In a self-interview on “practice,” dance artist Chrysa Parkinson gives a detailed account of what she calls her “personal performance practice”:
I'm working in Montpellier at 6M1L/e.x.er.ce. And I'm touring with Zoo/Thomas Hauert and occasionally with Deborah Hay. And I'm teaching. When I'm not performing, I do a daily performance practice based on a combination of scores from Deborah and Zoo and other people. It has about six sections. Sometimes I help people devise daily performance practices (aka Personal Performance Practice, or PPP). Sometimes I just talk to people about how they hierarchize information and sustain themselves creatively. Sometimes I take part of someone's practice and add it to my own. (Parkinson Reference Parkinson, Ingvartsen and Chauchat2008, 81)
In the last few years, “practice” has become a widely used term, a powerful concept, and a popular activity among contemporary freelance dance artists working mainly in Western Continental Europe. In the introduction to a special issue entitled Practice in the Australian journal Critical Dialogues, dancer/choreographer Noha Ramadan (based in Amsterdam and Berlin) suggests that statements like “I have a writing practice, or ‘xxx’ is part of my artistic practice” are very common among dance artists today (Ramadan Reference Ramadan2014, 4; italics in the original; see also Cvejić and Vujanović Reference Cvejić and Vujanović2012, 151). Similarly, “practice-based performance” has also become a frequently used phrase. The ubiquity of the term practice becomes even more apparent, however, when dance artists refer to their work processes. Choreographer Rosalind Goldberg, for example, readily applies the expression when she details the production process for a current piece. As Goldberg explains, she and her colleagues, Stina Nyberg and Sandra Lolax, started out by “sharing their practices,” (i.e., presenting and teaching them to each other) (Rosalind Goldberg, personal communication with the author during a joint residency at the Eskus–Performance Center in Helsinki, Finland, November 23, 2015). Moreover, many artists have developed discursive and body-oriented formats that explore the notion and implications of practice in their work. Apart from (self-)reflective texts and publications (like those by ParkinsonFootnote 1 and Ramadan), artists’ interest in practice also manifests, for example, in initiatives such as “Nobody's Business,” which holds week-long sessions for the sharing of practices within the independent dance community. An online platform with the same name not only documents those events but also contains a collection of practices and provides guidelines for anyone who wishes to carry out a shared practice meeting. Other examples include the two-day Practice Symposium held in Stockholm in 2012, which used the format of an academic conference in order to propose and study different practices. Furthermore, the workshop “What's up, practice?,” held by choreographer Stina Nyberg in Oslo in 2015, engaged critically with the impact of practice by asking what it once promised and what it has become today. The notion of practice, in other words, permeates contemporary Western European independent dance to such an extent that today some dance professionals, such as choreographer Litó Walkey, purposefully avoid the term or have decided to stop talking about the phenomena of practice altogether: “The talking about is taking over! … I think I may need to take a retreat from the ‘about practice,’ and just mainline on practice” (Zacharias Reference Zacharias2012, 91). This article seeks to explore the phenomenon of “having a practice” in relation to expanded conceptions of support and artistic form, in order to contribute to an academic theorization of practice. In other words, I wish to write alongside artists’ own explorations of “having a practice,” since—despite reasonable concerns about its purpose (as we shall see below)—these explorations encourage a reflection on the complex issues of support and sustainability within contemporary dance aesthetics.
