This article examines some recent dance exhibitions where a strong speculative involvement of choreographers from the so-called trend of “conceptual dance” has been at stake. Both the open question of the history of dance and performance and the possibility for choreographic thinking to engage with the forms of the exhibition display became objects of experimentation in important projects and museum pieces conceived by Boris Charmatz, Xavier Le Roy, and La Ribot. In turn, the latter activated further concerns around the way dancers and choreographers address the question of heritage and its transmission; in this regard, examples of Richard Move and Jérôme Bel are also brought in the discussion. The article considers these shifts within the hypothesis of a dance museum currently engaging with a wider statement and critique about the “time-based arts” (a term first coined in the context of film, video, and new media museum conservation) and the ongoing new, time-related configurations of the exhibition space.

The article analyzes an artistic project that is situated on the dividing line between the realm of performance and of exhibition. The Musée de la Danse in Rennes, France, contests the dichotomies of object and experience and introduces a notion of exhibition-as-performance. In so doing, the “Dancing Museum” suggests new perspectives on, and comprehensions of, the materiality involved in both museal and performance-based modes of presentation.

By renaming the Choreographic National Center in Rennes and Bretagne as the Musée de la danse in 2009, the French choreographer Boris Charmatz has indirectly raised new questions on both museum and dance ontologies, opening up the possibility of an enriched interdisciplinary discourse on the relationship between movement-based arts and museums/art institutions. This essay explores the changing museum and dance landscape over the past few decades, considers how museums have been theorized, and their relationship to, and engagement with, audiences; and asks what role choreography and dance can play in this new institutional context.

The search for the “centre”… For a dancer, this word resonates physically first of all. Not so long ago, the dancer, when he was training, was systematically told to “find his centre”. But today, it is generally acknowledged that the body has no centre, and he doesn't miss it. The body of modern times has no need for a centre, because that absent centre, the core which would enable one to feel reassured, isn't there, has ceased to be there. For in the void of a body expropriated of its centre, there is room for dance.

DRJ: It has now been five years since your manifesto “For a Dancing Museum” first appeared. As is well known, this manifesto led you to become director of the Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne (2009). Do you believe you have achieved the goals you stated as crucial for a dancing museum, i.e., to displace the idea of “Center” from the institution; to dismantle the “nationalism” always lurking under the adjectival “national”; to move the focus from the noun “Dance” to the actioning of the verb “Dancing” in defining this museum?

This piece is adapted from a lecture delivered in the “Performing Institutions” series curated by Artists Space with the 2012 Whitney Biennial. The event also included David Velasco of Artforum as well as Sarah Michelson, who had just become the first choreographer to win the Bucksbaum Award for the best work presented at the Whitney Biennial. Artists Space represented the Performing Institutions series in the following terms: “Taking as its starting point the 2012 Whitney Biennial's allocation of the fourth floor Emily Fischer Landau Galleries as a performance space for music, dance, theater, and participatory programming, this series of talks consider the status of performance and ‘virtuosity’ within the parameters of an institutional public sphere. Does this turn toward ‘activity without end product’ potentially shift entrenched relations between institution and artist, artwork and viewer, or reinforce a contemporary experience of totalizing social production?”

This article argues that the art world's current fascination for dance follows on from a previous high point of interaction in the late 1960s and 1970s, and before that, a moment in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It traces these first, second, and third waves of dance in the museum at three institutions: the Tate in London, and the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Three institutional histories are sketched, drawing out the differences between their approaches. The conclusion presents the four most pressing possibilities/problems of presenting dance in the museum: historical framing, spectatorship, altering the work's meaning, and financial support.

Once performance has a place in museums as a mode of exhibition, it problematizes its relationship to the event, and shifts its reception thresholds and expectations. This article offers an analysis of a number of durational exhibition formats based on the experience of temporality they offer, so as to examine how a system of temporal regimes comes into play. These projects have a duration that is dictated by the opening hours of the museum. The focus will be on the implications of this openness for the production of other modalities of spectatorship, and on the reconfiguration of institutional praxis.

What of dance is welcomed in the museum, and what remains on the outside? Artist Tino Seghal's “constructed situations” redirect this question, reworking relations of inside and outside, participant and observer, subject and object through a collective bodily attending to the situation itself. This article explores the conspiratorial techniques activated by This Situation (2007) to consider how dance moves in and with the museum. These techniques, which are derived from or affiliated with those of performance (the intricate negotiation of bodies, movement, and time in relation), include repetition, remixing, distributed movement, conspiratorial breathing, the compliment, disjunctions between words and gestures, and more as part of the work's ecology of practices. As interpreters of the piece in Montréal (and, as such, embodied archivists), the three authors take up key issues such as tensions between ephemerality and preservation, dance's anarchival propensity, and the contagious corporeal techniques of the piece that pass between interpreters and visitors, human and object materialities, and which traverse heterochronicities of the event and its resonances. We propose that what is specific to Sehgal's work within the museum is a holding of movements and relations as a way of persistently making and unmaking its forms, contents, and relations—as a way of making art contemporary, so to speak, via dance's propensity to always begin again. This commitment to re-beginning is what we term Sehgal's impersonal ethics: how This Situation (re)activates and relies on the generation of intensive but ambiguous embodiments.

This essay examines changes in apparatuses of visual and performing arts, taking as an example a museum presentation of Trisha Brown's project Floor of the Forest. The ontology of both the work of art and the dance exhibited in the museum, where presence and absence interact, is explored against criteria of temporality and theatricality. The position of the recipient is a focus of particular attention, undergoing transformations between the status of visitor (beholder) and audience (spectator) and as such actively involved in bringing forth art as such. Furthermore it is proposed, in particular in this example, that the interrelationships between recipients and actors or art objects can generate haunting choreographies which emphasize the indeterminate nature and progressive disintegration of artistic genres and attempt to intertwine divergent modes of presence in visual and performing arts.