Professor André Lepecki was a guest of Outset Bialik Residency, in collaboration with Kelim Choreography Center, Bat Yam, during February 2019. Prof. Lepecki is a researcher and curator, and Chair of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. During his residency, Lepecki led, for the first time in Israel, two seminars for choreographers, researchers, and curators, as well as a lecture for the general public.
Professor Andre Lepecki is the editor of several dance and performance theory anthologies, the author of the book "Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement" (translated to Hebrew in 2013) and of "Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance" (2016). He is a curator of dance and performance events, among them the revived exhibition and performance "18 Happenings in 6 Parts" by Alan Kaprow, for which he received a special prize from the International Association of Critics United States.
The seminars led by Lepecki were titled "dance and power: choreopolitics in neo-authoritarian times." The seminars investigated the current relations between choreography and the political. The working hypothesis was that this relation can be approached by expanding both what we believe choreography is and does, and what we think the political is and does. In this sense, the point of departure would be to address series of recent choreographic and performance works that operate directly on those expansions. To help the discussions, a series of texts by dance theorists, political philosophers, critical race theorists, post-colonial theorists, and by artists was read jointly, helping in addressing the new conditions of policing movement (including the movement of thought, including the movement of affect) in the expanded neoliberal, neo-authoritarian conditions of contemporary living.
