Dance and/as work

In 2002, dance scholar Mark Franko was probably one of the first to address the convergence between dance and work with the release of his book The Work of Dance. Labor, Movement and Identity in the 1930s (2002), which offered new tools for dance scholars to study the relation of politics to aesthetics. He departs from the hypothesis that 1930’s dance in the US conveyed ‘the physical presence of work in aesthetic and critical terms, bringing laboring bodies into visibility as historical agents’ (Franko 2002, 2). Following up on Franko, I proceed to explore what is particular about contemporary dance artists today

3 See especially “The Persistent Pandemic of Precariousness: Young People at Work” by Lefteris Kretsos (2010).

4 The interview was published in Dutch in Etcetera: ‘Ik denk dat de mythe van de luie kunstenaars die leven van belastinggeld kan worden doorbroken door de situatie te humaniseren’ (Van Assche 2016, 54).

and their relation to work?⁵ One may wonder what is as a matter of fact exceptional about contemporary dance artists within the category of the performing arts?

Firstly, in contrast to theater, dance does not necessarily demand language skills, which allows for a more transnational orientation. In the introduction of the edition of Dance Research Journal on Global/Mobile: Re-orienting Dance and Migration Studies, Paul Scolieri describes the dance world as a nomadic one, constituted by a mobile set of performers, choreographers, teachers and audiences in search of economic prosperity, political asylum, religious freedom, and/or artistic liberty (Scolieri 2008, v-xx).

Contemporary dance artists settle in what urban studies and cultural industries experts define as creative cities, which stand for cities that function as magnetic fields for creative workers, who, as if they were migratory birds can perch there and use it as a base for their further flights (see also Florida 2005; Hesters 2006; Pratt 2008). Brussels and Berlin, among others, act as such a base. In this respect, Berlin-based contemporary artist and philosopher Diego Agulló writes that ‘Berlin has become a paradigm of post-Fordist social organization. […] There is a continuous flow of people from an international network moving in and out of the city generating short term alliances in the so-called ecosystem of cultural industry’ (Agulló 2017, paragraph 4). A common question asked among contemporary dance artists therefore inquires into where their peers are based rather than where they live. In the introduction of her book Dancing Communities (2007), Judith Hamera summarizes this beautifully in one sentence: ‘Dancers make cities as friends, as partners, as corps and, in so doing, remake themselves, their audiences, and each other every day, day after day’ (Hamera 2007, 1). In the 2008 report commissioned by the International Organization for the Transition of Professional Dancers entitled Dancers Keep Moving: International Careers and Transition, dance artists are indeed depicted as

5 In her book Backstage Economies: Labour and Masculinities in Contemporary European Dance (2014a), anthropologist Dunja Njaradi explicitly points to the contemporary dance artist in particular, emphasizing the importance to acknowledge dance as living labor and living labor as the driving force of the contemporary form of capitalism.

As I pointed out earlier, Tsianos and Papadopoulos hold that today’s composition of living labor is the response to the risks imposed by immaterial labor (2006). As work becomes incorporated into private time, the exploitation of the workforce happens beyond the boundaries of work and is distributed across the whole time and space of life. In this respect, Njaradi argues the following: ‘The investigation of dancers’ lives has a great importance for understanding our contemporary political present not because they are the paradigmatic example of immaterial labourers, but because they are living labour in general’ (2014a, 169). While all labor presupposes life and the reproduction of life on the one hand, and the abstraction of that life as commodity on the other hand, it must be refined here that dance is not living labor more so than other labor per se, but what Njaradi seems to call attention to here is that the feature of living labor is something that is often overlooked in the performing arts, because the art world is repeatedly related to the notion of immaterial labor. Laermans (2015) and Kunst (2015a), for example, combat aesthetic fetishism, which only looks at the artwork as a product by revealing art as work. Furthermore, in a same manner as teachers, for example, the body is the primary material for work, but much of the labor remains invisible: like much of a teacher’s labor happens outside of the classroom, also much of a performing artist’s labor happens ‘backstage’.

