Join us in Paris on November 19th at 5pm !
Architect, researcher, performance-installation maker and educator Beth Weinstein investigates the field of archi-choreographic experiments in her monograph, Architecture + Choreography : Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge 2024). The book’s forty case studies spanning four decades give evidence of the range of motivations for embarking on these creative endeavors and the diverse conceptual underpinnings, generative methods, objects of inquiry, and outcomes. Architecture and Choreography builds theories through which to examine these works and the contexts within and processes through which the works emerged, the critical questions they raise about ways to work together, sites and citations, ethics and equity, control and agency.
In her Confluence Institute lecture, she will present outcomes of her investigation into what emerges when architects and choreographers collaborate for the first time on the making of a spatial event, and particularly when they conceptually excavate sites or assemble spatial dispositives as generative methods. The talk will be followed by a Q&A and conversation about by sites and structures in the local context that invite exploration through archi-choreographic approaches.
An architect, researcher, performance-installation maker and educator, Beth Weinstein’s practice and research move between textual, material, spatial, performative, choreographic, and graphic modes to render sensible (dis)appearances and (in)visibilities related to critical issues such as climate catastrophe, historic injustices, states of exception, invisible labor, as well as creative processes.
She has synthesized nearly two decades of research on the field she calls archi-choreographic experiments in her monograph Architecture + Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge 2024) and previously curated the Collaborative Legacy of Merce Cunningham exhibition (2011-13). She has broadly published on performativity in and of public space, theater architecture, and scenography, including chapters in Performing Architectures (Methuen, 2018); Critical Practices in Architecture (Cambridge, 2020); The Routledge Companion to Scenography (Routledge, 2017); Architecture as a Performing Art(Ashgate, 2013); and Disappearing Stage (The Theater Institute, 2012); plus articles in the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Artistic Research, Performance Research and Places.
Her current investigations, employing forensic architectural and other methods, focus on rendering sensible a razed space of internment in France—the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes. This has led her to co-found the international and interdisciplinary research group ReSI (Remembering Spaces of Internment).
Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation (USA); FACE Foundation/Villa Albertine, Academie d’Architecture and Cité Internationale des Arts (F); Casa de Velazquez (E); Bundanon and Rosamund McCulloch/UTAS (AUS) residencies.
Beth Weinstein (BFA, M.Arch, PhD) is Professor of Architecture, Chair of Object and Spatial Design in the BA in Design Arts & Practices, and faculty affiliate of the School of Art, of the Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory GIDP (SCCT), and Arizona Institutes for Resilience (AIR) at the University of Arizona (UA). She has taught at ESA, ENSA Paris Malaquais and Confluence Inst. in France; in the US, at Columbia University GSAPP, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Pratt Institute, and Parsons/The New School for Design.
Jo Kanamori and Tsuyoshi Tane, SHIKAKU (2004). Photo: Kishin Shinoyama
