A CAPLA Lecture Series Event
When
Where
Join CAPLA for the School of Architecture Lecture Series, featuring dynamic speakers from across built environment industries.
Architecture + Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time
Beth Weinstein
September 30, 5 p.m.
Sundt Gallery
Beth Weinstein (Architect and Associate Professor, School of Architecture) will speak about her recently published monograph, Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge, 2024).
The book examines the field of archi-choreographic experiments—unique interdisciplinary encounters and performed events generated through collaborations between architects and choreographers. Forty case studies spanning four decades give evidence of the range of motivations for embarking on these creative endeavors and diverse conceptual underpinnings, generative methods, objects of inquiry, and outcomes. Architecture and Choreography builds histories and theories through which to examine these works, the contexts within, and processes through which the works emerged, and the critical questions they raise about ways to work together, sites and citations, ethics and equity, control and agency. Three themes frame pairs of chapters. The first addresses disciplinarity through works that critically reflect upon their discipline’s tools, techniques, and conventions juxtaposed against projects that cite or use other art forms and cultural phenomena as source material. The second interrogates space and the role of spatial dispositifs, institutions, and sites, and their hidden and not-so-hidden conditions, as conceptual drivers and structures to subvert, trouble, unsettle, remember. The third asks who and what dances, finding a spectrum from mobilized architectural bodies to more than human cybarcorps. Modes of collaboration and the temporalities and life cycles of projects inform bookending chapters. Architecture and Choreography offers vital lessons not only for architects and choreographers but also for students and practitioners across design and performance fields.
This lecture will be in-person and online via Zoom. If you are interested in attending virtually, please register below.
Works featured in the book were created through collaborations between Merce Cunningham and Benedetta Tagliabue–EMBT Architects; Lucinda Childs and Frank O Gehry / Gehry Partners; Frédéric Flamand and Diller Scofidio +Renfro (DS+R); Flamand and Dominique Perrault / DPA; Flamand and Zaha Hadid Architects ZHA; Carol Brown and Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen; Jessica Lang and Steven Holl Architects SHA; William Forsythe, Maria Palazzi, Norah Zuniga Shaw and Stephen Turk; Wayne McGregor and John Pawson; Nacho Duato and Jaafar Chalabi; Flamand and Thom Mayne / Morphosis; Kota Yamazaki and Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects; Phillip Adams and Büro; Adams and Matthew Bird / Studio Bird; Asher Waldron with the SSDT and Bryony Roberts; Brown and Dorita Hannah; Sharon Mansur and Ronit Eisenbach; Tanya Lukin Linklater and Tiffany Shaw-Collinge; La Vitrina and Rodrigo Tísi; Melissa Lohman and Roberts; Ella Fiskum and Serge von Arx; Ellen Sinopoli and Frances Bronet; Flamand and Jean Nouvel / AJN; Jo Kanamori and Tsuyoshi Tane; Richard Siegal and François Roche; Forsythe and Nikolaus Hirsch & Michel Müller; Elisa Monte and Tod Williams Billie Tsien & Associates; Tere O’Connor and Julie Larsen & Roger Hubeli / APTUM; Flamand and Ai Weiwei; John Jasperse and Ammar Eloueini / Digit-All; Alonzo King and Christopher Haas; Siegal and Didier Fiúza Faustino; Jonah Bokaer and Harrison Atelier (HAt); Alito Alessi and Bronet; Yamazaki and SO-IL; Grisha Coleman and John Oduroe; Silas Riener and HAt; Bokaer and DS+R; Childs and Gehry; Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Company and DS+R.
About the Speaker
Beth Weinstein’s practice and research move between the architectural and the performative, and across scales from drawing to performance-installations to urban interventions, investigating spatial manifestations and invisibilities of political and environmental issues. Her practice-based doctoral research explored how performances of spatial labor, employing architecture’s instruments (text, drawings and models), can render ‘sensible’ (in)visibilities around architectures of internment. Co-founder of ReSI (Remembering Spaces of Internment), she continues to ask what forms of architecture, and associated invisibilities, are produced through executive order and under states of exception.
Beth is the author of Architecture + Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge 2024). The book examines the field of archi-choreographic experiments—unique interdisciplinary encounters and performed events generated through collaborations between architects and choreographers. The book includes forty case studies spanning four decades giving evidence of the range of motivations for embarking on these creative endeavors and diverse conceptual underpinnings, generative methods, objects of inquiry, and outcomes. She also curated the Collaborative Legacy of Merce Cunningham exhibition (2011-13) which was shown in several venues in the US and Europe. She has extensively published on performativity in and of public space, theater architecture, and scenography and she serves on the advisory editorial board of the Routledge Journal of Theater + Performance Design.
Beth is a registered architect and founded Architecture Agency in 2002 after more than a decade of practice in the offices of Jean Nouvel, Asymptote, SOM and others. She has coordinated and taught undergraduate and graduate design studios; capstone; critical inquiry; history, theory and techniques of representation; building technologies; and workshop-seminars exploring performance, politics and public space. In recent courses, she and her students have examined Paris through lenses of empire and postcolony and have reimagined social and ecological architectures and infrastructures along NYC’s East River. She has lectured internationally, taught at ENSA Paris-Malaquais, the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture (ESA), Confluence Institute and Columbia University in Paris, as well as Columbia’s GSAPP, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Pratt Institute, and Parsons/The New School for Design. At the University of Arizona she is a faculty affiliate of the School of Art, of the Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory GIDP (SCCT), and Arizona Institutes for Resilience (AIR).