Into the City, Onto the Stage – Unlikely Collaborations in the Performing Arts

« We, curators Alexander Roberts and Ásgerður G. Gunnarsdóttir, have been working on a curatorial research under the title 'Into the City, Onto the Stage' since 2014. The central point of enquiry has been to ask how we as curators – based in Reykjavík, Iceland – working as Artistic Directors of Reykjavík Dance Festival – can create a platform, with the performing arts at its centre, where the basic assumptions about who the performing arts are for can be fundamentally challenged and transformed. Who in our city gets to watch it, make it and have opinions on it How to cultivate and shape an institution that gathers publics through engagements with the performing arts on terms that are ardently anti-racist, pro-queer, interspecies, anti-ableist, feminist, pro-worker and decolonising? How to foster a platform that is constituted by a porous and intersectional community of listeners and learners committed to amplifying the voices, bodies, experiences and urgencies among them that are otherwise often under represented, lesser seen and lesser heard? [...] We conceived of this book as a space to learn from others that have also been busy devising artistic and curatorial strategies relevant to these questions. »