougobali Sanou hailing from Burkina Faso and residing in the United States. Anchored in African wisdom and in the form of poetic metaphors, he tells us of the delicate balance he must maintain while living between two continents and raising bicultural children, his desire to preserve tradition while engaging with the contemporary as a college dance teacher and artist, and how he brings together the profane and sacred in his own choreography (see his work on the cover of this issue).

How do curators, artists, and thinkers reconcile demands for a diversity of persons of various (cultural) identities while operating within a clearly culturally specific and often locally dominant practice when living in diaspora? How do mixed and transgressive identities, migratory aesthetics, the wide diversity and internal hierarchies of cultural practices within each given community enter into considerations—and long-term cultural strategies? TURBA co-editor Sandeep Bhagwati moderated a lively exchange among an intergenerational trio of artists living in Montréal, with biographical ties to India or Indian culture: Deepa Nallappan (Bharata Natyam choreographer and festival curator), Rahul Varma (playwright and theater director), and Gabriel Dharmoo (composer, singer, performer, drag artist). Bhagwati launches the exchange with a primary question about how their “Indian-ness” has informed their artistic and curatorial work. The interlocutors offered differing thoughts about whether or not preserving Indian culture had played a part in their artistic vision, and contemplated questions about appropriation. Each response was unique in view of their circumstances, affiliations, and trajectory, but Indian culture has, to some extent, proved a driving force for each of them.

Curators and artists are regularly asked to field the contemporary animated, debate-oriented public cultural sphere, largely a heritage and hegemony of European notions of individualized expression and art histories. These narratives are often positioned precisely against or at the margins of prevailing majoritarian thinking. The very vitality of public cultural discourse and the survival of threatened arts historiographies, relies on authors who are able and willing to think and speak and write publicly about their critical perceptions of others and of the Other, even to imagine what it would be like to be an Other. Veteran independent Indonesian curator/dramaturg Helly Minarti, revisits her critical assessment of the “sites of mis/understanding” at the Second Asia-Europe Dance Forum in 2006. Bringing together sixteen young contemporary dancers in Berlin for eight days of performances, workshops, and discussions proved “not only a site of re/presentation, but most predictably, of confrontation.” Reflecting on the wisdom gained over the course of the eighteen years since the forum, Minarti realizes that the repercussions of these experiences led her to bond with her Indonesian colleagues as they embraced a practice of “travelling/dwelling,” as they sought to discover more deeply the dancing in their own regions. This brought about a radical transformation of her own curatorial practice, one in which she now creates intimate spaces for immersive conversation and “deep listening in the hope of subverting . . . certain ideas about Asianess that persist.” In the midst of horrific war and destruction in Ukraine, Basel-based and Ukranian-born cultural critic and writer Kateryna Botanova calls for a “nonhistory” of the arts in her poignant and powerful call to engage with the “new sensitivities arising from decolonized knowledge,” and so to begin writing multicentered, nonlinear art histories. One of Botanova's case studies, a monumental project at the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, The Shadow of Dream Cast upon Giardini della Biennale conceived by curatorial collective The Open Group, assembled a hard drive with a registry of 1,143 artists from Ukraine in response to their virtual invisibility they called “blankets of snow.”

