Curator, dramaturg, writer, André Lepecki is Associate Professor in Performance Studies at New York University. He graduated in Cultural Anthropology at the New University of Lisbon and obtained his masters and doctoral degree in Performance Studies at New York University. In the 1980s he was dramaturg for choreographers Vera Mantero and João Fiadeiro, in the 1990s for Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods. He co-directed with Bruce Mau the video-installation STRESS (MAK, Wien, 2000), and with Rachael Swain the video-installation proXy (Performance Space, Sydney, 2003). With Eleonora Fabião he co-created the performance series Wording (2004-06). He co-curated with Stephanie Rosenthal and directed the first authorized remaking of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Acts, for Haus der Kunst, Munich, and PERFORMA 07, NY. He has curated events for Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Tanz im August. Since 2008 he is a Permanent Fellow at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Research Project

Grounds of Performance (Part II): The Performance of Violence and the Postcolonial Nostalgic

My project revisits the recent history of performance art by considering it as intrinsically bound to historical movements of colonial liberation, and to current debates on post-colonial criticality and awareness. In this sense, a clarification of the specificities of the affects and politics of performance art becomes inevitable. Here, performance art’s emphasis on a politics of identity and of embodiment through a dramaturgy of violence gains a different contour, and its emergence in the broader political and historical context of our current post-colonial condition reveals our time’s post-colonial melancholic convulsions.