Craig Quintero

Bio

Artistic director of the Taipei-based Riverbed Theatre Company, Craig Quintero has written and directed over 40 original image-based performances, including productions at Taiwan’s National Experimental Theatre (Taipei), Theatre Mouffetard (Paris), Alte Teuerwache (Mannheim), Fritz (Stuttgart), Theatre Le Funambule (Avignon), Theatre de la Condition des Soies (Avignon), the Esplanade Studio Theatre (Singapore), Telus Theatre (Vancouver), Tiny Alice (Tokyo), KAVC (Kobe), and Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center (New York). He is also a sculptor and installation artist whose work has been shown at the Asian Biennial, Venice Biennale, Kobe Biennale, Taipei Biennale, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art. During the 2015-16 academic year, Quintero was a Senior Fulbright Scholar to Taiwan and a Mellon Foundation Academic Enterprise Leave Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and is currently the chair and an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Grinnell College.

While at Duke, Quintero and Department of Theater Studies Chair Torry Bend will guide a focused discussion and creative exploration of interdisciplinary collaboration in the arts culminating in the creation of a theatrical performance. They ask the question, “What can contemporary artists learn from the collaborative art-making approaches of the avant-garde?”  The curriculum and creative work developed at Black Mountain College will be the initial starting point for their investigation. Black Mountain College was an experimental college that emphasized the central role of interdisciplinarity and art making in a liberal arts education in Black Mountain, North Carolina (1933-1957).

Engagement Information

In addition to a series of lectures and workshops open to the campus, core members of the collaborative team will also organize “beehives” in which they facilitate evening-length creative exchanges open to the university. All of these preliminary activities will provide the foundation for developing the new production Black Mountain in collaboration with members of the Taiwan-based Riverbed Theatre Company, adding a cross-cultural perspective to their creative work.

The performance will premiere at Duke University from April 17-19, 2020, and be remounted at Grinnell College and at the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts in Taiwan.