丁香园AV

Thursday, January 30, 2025 | 5:30 PM 鈥� 6:30 PM
Room 4390 鈥� 丁香园AV School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

Please join us for a talk by Philip Bither, the Senior Performance Curator from the , presented in collaboration with the .  

Biography

Philip Bither has been Walker Art Center鈥檚 Senior Curator of Performing Arts since April 1997, overseeing one of the United States leading contemporary performing arts programs. He has overseen significant expansion of the Performing Arts program, including the building of the McGuire Theater, an acclaimed new theatrical space within the Walker expansion, the raising of the program's first commissioning/programming endowment, the commissioning of more than 130 new works in dance, music and performance, and the annual presentation/residency support of dozens of contemporary performing arts creators, established and emerging. Prior to this, he served as Director of Programming/Artistic Director for the Flynn Center, and served for eight years as  Associate Director/Music Curator of the Brooklyn Academy of Music鈥檚 (BAM) Next Wave Festival. He received the Fan Taylor Distinguished Service Award in 2009. He helped establish the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP) at Wesleyan University in 2011 and served as a guest faculty member for the proceeding decade. He sits on numerous federal, state, local, and national foundation arts panels and he speaks and writes about contemporary performing arts nationally.

Key artists who Bither has commissioned at the Walker have included Lee Breuer/Mabou Mines, Ornette Coleman, Eiko & Koma, Elevator Repair Service, The Builders Association, Tim Etchells/Forced Entertainment, Dan Graham, Maria Hassabi, Cynthia Hopkins, Bill T. Jones, Young Jean Lee, Ralph Lemon, Richard Maxwell,  Meredith Monk, Jason Moran, Dianne McIntyre, Shamel Pitts, Shirin Neshat, Faye Driscoll, Devendra Banhart, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Makaya McCraven, Annie B. Parson/Big Dance Theater and more than 100 others.

Bither has also been committed to the development of the Twin Cities鈥揵ased dance and performance communities through the expansion of Choreographers鈥� Evening, the launching and producing of the Momentum Dance Festival (2001-2021) with local partner organizations, and a wide range of full evening commissions and national advocacy for such artists as, Dave King/The Bad Plus, HIJACK, Emily Johnson, Chris Larson, Douglas Ewart, Ragamala Dance, Chris Schlichting, Karen Kaz Sherman, Michael Sommers, Morgan Thorson, Leslie Parker and dozens of others.

Additionally, Bither helped organize or co-curate numerous performing arts-related exhibitions like Art Performs Life (1998), Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing (2008), Naked by Eiko & Koma (2010); Scaffold Room by Ralph Lemon (2014), Jason Moran (2018), three major commissions with choreographer Sarah Michelson and co-curating her exhibition March /\ 2020 (4pb), and overseeing multiple performance or performing art-related acquisitions, including the expansive Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection of sets, props, costumes, and ephemera. This acquisition led to his co-curation of the Walker-wide exhibition Merce Cunningham: Common Time (2017) and its associated dance commissions, residencies, concerts, and related performances.