Scapegoat Garden’s Deborah Goffe has developed a curatoial practice alongside her artistic work since co-founding and producing Drink to This, a coffeehouse, performance and literary magazine, which was built on a transformative multi-generational collaborative process over the course of several weeks each summer (1996-1999). This commitment to incubating creative processes within local communities has continued, most evidently in Scapegoat Garden’s The Garden Center for Contemporary Dance (2011-2014) and The Invisible City Project (2013-2015). Since then, Deborah has earned and MA in Performance Curation at Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. Her thesis work, “Orienting Ourselves to See: Mapping Nested Dance Ecosystems as Curatorial Practice in New England,” considered the nested arts ecologies New England dance artists construct in order to navigate, circumvent, or intervene in established and emerging systems that support and organize the arts. The Nest (another recent project) built on this research by inviting cohorts of movement-based artists of color from Southern England and New York to convene in lateral facilitations around land, body, creative capacities, and connection as survival strategies. While The Nest did not fully manifest due to Covid in 2020, the initiative provided an important framework for artists in these aforementioned geographies to meet one another, and to exchange ideas and concerns at a critical moment of change for arts and culture practioners.
Reflections, documentation, and research reflective of these projects can be found by clicking on the linked text above or the images below …
