Incognito

In 2015 Tate’s Curator of Performance Catherine Wood and Choreographer Boris Charmatz devised ‘If Tate Modern was Musée de la Danse’, a curatorial project which invited audiences to imagine the Tate Modern galleries as a space for dance. Dances were implied through signage, a map and actual dances. As Wood argued, the project imposed the label of the dancing museum on the art museum in order to conjure up a dance. However, reflecting on this project in ‘Who Cares’, a collection of interviews edited by dancer choreographer Sara Wookey, Wood also asked if the museum could be dance already, and Boris Charmatz similarly posited, that everything is dance.[i] In this essay I will test the proposition that the museum is dance, searching for the choreographic in amongst the National Gallery’s live spaces and represented spaces, acoustic environments and pictorial silences, their furniture, doors and picture frames, and the quotidian rituals of visitors and gallery employees. [i] Catherine Wood in conversation with Sara Wookey, Who Cares, Dance in the Gallery and Museum, Sarah Wookey eds, London: Siobhan Davies Dance and Sara Wookey 2015.