The community in question may also be consciously constituted through self-identification or, as José Esteban Muñoz terms the transformation of works by those outside the mainstream for their own cultural purposes, “disidentifications” (1999)—through recognition by others who already belong to it. The precise criterion for belonging may thus differ widely from community to community. With his landmark interdisciplinary essay “Who Needs Identity?” in which he reopens contentious questions about the meaning and function of identities, Stuart Hall contends that “Identities are . . . not the so-called return to roots but a coming-to-term with our ‘routes’” (2000, 4). Japanese curator and dramaturg Ken Takiguchi reprints—and then revisits—his chapter for the anthology Curating Live Arts (2019, 59–70) investigating how Singapore became a “curating nation,” beginning with Keng Sen Ong's POST-Empire, POST-Tradition, and POST-Global futurist curatorial outlook for the Singapore International Festival of the Arts in 2015. Takiguchi later delves into Ong's TheatreWorks’ (now T:>Works) intercultural methodology in which he imagines a “New Asia” by revitalizing contemporary arts through juxta-positioning them with traditional cultures. Controversial and contested by some, this philosophy synchronized with the national cultural policy defining the “Renaissance Singaporean”: at once open, analytical, creative, and attuned to their “Asian roots and heritage in a borderless world.” Berlin-based ex-Moscow critic, curator and journalist Alexey Munipov, as discussed earlier, asks us to consider the immensely complex blend of characteristics that compose our characters and ideologies. In this essay he also delves into questions about how audiences, musicians, and curators try to, and often avoid, labeling genres of abstract musical compositions when they “resist clear categorization.” In imagining which kinds of music will “constitute the cultural gold reserve” of the future, he predicts that it will be precisely those with musical identities that are complex hybrids woven together from a myriad of cultural sources and artistic genres.

Turning us toward the identity of curatorship itself, performer and researcher Theresa Coffey offers a theory of the curatorial as an “ethico-aesthetic” practice. Squaring French poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault's notion of cura sui (care for the self)—which she reads as necessarily a form of care for others—and core ideas from American feminist theorist Karen Barad's new materialism, Coffey posits the curatorial as a relational, co-constitutive process that produces the agential subjectivities of curator and curated.

In her inaugural text on curating this artistic medium in the live arts, with this comprehensive essay on the emergence of contemporary circus arts over the last fifty years, veteran circus curator and producer Ruth Juliet Wikler skillfully maps the myriad genres, companies, and geopolitics that distinguish and identify those performances located in the art world from those of the popular entertainment complex. Illustrating this art form's “infinite variety,” with abundant examples and in her lively and ironic voice, Wikler has created an insightful, useful primer for aspiring contemporary circus curators, audiences, and critics.

Cultural actors and their work are often marginalized and subjected to vehement critical scrutiny over the legitimacy of their voice. Finding a strategy to overcome these obstacles can be as vexing, daunting, and intimidating as it can be transformative and liberating. Taking us into to the corridors of South Africa's community theater milieu, multidisciplinary artist and film scholar Obett Motaung offers an ardent advocacy paper in favor of bringing to prominence the voices of its actors, whose socially vital theatrical works and alternative public events and venues have too long been underfunded, unrecognized and excluded from mainstream festivals. He discusses the economic and political barriers they face, their impactful voice of protest against Apartheid, and some of the exemplary festivals and organizations that are already providing models of inclusion.

Lastly, dancer and dance scholar Élisabeth-Anne Dorléans offers a review of the first issue of the long-standing OnCurating journal dedicated entirely to dance, and, in particular, to decolonizing the curation of dance. From her perspective as an Afro-descendant Canadian dancer and curator living in Montréal, Dorléans offers a first-person critique from the perspective of a thoughtful engaged reader like herself who holds a personal stake in these discourses.

In the guise of a conclusion, a final realization comes to mind. As our journal has taken shape over the past three years, the process of putting together this issue was also a moment of reckoning with our own disciplinary identity. As we work to consolidate our position as a unique global publication within an evolving field of theory and practice, certain submissions in this issue pushed at the edges of our collective understanding of both “curation” and “liveness.” Might the idea of a visual arts exhibition in which the artist merged her body with that of trees through AI, or of pre-recorded voices of endangered refugees experienced through headphones in a gallery be considered live performance? Perhaps not. Boundaries and gray zones, are still (and will always be) under construction.

During the process of assembling this issue, it has become evident that the topic of identities hits a nerve in the discourses of so many artistic communities and is one of the vital concerns of today's socio-geo-politics. Perhaps the simplest way to draw a thread throughout this disparate set of reflections on curation and identities is via this offering from Pia Arke: “If we are to belong in a place, we shall have to create that place ourselves” (2010).

Dena Davida, Sandeep Bhagwat, and Tawny Andersen