Architecture + Choreography: Lecture by Beth M Weinstein
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.
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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).
