Tights Conference 2025: Conservation of performance, or performance as conservation?
Dance Conference #8
Traditionally, performance and the living body are positioned opposite the logic of archiving and preservation. The mortality of the living body marks the end of the event and its separation from the archive and the cultural product. Therefore, performance is often perceived as something ephemeral and temporary, standing in contrast to political thought that is grounded in containment, accumulation, and permanence.
However, is this distinction in itself not already a preservation of habits of thought and binary assumptions? Could it be that what we today call the “performative code” is precisely a potential through which various political forces intersect, succeed, and act?
This conference will therefore engage, through a range of case studies, with the tension and space between “preserving performance” and “performing preservation.” We will explore, through history, theory, and contemporary thought, the power of performance to reshape the tensions and paradoxes between appearance and preservation. From within this inquiry—and especially in Israel today—where the entanglement of every political thought becomes visible, there lies an opportunity to reopen the discussion on the political and the artistic