Curation
Curation 2010 - 2021
>>Phosphorescence supported by Creative Scotland for The Barn, Banchory
How The Sun Lights The Earth & other works funded by Arts Council England
What Matters funded by Arts Council England, presented at Siobhan Davies Studios
What If… supported by South East Dance & funded by Arts Council England presented at Siobhan Davies Studios
Small Matters commissioned by Dance Umbrella / funded by Arts Council England
Stray Gifts commissioned by Dance Umbrella / Funded by Arts Council England / produced by Artsadmin
What if … [link to festival pdf] What Matters [link to festival pdf]
Between 2009 and 2015, Lucy developed a series of collaborative curatorial projects that positioned exhibition-making, programming, and public dialogue as forms of choreographic and practice-based research. Emerging from a fellowship awarded by South East Dance in 2009, this body of work marked a significant expansion of her choreographic practice beyond performance-making toward curating as a methodology for generating interdisciplinary exchange, collective inquiry, and new forms of public encounter.
Rather than treating choreography solely as the composition of movement for performance, these curatorial projects explored choreographic thinking as a broader organisational and relational framework capable of structuring experiences across moving image, sound, live art, documentary practices, installation, conversation, and public space. Through collaborative programming and site-responsive exhibition formats, the projects investigated how curatorial practice itself might function as a form of spatial and social choreography.
The first major project within this trajectory, What if…, was co-curated with artists Becky Edmunds, Claudia Kappenberg, and Christin Whyte at Siobhan Davies Studios following an invitation from Gill Clarke at Independent Dance. Bringing together works across dance, live art, documentary film, and experimental moving image, the festival examined how choreographic thinking might emerge within and across disciplinary boundaries.
Importantly, the festival extended beyond exhibition and performance presentation to foreground discourse and critical reflection as integral components of the curatorial process. Ten writers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds — including anthropology, visual art, dance, moving image, and popular science — were invited to attend and respond to the programme through commissioned texts later published in a special issue of Dance Theatre Journal co-edited by Lucy and Theron Schmidt. In this sense, the curatorial structure functioned as a research ecology in which artistic, critical, and public forms of knowledge production operated in dialogue.
Subsequent collaborative projects developed through the curatorial platform straybird, founded with Becky Edmunds, extended these concerns through increasingly experimental approaches to scale, mobility, and public encounter. Projects including What Matters, Small Matters, and Stray Gifts — the latter commissioned by Dance Umbrella — explored intimate and non-institutional modes of spectatorship through temporary, mobile, and site-responsive exhibition formats.
For Stray Gifts, a mobile horse container was transformed into a small-scale travelling gallery for sound and video works that toured multiple London sites. This project examined how mobility, temporariness, and informal encounters might reshape relationships between audience, artwork, and urban environment. The curatorial format itself became an experimental research apparatus through which questions of accessibility, attention, scale, and embodied spectatorship could be explored.
Across these projects, Lucy’s curatorial practice consistently investigated:
choreography as a relational and organisational structure
interdisciplinary dialogue as research methodology
curating as collective knowledge production
alternative formats for spectatorship and encounter
site-responsive and mobile exhibition practices
the relationship between discourse and embodiment
public programming as choreographic practice
expanded definitions of dance and movement-based thinking
This trajectory continued in projects such as How The Sun Lights the Earth and other works for Decoda’s Summer Dancing programme, in which works were curated across multiple venues including Warwick Arts Centre, Café Rising, and Gosford Books. Here, curatorial practice further operated as a means of investigating how movement-based and interdisciplinary works generate different forms of reception and meaning across distinct spatial and social contexts.
Collectively, these curatorial projects contribute to discourses surrounding expanded choreography, curatorial research, socially engaged arts practice, and interdisciplinary performance studies. They position curating not as a supplementary activity surrounding artistic production, but as a distinct practice-as-research methodology through which aesthetic, spatial, and social relations can be actively composed, tested, and critically reflected upon.
Response to What Matters from choreographer, Siobhan Davies:
“It was immediately easy to see and feel that Lucy Cash and Becky Edmunds had curated a thought-provoking collection of events and films which mattered to them and which scratched at all of those who came to experience them.
One of the scratches on offer was that a common rootage in all the works could be found in dance, choreography, and movement. The collected works, in the context in which they were seen, made the larger concerns and appetites of dance more present… What Matters 2012 will become a marker to remember and be an influence in the future.”
