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.

As authors who contributed to an edited volume, we were startled to learn that editors added a subtitle that broadly declared French balletic supremacy. This text, entitled The Opera Ballet: Three Centuries of Supremacy Beginning with Louis XIV [Le Ballet de l'Opéra: Trois siècles de suprématie depuis Louis XIV] (Auclair and Ghristi 2013), presents the notion of “supremacy” as a seductive value, and it is disturbing, to say the least. It is first and foremost a false assertion. The editors cannot seriously suppose that the Paris Opera Ballet, during the course of three centuries, occupied a position of dominance; and such a notion requires, in any case, detailed discussion establishing the criteria that are considered to define and delimit said domination. Such a title participates in a type of competition better identified with nation states, capitals, or European theaters after the seventeenth century. To suggest that the Paris Opera Ballet has always existed as a place of cultural “supremacy” is first of all to ignore the question of métissage, and to overlook how the institution adopted exogenous knowledge and savoir-faire; it is a rejection of dance history that occurred elsewhere, entirely separate or sometimes in opposition to the productions of this single cultural institution. Most disturbing of all is the highlighting of the notion of “supremacy,” or a superiority and power over others. By valuing the notion of domination, the editors encourage readers to envision dance and the broader world in terms of inferiority and superiority (between classes, genders, nations, and cultures). The Paris Opera Ballet may have acted in the service of such an ideology in the past, and may do so again in the future; however, the role of a scholarly publication should be to analyze discourses of propaganda, not to reproduce them.

It appears to be a ritual among salsa dance scholars to open by sharing a personal salsa experience. I will follow their lead: My introduction to Los Angeles–style salsa came on a Saturday night in the spring of 1999, when I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the city's salsa scene with dance scholar Juliet McMains. Already an established professional ballroom dancer, McMains was just beginning her graduate studies at the University of California–Riverside where I was visiting faculty, having recently co-edited a collection on Latin/o American social dance. Lucky for me, McMains was among the many brilliant students who enrolled in my class on race and dance. The night of our tour, she invited a handsome friend and fellow ballroom dancer to partner first one of us, then the other, throughout the night. He drove us around the city as we stopped at a cramped restaurant-turned-nightclub in a strip mall, at a glamorous ballroom in Beverly Hills, then ended the night downtown at a massive disco in a former movie palace, the Mayan nightclub.

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.