Chasing your own tail

After he graduated from a Master in anthropology and ethnology at the University of Belgrade (Serbia), Igor Koruga studied MA Solo/Dance/Authorship (SODA) at the Universität der Künste (UdK) and Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz (HZT) in Berlin. Even though Koruga stayed in Berlin after finishing his dance education, his relationship with the city was similar to that of many international dance artists: he was travelling in and out all the time, especially commuting between Berlin and Belgrade.

Since 2006, he has collaborated with Station – Service for Contemporary Dance in Belgrade. Koruga’s work discusses the social status of artists in the field of contemporary dance and conditions of temporality as the basis for both work and life. Koruga’s earlier work demonstrates that his research focuses primarily on the working and living conditions of neoliberal citizens, especially artists. For example, the collaborative project Temporaries (2012) – which is a neologism for temporary employees – questions the conditions for the production of art and knowledge by discussing notions such as temporality, flexibility and self-realization with the audience. This performance event was created in collaboration with five other Belgrade-based dance artists, namely Ana Dubljević, Dušan Broćić, Jovana Rakić Kiselčić, Marko Milić, and Ljiljana Tasić and was staged as a picnic during which the audience members are offered to play a game of charades¹. The spectators were asked to guess terms related to the prevailing working conditions in the performing arts and these were then translated into short performance actions. Once the first group has guessed the right notion, the second half gets an overview of descriptions of short performance actions. They have to decide unanimously which performance action fits best to the guessed term. If they come to common ground, the action will be performed. The notions as well as the performance actions show references to the neoliberal art market. In one of the acts, the performers execute unstable movements as though they are falling continually and trying to keep each other up. This movement material is performed against the background of the sounds of the

1 The observations here are based on a performance in Weld, Stockholm, in December 2013.

Road Runner being chased by Wile E. Coyote and seems to stand for a feeling that corresponds to the notion of ‘slow death’ introduced by Lauren Berlant (2007, 754): a feeling that coincides with precarization and the resulting diminution of future prospects. The notion of ‘slow death’ can refer to the (typically physical) wearing out of a population in a way that is comparable to the common phenomenon of the burnout in an individual. Like the coyote, neoliberal subjects experience a sensation of not really getting anywhere, because they have myriad things to do at the same time. In Koruga’s work, the reference to Wile E. Coyote’s chase stands for the ever-unsuccessful attempt to achieve something. In an interview with anthropologist Dunja Njaradi, Koruga explained this exhaustive nature of his life as a freelancer referring to dance theorist Bojana Cvejić who had illustrated the situation using the example of this cartoon character. He tells Njaradi: ‘it makes me wonder what exactly am I chasing after? What am I fighting for?’

(Njaradi 2014a, 186) In response to this unsuccessful chase, the executed movement material also demonstrates how the performers are trying to keep each other from falling, which is in turn, a beautiful portrayal of collective care and solidarity.

The performance of Temporaries then shifts to a discussion with the audience when Koruga announces the following: ‘Actually, what I really want to talk about are the working conditions of our jobs and the ways how they shape our lives, and also the possible ways of reshaping those conditions.’ Interestingly, Koruga speaks in the performance about ‘our’ jobs and ‘our’ lives as though he takes for granted that the audience members could relate to these issues. Koruga draws on examples from his own life, explaining that his work basically consists of being at home sitting in front of his computer, specifying that the concept of home already confuses him since this usually refers to a friend’s sofa or a temporary sublet. At his computer, he continues, he is mostly reading and writing applications for funding. While he does this, he also tries to hang out in social networks, at art festivals, in venues, and with producers. Furthermore, he explains that he travels a lot, which is the principal reason for always being single or in a long-distance relationship and why it scares him to think about having children. In Temporaries, he states that ‘it comes down to this everlasting accelerating loop of chasing a promising future that might never come’, which again is reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote charging after the Road Runner, while everyone knows he will never catch it. By summing up these examples, Koruga actually allows me to highlight several key issues: he begins by pointing out the constant mobility and consequential feeling of homelessness. He then addresses the constant chase after funding and the accessory chase after programmers (or endless networking) and lastly, he refers to the influences of these on his private life and future prospects.

