Dancing in Galleries: Reimagining Movement for Visual Art Spaces

Will Rawls, [siccer] (performance view) (2023) with Katrina Reid, keyon gaskin, and jess pretty. Performance at REDCAT in April 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and REDCAT. Photo: Angel Origgi.

The REDCAT stage is covered in green props. The walls and floors are nearly bare, the occasional sprig of cattails sprouting from the floor. Choreographer Will Rawls sits at the corner of the stage, looking at the audience, and holding a remote in his hand. He presses the button. A camera, propped in the down-stage corner, fills the silence of the stage with a click every few seconds as it takes a series of stop-motion photos in this neon green bayou. Five dancers emerge, dodging the shots, bunkering behind the props, only jumping into the spotlight to craft exaggerated characters for the camera. Their movement switches from soft and supple steps, emphasizing the transition between positions, to erratic shifts. Rawls’s work, [siccer] (2023), explores the mistreatment of Black bodies in media by juxtaposing the personalities of the performers with the characters they perform for each camera click, displaying how Black people navigate the camera’s surveillance. The title of the work is inspired by the Latin adverb sic, which indicates incorrect spelling and is often employed against Black Vernacular English. Throughout the three-day run of the performance lastApril, audiences witnessed Rawls experiment with cinematic and audio technologies in real time.

However, the performance didn’t end there.

On the other side of Downtown L.A., in the main gallery of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA L.A.), [siccer] continued with an exhibition that was on view through the summer. A neon green hue lit the space. Empty picture frames last seen on stage at REDCAT hung from the ceiling, obscuring or enhancing projections on the wall. The same dancers that performed at REDCAT appeared in projections that covered the gallery walls and the sprigs of cattails were scattered across the floor alongside beanbag chairs. It felt like walking into the photographs that were taken by Rawls on stage, turning the performance’s ending statement into an ellipsis. With [siccer], Rawls uses dance as a bridge between his performance and his installation, allowing the work’s themes to continue to grow and expand across mediums.

Dance in gallery or museum spaces is nothing new, but the intention is evolving. In Los Angeles, a city with a scrappy ecosystem of movement artists but without a dance epicenter, the ephemerality of the artform feels heightened amid the financial impacts of the pandemic, which led to the shuttering of dance studios and performance spaces. Many dance artists have turned to unconventional venues. This adaptation has led many performers to explore how performance might be sustained within a visual art context. Museums and galleries can offer dance a valuable element: time.

Typically, commissions by performance spaces impose time constraints on choreographers, requiring them to create within a week or three and then present the work on a single night or weekend.¹ Their creations materialize as quickly as they depart. This limits both the artists’ exploration and the viewers’ meditation on the performance. By contrast, museums and gallery spaces often exhibit exhibitions for months, allowing broader engagement with a work.

ICA LA senior curator Amanda Sroka told me that she was excited to bring Rawls’s work to the museum so that it could be shown in its fullness. It’s a trend that Sroka hopes to continue and share with other institutions. “L.A., as a city, has always been a place where performance-based work has thrived and it feels like now it is being more integrated into the ecosystem here” at galleries and museums, she said.

That Rawls’s work, known for its multidisciplinary approach, adapted well within a visual context was no surprise. Rather than building the work as two separate programs, an exhibition and a performance, [siccer] was conceptualized to be a dynamic whole. In one of the videos at the ICA LA exhibition, the five performers—Holland Andrews, keyon gaskin, jess pretty, Katrina Reid, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste—laboriously presented alternate, inauthentic versions of themselves for the camera, striking dramatic and hyperbolic poses for the camera. In the floor-to-ceiling projection, Andrews lets out a silent scream, slowly moving their head until it is momentarily obscured by a shadow created by a hanging frame in the gallery space. Their frustration is briefly hidden from the viewer, and when they return, they present a façade of joy. The same movement took place on stage at REDCAT, here mediated and edited by the camera. The through-line between performance and exhibition expanded the work, allowing each dancer’s explorations time to grow—the viewer was granted access to the juxtaposing personas portrayed on- and off-camera, adding subtext to Rawls’s meditations on Blackness and what it means to be Black in the public eye.

“When seeing the installation, you have this after-image, this echo of the performance,” Sroka said. “The thing that I found really striking was the deep connectedness of these two parts. Within the installation, you’re seeing the bodies, the images that get captured through the camera, and then the performance is all the slippery stuff that goes uncaptured.” I encountered the “slippery stuff” first—the raw messiness that went into creating the video piece. The live work felt, then, like a deconstruction of a photo shoot, exposing the conversations that went into making each image. In the performance, the characters discuss their search for genre in a world seeking to contain their artistry; Toussaint-Baptiste describes his relation­ship to racism by comparing himself to Kermit the Frog, singing “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” At ICA LA, the exhibition was more muted and precise, displaying the fruits of the performers’ labor. The exhibition—mediated portrayals of Black bodies—was the byproduct of Black production. But the live performance was Black production at work, revealing all the unspoken truths about racism that are often left on the cutting room floor and out of a final product. In the live performance, the artists debate on whether a move is supposed to look more structured or loose, working together to get the image right. The result is stiff. In contrast, when the cameras are off, they dance authentically without monitoring how they look. The camera embodies the impact of surveillance, showcasing how a single image can skew the reality of Black life.