pioneers of the transnational labor market because their ‘double mobility (across borders and across careers) constitutes a case that may very well be taken as a model for mobility and employability of workers in general’ (IJdens et al. 2008, 15). However, I would be careful about the use of ‘pioneer’ in this context, while we know that this is certainly not only true for dance artists: the statement also applies to opera singers, musicians or ballet dancers in the performing arts sector, and consultants or managers in the private sector, to name only a few. Nonetheless, it remains important to acknowledge that in contradistinction to many other professions (even including several performing arts professions, such as text-based acting), dance artists are particularly transnationally mobile. What differs today from the nomadic lifestyle of dance artists in the past is that the work of project-based contemporary dance artists is nowadays produced in various locations in periods of residency, whereas the mobile lives of dance artists in the past were a consequence of touring finished productions. Interestingly, the transnational mobility of project-based contemporary dance artists knows a decoupling of the conception of a work, the production of a work (generally in residency periods) and the presentation of a work, which results in a deterritorialization. In other transnationally mobile performing arts branches, such as opera or ballet for example, the conception, production and presentation are generally coupled to one location abroad. In contrast, residencies in contemporary dance are in general short and the research (conceptual and studio work) does not necessarily lead to the presentation of an outcome. Furthermore, producing a contemporary dance performance in a project-based funding system requires several consecutive residency periods in various locations and the presentation of the outcome (if any) is not necessarily connected to the location of these consecutive residencies. Since travelling has become much faster and more efficient than before, dance artists do not have to rely solely on resources from their base country, but find infrastructure and co-production budgets across the borders. The present-day digital era allows people to connect even more effortlessly and consequently constitutes virtual and mobile dance communities. Accordingly, in line with Paolo Virno’s notion of ‘not-feeling-at-home’ (2004, 34-40), visual artist John Di Stefano calls attention to the twentieth-century perpetual loss of home that stems from an increasingly transnational, mobile and media-saturated world (Di Stefano 2002, 39). This aspect of the contemporary dance profession is examined to the full in the chapter “The Mobile” in part II of this book.

Secondly, in contrast to classical dance, contemporary dance tends to focus on creative (and collaborative) processes rather than on (specializing in one) technique. This may explain partly why contemporary dance artists appear to favor project-oriented work formats rather than commitment to an ensemble (next to the fact that project work has been greatly facilitated within the neoliberal regime of governmentality – not the least through granting subsidies per project). In fact, in the performing arts, hybrid career paths have become standard and the idea of a steady job is perhaps not even the most desirable path within this professional category of the arts (see also Hesters 2006;

Janssens and Moreels 2007). It should be noted that contemporary dance is an especially multifarious, even heterogeneous artistic field with an everything-but-stable identity.

According to sociologist Rudi Laermans, its contemporaneity is intrinsically linked with the performative construction and reproduction of the collective belief that particular practices are genuine instances of contemporary dance (2015, 60-79). Contemporary dance is thus certainly not a unifying style. First, each choreographer has established a particular movement language, and as a consequence they recruit a relatively broad spectrum of performers with and without training. Rather than fitting perfectly in a certain idiom (as is the case with classical ballet), the personal movement style of the performer is most essential. Secondly, and somewhat paradoxically, a great adaptability is crucial, because each choreographer has different expectations regarding her or his performers and their skills. Creating movement material together in the absence of a defining vocabulary or body technique is one of the hallmarks of contemporary dance practices. I would highlight that contemporary dance is not characterized by a particular movement style, but by the expansion of the definition of dancing: all bodily activity can be classified as dance and can become an element of choreography. As Laermans puts it:

There is the more specific name, “contemporary dance”, which may be explicitly invoked or just assumed when stating “this is dance”. Contemporary dance has been and will likely continue to be — at least in the foreseeable future — that evident and at the same time rather strange spectacle of publicly observable practices that involve the external designation and self-designation of artefacts, authors, stylistic features, institutions, et cetera, as contemporary dance.

(Laermans 2015, 73)

This perception of dance stems from the focus on movement with a pedestrian quality in American postmodern dance, or even further back, from the falling and rolling movements introduced in American modern dance. The core idea is that the choreographer can have access to any kind of material and that s/he recharges the material with artistic substance, with or without a reference to the context from which it transpires. In that regard, Sally Banes concluded that ‘the postmodern choreographers proposed that a dance was a dance not because of its content but because of its context – i.e., simply because it was framed as a dance’ (2011, xix).

