We live in the turbulent wake of a great disturbance. It has radically altered not only the course and the texture of all human lives–but also our perceptions of our own relationship with the world at large–and thus, by consequence, transformed the roles and possibilities that the live arts can assume and offer. Over the past two years, certainties have dissolved, and habits have been broken. Some are rebounding, albeit into a profoundly disrupted social environment in which the concerns of climate crisis, of equality and diversity, of recalibrating the world’s economic and political constellations are embroiled in dangerous cacophonies. Being (a)live in a world of lives being lost and damaged prematurely every day forces us to confront deep questions about what the work of curating the live arts might do to counter rampant fears and console us who have survived so far.
In this issue, TURBA asks for texts that examine the aesthetic and organizational resilience of live arts making: What could it mean to curate through this global crisis? Beyond all the astounding stories of coping, this issue would like to examine the long-term consequences of the pandemic for ethics and aesthetics, for trust and truth, for social cohesion and polarization, for authority and dissent, for the conditions for and the relevance of the live arts and other cultural expressions. If “war is the father of all things” (Heraclitus) and “necessity the mother of invention” (Aesop) – what are new forms of expression and presentation that have been invented by live arts makers and curators in these troubled years? And will these new expressive inventions really change our cultural reality amidst the busyness of making our art forms live on?
What do makers and audiences make of the sudden shift towards digital technologies in the live arts? New questions arise: How far can our human body reach out into the world? Which sensations can impact us even at a distance? What do we need to feel the presence of an audience? What does the audience need to experience our liveness? Do we really need to be together at the same moment, in the same room? TURBA is interested in analyses of curatorial responses to these questions, also those that place them in wider historical and cultural contexts. Digitalization has also led to new, more democratic forms of distribution that, both in production speed and audience access, often circumvent habitual curatorial routines. Is the idea (and the business model) of curation threatened or invigorated by these hybrid models of curation and production that bridge the physical and the virtual, that easily convey local productions to a global viewership?