⁂

Typically, dance is utilized in art spaces as an activation for another visual exhibition by simply presenting choreography within the gallery space. For example, Gagosian welcomed A.I.M by Kyle Abraham to perform works from their repertoire in the Social Abstraction exhibition in July 2024,² and in June 2025, Jeffrey Deitch welcomed VOLTA into its gallery space to perform a new work within The Abstract Future exhibition.³ As supplemental programming, neither visual art nor dance performance is fully dependent on the other to tell its story.

Sometimes, dance is the subject of an exhibition in a museum space, but not the mode of creation. This is commonplace for retrospective exhibitions like Edges of Ailey at The Whitney,⁴ or Merce Cunningham, Clouds and Screens, on display at LACMA from October 2018 to March 2019.⁵ Such exhibitions often fail to support the living aspect of performance, displaying archival artifacts rather than choreographed examples of their movement in real time.

Qwenga, Infinite Rehearsal (2023–24). Performance at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles from October 7, 2023 to January 14, 2024. Images courtesy of the artist and ICA LA.

But institutions like ICA LA have recently been exploring how dance can enter exhibition spaces more fruitfully. Simone Forti, a 2023 retrospective exhibition of the notorious performance artist and choreographer at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), included performances from Forti’s Dance Construction series (1960–61) throughout the run of the show. Notably, the performances of Slant Board (1961) enhanced the exhibition by giving her historical work a new voice. In the piece, performers travel up and down a slanted wooden ramp, using ropes to traverse while discovering new routes and exploring the effort it takes to keep going. For the exhibition, MOCA brought in local artists to recreate the piece. In rehearsals, Forti supported new ideas shared by the artists and allowed for her historic work to morph.

Simone Forti, Slant Board (1961). Performance with plywood and rope, 10 minutes, at MOCA Grand Avenue, January 29, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and MOCA. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.

Because of her previous support of performance and new media at the Future Fields Commission (a biennial award by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for time-based media artists), Sroka’s appointment as senior curator of ICA LA was promising to dance and performance artists who were eager for more exhibition venues.⁶ Before [siccer], another exhibition Sroka curated (assisted by Seanna Rihanna Latiff, Getty Marrow Curatorial Intern) was the experimental collaboration between choreographer Chris Emile and No)one. Art House, in which the gallery space was dedicated to the artists as a rehearsal space. The 2023–24 exhibition, Infinite Rehearsal, which ran for three months, constantly changed.⁷ Throughout the course of the show, artists Emile, Shauna Davis, Marcella Lewis, Jobel Medina, Cody Perkins, Jordan Slaffey, and Qwenga rehearsed in the space, and visitors could observe both the process and final presentations. For Sroka, the performers needed to receive the support and resources of an exhibition curation rather than the short-term funding of public programming because, in addition to space, curation offered more funding and hands-on institutional support.

The exhibition particularly solved a common issue of space for dancers. In 2020, California’s AB5 law went into effect, establishing firmer eligibility requirements for independent contractors. This led to backlash when performing artists working with certain institutions no longer qualified for compensation.⁸ This constriction was compounded by the pandemic, when LA studio and rehearsal spaces closed, including EDGE Performing Arts Center, The Sweat Spot, and Pieter (which has since reopened with a new model), among others.⁹ Dance practices are logistically sustained by grant applications, fundraising, and self-producing. One day during the run of Infinite Rehearsal, Sroka checked in to find Davis sitting on the bench with her laptop, working on a grant application. “She’s like, ‘I think it’s really important that visitors understand that the labor of performance is also working on these grants,’” Sroka recalled. “It was cool because there were those moments that were more unexpected for me of how we get into these conversations around what it means to be a dancer, this laboring body.”

Unlike visual artists, sales from choreographers’ and dancers’ work cannot be used to fund further creation. Performers have taken another hit with recent budget cuts at the federal, state, and municipal levels.¹⁰ For instance, the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture budget was slashed by over $1.7 million in July, directly impacting organizational, community impact, and arts internship grants.¹¹

Visual arts institutions that invest in dance and performance are starting to address this lack, but many don’t have the architecture to offer physical support for dancers, such as Marley and sprung flooring, which provide bounce and shock absorption.¹² “In the museum context, we’ve figured out how to care for more traditional art mediums, be it painting, sculptures, drawings, and photography, but our ability to care for the living is still very much in process,” Sroka said.

The struggle for space and time is a practical duet that performers have with the act of creation. By alleviating this struggle for time and duration, the very act of dance in a space like a visual arts institution has the potential to expose the slipperiness that happens off-stage, visualizing the (often) invisible labor of making a performance. Rawls created his exhibition presentation and performance to be one entity, according to Sroka. One cannot exist without the other. The additive thrust of both presentations gave viewers a more expansive look into Rawls’s varied practices. After viewing the performance leg of Rawls’s presentation, and stepping into the gallery space, I could envision all the movement happening beyond the frame in the installation video. I could hear Holland’s scream.

As art spaces begin to embrace performance and dance, they offer essential support to movement artists. But dance also offers something to the visual arts—a way to think differently about time and our bodies in space. “There is this commitment to attention when you’re watching a performance, a commitment to engaging in some way,” Sroka said. “It’s so easy, I think, in our society to disengage and to disassociate, and so performance holds you in time. [Performance is] a contraction and expansion of time as we know it.”

Will Rawls, [siccer] (performance view) (2023) with Holland Andrews, Katrina Reid, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, jess pretty, and keyon gaskin. Performance at REDCAT in April 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and REDCAT. Photo: Angel Origgi.

Will Rawls, [siccer] (installation view) (2023). Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), September 23–November 5, 2023. Image courtesy of PICA.