expo zéro was described on the online event page as “an exhibition project without any objects” and a meeting place for a diverse group of ten international performance and dance artists and scholars who were invited to “discuss, enact and perform” their proposals for a “museum of dance.” In this sense, the event was envisioned as a hub for the overarching concept of Charmatz’s museum of dance. The gathering was situated in a collection of unmarked white-box galleries. The dynamics of each meeting and room were distinctive. Popping into one would lead to an encounter with British performance artist Tim Etchells, who performed delicious walkabout soliloquies; contemporary Thai dance artist Pichet Klunchun, in another, was quiet and withdrawn into slow-motion movement introspections. Although discrete, because it was a bit tucked away from the other events, expo zéro functioned as a kind of viaduct that indirectly helped the visitor to transverse back and forth between the surrounding ideas on offer both in the Turbine Hall and by the dancers scattered in galleries throughout the building.

Like Adrénaline, expo zéro manifested a state of in-betweenness. In both, viewers and participants saw Charmatz giving up a certain degree of control, inviting chance and exploration into the project; both projects also relinquished the museum/dance binary in favor of hybrid forms. Given the vaguely anthropological tone of Charmatz’s experimentation with the museum, it is perhaps not surprising that the liminal spaces emerging in these two parts of his work might be theorized by the concepts proposed by anthropologist Victor Turner, who studied ritual structures in relation to individuals and communities: although in this case not people but places, the suspended states of both Adrénaline and expo zéro are “at once no longer classified and not yet classified” (Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols, Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1967, 96). This liminal dimension has ontological implications, as it equally negates “all positive structural assertions,” while it is “in some sense the source of them all” (97). Charmatz’s two events were also suspended realms of “possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (ibid.).

Charmatz’s proposals crack open existing structures—the museum, the theater—that have traditionally hosted the relationships and encounters of these forms (art and dance, respectively). Particularly, perhaps, the thinking spaces of expo zéro help us to see that the answer might be in the very interrogation of the governing principles and conventions for museum and theaters. By keeping this process open, some new relational configurations between dance and the visual concept of art museum might be revealed.

The version of 20 Dancers for the XX Century in If Tate Modern Was Musée de la Danse? featured twenty dancers, each of whom represented different traditions, choreographers, and styles of dance, from the balletic tradition of George Balanchine to the contemporary street style of krumping. Dispersed throughout Tate Modern’s permanent collection galleries, the dancers, equipped with boomboxes, were free to choose the location, or “stage,” in which to perform their movement. Some, like Seguette, situated themselves in galleries, thus juxtaposing their piece of the twentieth century with the artistic styles surrounding them; others chose to perform in more apparently neutral or transitional spaces, such as hallways. ...Continue Reading