Interestingly, all these issues reappear in Koruga’s solo Streamlined (2014) two years later, indicating that not much has changed in that time. In this solo, Koruga runs on a treadmill for sixty minutes while speaking in public and literally selling himself.

Thereafter, the metaphorical accelerating loop mentioned in Temporaries materializes in

the form of the continuously accelerating treadmill on which Koruga is performing his solo in Streamlined: instead of having future prospects, artists live in a perpetual present – or what Pascal Gielen has termed ‘bottomless instantaneity’ in his essay on “A Chronotopy of Post-Fordist Labor” (2014, 196). But, as Koruga explains, as long as he is running on the treadmill, his working conditions are in fact in good shape since he is performing and thus earning a living. The loop also stands for the awareness that, paradoxically, when trying to practice politics through art - in ‘deploying precarity to critique precarity’ (Ridout and Schneider 2012, 9) - Koruga becomes an accomplice of the socio-economic and political system he tries to criticize or protest against. Indeed, Koruga’s words exemplify Vujanović’s statement cited at the start of this chapter that dance artists have become complicit with neoliberal ideology. What looks like a form of emancipation or resistance is in fact opportunistic: Koruga realizes he is practicing exactly that which he is preaching against and profiting from the system he criticizes.

Analogously, an informant wonders what effect of resistance publicly addressing your own precarity might have, when ‘everybody who came to the show probably already agrees with you’:

It [resistance] is somehow in my work, but for me, just the fact that I get to make the work is already a statement, so I don’t know if I need to be political in the actual work that I am making, because anyway then I think that you’re preaching to the choir. Everybody who came to the show probably already agrees with you. It’s an interesting thing, when people find a way to manipulate it, so that they are actually benefitting from the same thing they’re criticizing.

In a similar regard, Ramsay Burt points out in his book on Ungoverning Dance that certain performances ungovern, meaning that they reveal the hidden relations of power that produce precarious lives through dance on the one hand, or they perform an alternative society on the other hand, and these are political acts (2016, 233). As I discussed in the introduction, most performances of precarity ungovern dance, yet what Koruga and the informant expose here is that it is often problematic to truly ungovern because in doing so one is in fact submissive to neoliberalism’s ideals. Burt provides an excellent example when he discusses the emancipatory performance Fake it! (2007) by Janez Janša during the Exodos Festival in Ljubljana, in which excerpts of canonical works from recent dance history were restaged in response to radical budget cuts that impeded the inclusion of these types of work in the festival. In so doing, the dance artists ungoverned dance successfully by redistributing and sharing a common without economic gains as the event could be attended free of charge. This provokes a true emancipatory statement as the artists are not benefitting financially from the system they criticize, yet simultaneously this can be seen an act of self-precarization, which in turn is in line with the neoliberal model.

The discourse on neoliberal subjectivity embedded in Koruga’s work is a fruitful field to introduce the modes of production common to contemporary dance artists in Brussels and Berlin. In the project-based performing arts sector, many artists never seem to make ends meet despite being resourceful and motivated. In an acceleratory society, the artist’s chase has three dimensions. Firstly, project-based artists are continually chasing funding in order to pursue their art making, in the first place, and to earn a living, in the second place. Additionally, artists are chasing programmers, who facilitate the chase after funding;

because the ball is in their court to offer studio space, to provide co-production budgets, and to present creations. My fieldwork has exposed the often vain efforts artists make in endless networking and self-promotion. Lastly, project work goes hand in hand with paperwork and much time is spent chasing papers concerning administration, finances, legality, or unemployment benefits. In what follows, I dissect this threefold chase in depth based on my empirical study and in so doing I aim to provide an empirically grounded description of the acceleratory work regime in which contemporary dance artists maneuver between projects. I will conclude that the threefold chase eventually concerns a fair amount of chasing one’s own tail. While this idiom suggests that contemporary dance artists individually undertake exhaustive and often futile actions – usually without making much progress – I uncover a certain sense of solidary individualization that unites them.