Theresa Coffey: Becoming with Music Curation: Tracing Transformations of Artistic Identities and Artistic Practices of Performer-Curators

Field of study: Performance Practice

What is an artistic identity? How is it experienced? How is it performed?

This project looks at performers’ music curation practice as a case study in producing artistic identity, performing reflexively, and working towards a feeling of congruence with one’s own self.

For the purposes of this project, music curation can be seen as an artistic act of mediating and contextualizing organized sound in performance. It takes account of the visual, kinetic, corporeal, aural, spatial, and discursive materiality of performance to create intra-active artistic experiences.

This project seeks to explore the relationship between performer-curators’ self-concepts and the identities performed in their music curation practice.

The empirical data for this project will include semi-structured interviews with five performer-curators, an autoethnographic investigation of artistic identity in curated music performance, and literature studies on performance practice, identity, self-concept, and music curation. The principal research questions are: “How do performer-curators understand and experience their artistic identities in music curation?” and, “how does artistic identity unfold in music curation?"