A third and very important aspect of contemporary dance is the aura of the performer rather than the performer’s virtuosity, since from the 1960’s onwards virtuosity is often viewed as a purely technical principle instead of an artistic concern. As dance scholar Gabriele Brandstetter concludes in her article on The Virtuoso’s Stage (2007):

What remains is virtuosity as a “transgressive scene”. And this draws our attention to the fact that contemporary performance is “deferred”, that it may be precisely in the “withdrawal of the virtuoso” that the stage opens up for a new and different evidencing of the improbable. (Brandstetter 2007, 192)

In this respect, Ramsay Burt points out that new European experimental dance performances often do not look like dance and do not seem to be concerned with presenting conventional dance movement as such, but with presenting alternative approaches to virtuosity (2016, 3 and 59). For many choreographers, however, I observe that a degree of virtuosity in the classic sense remains important, but rather in function of the choreography and not in terms of excellence. The performer’s aura relates to a unique presence on stage, the capacity to attract attention, and to embody the artistic intention of the choreographer in a specific way but at the same time to radiate something very individual as a dancer. The combination of these three aspects of contemporary dance may be termed flexible performativity, which refers to a particular skill that dancers today have to master.⁶ The skill encompasses the adaptability to perform in accordance to the demands or expectations of a certain choreographer, but also in response to certain audiences, locations and situations. I will discuss this skill more in-depth in the chapter “The Flexible” in part II of this book.

All in all, the requirement to have an at once multicompetent and adaptable body is a rather vague characteristic of contemporary dance and therefore difficult to train. In defining my research population, I therefore rely primarily on self-definitions that are to a certain extent validated by peers, programmers, critics, audience members, etc. In addition, I choose to use the term contemporary dance artist throughout this book, because in line with the reality of flexible and project-based work, many contemporary dance artists combine the positions of performer and choreographer either at the same time or over a certain period of time (meaning that one swaps position according to the project one is involved in at a specific moment). As contemporary dance artists often cultivate hybrid artistic careers, fluctuating between performing and choreographing, but also teaching, and perhaps other arts-related jobs, I employ the term dance artist to encompass this multifacetedness and to avoid employing slash-identities (e.g.

dancer/choreographer/performance artist/…), which brings us back to the issue of occupational identity discussed in the first chapter. Consequently, I distinguish the terms dancer (or performer) and choreographer only when the distinction is necessary for clarity of the role.

Lastly, the above implies that it is therefore impossible to truly define contemporary dance in a neutral or objective way, and by implication it is thus a challenge to delineate its practitioners or authors. Contemporary dance is often created collaboratively and thus also collectively validated, which in turn informs the notion of contemporary dance and its validation as such. In the second part of his book Moving Together: Theorizing and Making

6 I purposely put the notion of flexible performativity in italics as I employ a term here coined by Berlin-based contemporary dance artist Kareth Schaffer in a lecture in HZT in Berlin on February 4, 2013 and who uses the term in her practice and jargon on a daily basis.

Contemporary Dance (2015), Laermans devotes himself to the examination of the social relations within the contemporary dance world, and specifically within the making of a performance. With Luhmann’s system theory in mind, Laermans examines creative working processes and zooms in on the collaborations between the choreographer and the dancer, particularly those which happen, in his terms, in a semi-directive mode of participatory collaboration. As Laermans puts it: ‘collaborative dance indeed emerged within the practice of conceptual dance but rapidly changed into a generally valued mode of commonly creating dance, whatever its more specific stakes’ (2015, 21). Collaborations within contemporary dance are often experiments in common decision-making.

Contemporary dance artists especially value those collaborations that offer them numerous chances to explore and develop their ‘self’. Most importantly, Laermans introduces the notion of ‘the collaboratory’, meaning the ‘always contextually embedded, only partially realized and still virtual potential to co-create’ (2015, 364). In his text Being in Common, Laermans notes that artistic collaboration is always a collaboration ‘yet to come’ with a shared promise of a genuine social productivity as a driving force: ‘artistic collaboration nowadays bets on the potentialities of cooperation itself’ (2012, 94). Lastly, it is important to note that when the collaboration is too directly product-oriented, this is often perceived as not very conductive to a productive collaboration due to the time pressure it presupposes. Collaborative dance practices essentially ‘exemplify a cooperative mode of artistic creation that precedes a public performance without necessarily marking its observable features (though this may of course be the case)’

(Laermans 2015, 21). Hence, these ideas about collaboration and its potential inform contemporary dance practices and working modes and therefore also the notion of contemporary dance.