Curation has always been central to my artistic process. The very start of my performing career was helping found Chez Bushwick in Brooklyn, a live-work loft that became legendary for its $5/hour rehearsal rentals (in a breakneck gentrifying Borough). Our unique experimental model resulted in a non-stop flow of in-progress showings. We were more of a subcultural whirlwind underground revue show than venue. With them, I learned that the closer I stayed to the work of my colleagues—the more I grew as an artist and as a viewer. My career has taken me around the world, but that insight (from birthing a grotty punk loft) has been key to all I’ve done, wherever I’ve done it. To put it still more simply: mutual aid is not a good deed, not a charity we give out to the world. Mutual aid builds and establishes the necessary conditions of togetherness where research, risk, and new forms might surface. It was in the churning grab-bag of Chez Bushwick that I developed my careerlong obsession with disorientation.

This ethos only deepened when I moved to Berlin. With Creature Feature (2007–11), a laboratory for experimental performance at another now infamous space called Basso, this event that blurred audience warmups, lectures, and brutal works in progress, Berliners saw Florientina Holzinger and Vincent Reibeck perform Keine Applause for Schiese and were forever changed. With Meg Stuart and others, I co-curated Politics of Ecstasy (HAU, 2009), where our motto in the production office for this event was “doorstep to doorstep”: an ethic of hospitality that recognized every interaction, each gesture, every last email or text, as a foundation of trust. That implies travel, arrival, safety, and return are all part of the artistic work of community building itself.

Jacques Derrida reminds us that hospitality is also politics — a choreography of borders, and permissions. For me, curating was always service: making sure artists like Vaginal Davis or Ron Athey could not only perform but also arrive, eat, rest, and depart with a hopefully good feeling about the event they helped to create.

By 2014, I expanded this into The Great Big Togetherness (Donaufestival, Krems), a charged exploration of collective ecstasy. Here, curating became hyper-composition: a 10-day score combining performance, food, participatory rituals, lectures, and mass dances. Togetherness was not “nice”; it was risky, ecstatic, and politically fraught. The ethics of the gathering mattered as much as the performances themselves.

This trajectory — from Chez Bushwick to Berlin festivals to touring worldwide to sitting through international symposiums — eventually fed into projects such as the Future Clinic for Critical Care and the Take Care Symposium. There, the lessons of hospitality, access, and the choreography of publics became central dramaturgy. Curation has never been separate from my art-making: it is the threshold practice where research, politics, and performance meet. The chain is only its links, whatever you receive and digest is without meaning until shared and displayed.