Surprisingly, the field of dance studies has, as of yet, paid little attention to the phenomenon of “having a practice” in the contemporary dance scene in Europe and elsewhere. One possible explanation has to do with the term “practice” itself. The myriad definitions of the term are also reflected in the field of dance, making practice a rather fuzzy concept. Practice (Greek: prattein, to act or to do) can refer to the actual execution of a “method” or “idea … as opposed to theories relating to it” (e.g., the practice of dance education); to a particular and routine “way of doing of something” related to a specific field, location, and time (e.g., post-modern training practices); or to exercising and rehearsing a skill (e.g., daily yoga practice) (Oxford Dictionary; see also Parkinson Reference Parkinson, Ingvartsen and Chauchat2008 for different uses of the term within dance). Specific to the arts, two further meanings of practice are important to mention. First, practice marks a distinct form of knowledge, which is understood as embodied and situated, as referred to in the context of “practice as research.” Secondly, practice can also refer to the Aristotelian distinction between praxis and poiesis. While poiesis stands for an act of making that aims to create a product (crafts), praxis refers to the act of doing unto itself. The goal and purpose of praxis is thus inherent to it, such as in the act of engaging in politics (see Bien Reference Bien, Ritter and Gründer1989, 1278–1285). By the 1960s, the resonance of the idea of praxis became visible in the shift away from art as artwork or object, to art as performance, process, or project.Footnote 2 Despite the various meanings ascribed to practice by different dance artists, there is a tendency in the field of independent contemporary dance to understand practice as “having a personal (performance) practice.”Footnote 3 As illustrated in the above quote by Chrysa Parkinson, practice does not have to refer to the professional dance artist's entire artistic output. In many cases, practice rather implies a specific regular activity or “set of activities” (Vujanović Reference Vujanović, Klein and Göbel2017, 299), which often evolves over time.Footnote 4 As the choreographer Walkey casually formulates it: “It's this little thing I am doing” (Litó Walkey, personal communication with the author after Walkey's rehearsal in Berlin, September 13, 2018). Moreover, by implicitly or explicitly applying the Aristotelian notion of praxis, personal performance practice often becomes distinguished from creation. More specifically, personal performance practice is differentiated from the result-oriented development of dance productions during rehearsals, as well as the ability-oriented and problem-solving purpose of technical training. Even though practice might influence the development of a piece and is fed into by various processes of production and continuous training, most performance artists understand practice as something which exists independently of the institutionalized obligations created by the production and training system. Thus, practice has its own temporality, outside of external production cycles (see Parkinson Reference Parkinson, Ingvartsen and Chauchat2008; Ramadan Reference Ramadan2014; Hardt Reference Hardt, Quinten and Schroedter2016; Vujanović Reference Vujanović, Klein and Göbel2017; Söderhult and Vujanović Reference Ellen and Vujanović2018). It is this understanding of practice—as personal performance practice—that is the subject of this article.
While the field of dance studies has mostly ignored the phenomenon of personal performance practice,Footnote 5 theorist and cultural worker Ana Vujanović (Reference Vujanović, Klein and Göbel2017; see also Söderhult and Vujanović Reference Ellen and Vujanović2018) has recently addressed the issue, discussing personal performance practice from a critical perspective. Though the artistic discourse on practice seems to suggest a great deal of self-awareness, Vujanović points out that—from a political perspective—personal practice is rarely unproblematic. Within the context of “neoliberal capitalism” (Vujanović Reference Vujanović, Klein and Göbel2017, 305), practice designates a “withdrawal from regular performance production” (Vujanović Reference Vujanović, Klein and Göbel2017, 295), and thus promises to engage in “resistance”: “In the situation where neither the product nor the work belongs to the artist as the agent … the main common goal of otherwise goalless personal performance practices can be understood as resistance to the ongoing alienation of artistic production” (Vujanović Reference Vujanović, Klein and Göbel2017, 303; italics in the original). Yet, following Vujanović, practice cannot keep the promises it makes. Quite the contrary, in its current manifestation as “personal,” practice is primarily dedicated to the development of the artist as product. From this perspective, practice is yet another “investment in the self” (Vujanović Reference Vujanović, Klein and Göbel2017, 307). By applying Gilbert Simondon's notion of the “transindividual” (Vujanović Reference Vujanović, Klein and Göbel2017, 304–305; 306–309), Vujanović urges artists to leave the sphere of personal practice and the “production of the self” (Reference Vujanović, Klein and Göbel2017, 307), by focusing instead on activities that “take place among people,” in order to create “public(s) and counterpublics” and to act as “citizens” (Reference Vujanović, Klein and Göbel2017, 309), thereby finding ways out of the messy situation of commodification. While Vujanović largely presents personal practice as a failed project that needs to be rethought and politicized, I argue that, understood as support, personal practice still has the ability to induce important discussions about the sustaining systems of dance and its aesthetics.
