Configurations in Montreal: Q&A with Jane Gabriels

On June 1 and 2 Configurations in Montreal: Performance Curation and Communities of Colour will be held at Concordia and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. While Configurations has convened twice before at Duke University, this is its first appearance in Canada.

“It’s a huge opportunity for Canadian and American performance curators, artists and scholars to share work, develop resources and build strategies for supporting performance in, for and by Black, Indigenous and communities of colour in Canada and the United States,” says Concordia alumna Jane Gabriels (PhD’15 Huma), co-producer of the event.  

Gabriels, an independent curator working in Montreal and New York City, along with M.J. Thompson, assistant professor, Interdisciplinary Studies and Practice Art Education, and Angelique Willkie, assistant professor, Contemporary Dance, wrote the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant to bring Configurations to Montreal in partnership with Duke University and University of Toronto and additionally to hold a year-long series of events focused on critical dance studies.

Configurations in Montreal is curated by Thomas F. DeFrantz, Chair of African and African American Studies and Professor of Dance and Theater Studies at Duke University, and Seika Boye, Lecturer at the Institute for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and Director of Institute for Dance Studies at the University of the Toronto.  

Over the course of the next two weeks leading up to the two-day event, we will interview the curators and co-producers of the event.  

Q&A with Jane Gabriels

How is this gathering important to your work as a curator/producer and writer/emerging scholar?

I wanted to bring this gathering to Montreal to introduce the kinds of thinking that the group was developing in the States to my world en ville, and to see how the work might further grow within the ongoing conversations in Canada, and how meeting other cultural workers and artists here might influence some of the thinking of the scholars, artists and curators in the States. In particular, I hoped that learning more about the work of indigenous curators and artists in Canada might also help support other strategies for performance curation. Overall, having the gathering of American and Canadian curators, scholars, and artists in Montreal felt like a rich exchange, and a way to further our understandings and raise visibility for the work and our ideas.

How did this gathering in Montreal come about?

Dr. Thomas F. DeFrantz was the external reader for my dissertation on artists and non-profits in the South Bronx, NY (Concordia's Humanities, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, 2015; thesis advisor: Dr. Erin Manning). The work centered around a dance theatre piece that I created as a site of immersive research, and the written dissertation focused on curation and its particularities in the Bronx. The South Bronx is one of the poorest congressional districts in the U.S. which also has incredible cultural wealth created by its primarily Afro-Caribbean-Latino artists and residents. I've been working in the borough for almost 20 years.

Dr. DeFrantz told me that reading the work inspired him to gather a diverse group of curators, artists, presenters, and funders at Duke University to talk about shared concerns in performance curation and communities of color. This is exactly the kind of development you hope a dissertation might have, and I of course was beyond thrilled. He invited me to co-convene the first gathering at Duke University in 2015, and this year marks the third annual iteration.

When I returned to Montreal after our last meeting in July 2016, I started contacting everyone I could think of in Montreal to try to find a site and means to bring the group en ville. There was alot of interest, but MJ Thompson saw its possibilities and made time to meet with me to figure out how to make the project happen. The project connected with her ongoing research interests, and, with support from Angelique Willkies in the Concordia Dance Dept, we wrote a successful SSHRC grant. MJ also introduced Seika Boye from the University of  Toronto into the project, and having Boye and DeFrantz involved as co-curators selecting the speakers, we think, has created possibilities for truly enriched and creative conversations. Our aim is that this two-day event will serve as an introduction to the work, and that more projects will develop from it in future.

To get the word out about the work of Dr. DeFrantz while he was in Montreal, I also reached out to local museums and arts centers to see if they'd be interested in hosting a talk with him. Cheryl Sim at DHC-Arts immediately replied with interest. With their support, we were able to secure an engagement for him at the Musee des Beaux Arts on Fri June 2 6:00pm. Having this keynote at the Musee shows the kinds of fruitful collaborations that are possible in Montreal.

What brought you to Montreal and to Concordia to study?  

I'm often asked why I did my doctorate in Montreal while I was writing about the South Bronx, N.Y. While there are many practical reasons for this, I'm also in Montreal because I have family here (cousins) and family roots en ville (my grandmother was born here, and my great-grandfather was a Physician and became Mayor of Montreal, 1910-12). There are these ancestral connections that keep me linked to both places; I have one great-grandfather buried in the Bronx, and another buried here in Montreal. It feels personally significant to connect my work in the Bronx with my work in Montreal.