Museum Choreography

As we enter a museum, we are choreographed by the curatorial rationale: museum architecture, thearrangement of art works in galleries, verbal descriptions (labels, panels, audio-guides), and the museum'stacit codes of behaviour are powerful tools in shaping our interpretation of art works, especially if we havelittle or no prior knowledge of art. Like choreographic instructions, they configure our movement in space,direct our gaze and condition our thought.Working in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I propose an interdisciplinary methodology that reframes the visitor's movement in the museum space aschoreographed performance. Building on my experience as a dance practitioner and a museumprofessional, I will combine visitor research strategies and choreographic practice to study the interactionbetween museum 'instructions' and visitor movement, to provide practical solutions that allow for visitoragency in navigating the museum space.In recent years, the programming of live dance in museums is a 'burning topic' (Bishop, 2014) in museumand curatorial studies. In the wake of this supposed 'curatorial turn' in dance, it is however still fervidly debated whether dance is being used to entice visitors into an intensified interactive museum experiencethat nonetheless does not entail a deeper engagement with the artwork (Foster, 2015; Bishop, 2014).Rather than discussing the curatorial implications of showcasing dance in museums, my study builds onrecent discourse on the choreographic and performative nature of curatorial practices (Lind, 2012, VonBismark, 2012, Copeland, 2013) and on the idea of choreography as an expanded practice (Spangberg,Cvejic', Le Roy, 2012), to demonstrate the profound conceptual connection between choreography andmuseum curating.By asserting this connection and its potential to increase intellectual access to art collections, my researchwill significantly contribute to a critical repositioning of the role of dance in museums.