This article builds upon Vujanović’s propositions to investigate personal performance practice in relation (and as a reaction) to working conditions in dance—i.e., not in terms of embodied knowledge or as writing from within one's own movement experience. Yet, while Vujanović rightly criticizes the neoliberal dimensions of these personal performance practices,Footnote 6 I find it equally crucial to take a closer look at its concrete formation and aesthetics. How exactly does this self styling occur in the first place, and in what ways does the ambiguity of practice explain the aesthetics and forms of today's dance worlds? Such a perspective can ultimately also help to prevent us from falling victim to an uncomplicated desire for artists to unmistakably act beyond a profit-based market. How do different activities connect as personal practice? And how do they connect in order to make a supportive continuity or a feeling of autonomy possible? Indeed, Vujanović mentions the fact that personal practice “brings a sense of continuity” to the “compartmentalized” lives and jobs of dance artists working today (Reference Vujanović, Klein and Göbel2017, 302) but does not delve into those aspects of support. On what levels does personal performance practice operate, and how does it express itself aesthetically? And finally, what new perspectives and avenues for reflection does this phenomenon make available to the discipline of dance research?Footnote 7
Against the backdrop of a Western European contemporary and independent dance scene, characterized by technical, aesthetic, and intellectual depth but also by socioeconomic insecurity—in short, work with/out boundaries—this article suggests that practice must, at least for now, be understood as “support.” In dance, support firstly implies the basic foundations required for movement—such as balance, bracing, holding, and carrying. As a technical term, support is more ambiguous. On the one hand, a standing leg, which provides support to stabilize precarious movements, is both emancipatory (away from the barre or the supportive teacher) and allows for freedom of movement. On the other hand, it ensures that the system keeps running and that given forms and moves are properly executed. As such, it seems productive to connect the somewhat ambivalent notion of support with practice, since—at least for the time being—it allows for the tension between resistance and self styling to remain. Instead of affirming or damning the concept of personal practice in dance, the notion of support allows for a discussion about sustainability in dance. Here, I build on the research of performance scholar Shannon Jackson. In her book Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Reference Jackson2011), she presents the systemic apparatuses and infrastructures that constrain but also support and sustain the aesthetic and social livelihood of art, and indeed of all living beings.Footnote 8 Analyzing a wide range of artistic undertakings that fall under the category of “social practice” and are marked by an “‘avowal of support’” (Reference Jackson2011, 31), Jackson champions an understanding of freedom in terms of interdependent contingency, made possible by the backstage labor and civic structures that are often rendered invisible in daily life. Although such a perspective is rather atypical for (and easily attacked within) the discourse due to a long-standing insistence on art's autonomy, Jackson argues that a general leftist stance of “institutional critique” risks playing into (indeed already has) the hands of global deregulating forces, which we have come to know as the neoliberal situation of “individual precarity” (Reference Jackson2011, 25). Thus, Jackson's interest lies in “impure” gestures, which enable an “embedded antagonism within the processes that shape our contemporary environment” (Reference Jackson2011, 72–73). In line with this preference for the “impure,” I will argue that specifically because practice is so intertwined with neoliberal developments, it offers a crucial window into the under-analyzed daily routines of dance—or what is often more broadly referred to as “context” (and which combines dance aesthetics with the technical, mental, social, and economic dimensions of artists’ lives and work): from the subway rides between training and rehearsals, to the friendships that accompany artists throughout their lives. Framing this argument is the notion that, in the long run, practice brings about subtle, gradual shifts in style and in the aesthetics of dancing, which often stem specifically from those moments of support intrinsic to daily life—including those of dance professionals.
This article is grounded in a two-fold perspective. As a dance scholar trained and working at the Free University of Berlin, my research is located within the academy. As someone who has occasionally been active as a freelance dance production assistant, as an “outside perspective” during rehearsal processes, and as an interlocutor during residencies, as well as someone who takes open classes where professionals and lay people mix, my research profits from the spatial proximity to the international dance scene happening in Berlin. Not least, this milieu sometimes even serves as a basis for long-standing friendships. Taken together, my approach generates a quasi-ethnographic methodology: the personal conversations included in this article were not conducted as formal interviews, but rather as a form of “friendly conversation” (Spradley Reference Spradley1979, 55–58) that accompanies ethnographic fieldwork. I believe that this approach is not only helpful but also necessary, as my intention is to study the phenomenon of practice alongside dance artists’ own explorations and understandings of the subject. With regard to the case study and the material, artists like Chrysa Parkinson have an international reputation, while several of the other artists selected are quite established in Berlin or well-known in local European networks of “emerging artists” but likely unfamiliar to an international audience. This selection is not only a result of my approach, but is in fact crucial to a discussion of support, which is a pressing matter precisely for those artists who are not yet firmly established (as well as working within an independent dance scene, which I characterize as having eclectic and mobile ways of working) and thus often more involved in personal practice.Footnote 9 Two further comments are useful here. Firstly, within this exploration of practice in relation to questions of support, the examples given take place in the interval between art and life. Yet, that is not to say that an art-into-life gesture is characteristic of all personal practice or that those approaches are the only way to cultivate support through personal practice. Secondly, if the examples below display a form of relationality or of being “outside the studio,” I do not necessarily interpret this in line with Vujanović’s demand to act in public and beyond the self, but rather, I connect it to a language of context or infrastructure, such as Jackson's suggestion in terms of support.
In the first section, this article will outline—through the concepts of eclectic training and mobility—the possible meanings of work with/out boundaries in contemporary dance and how personal performance practice can be positioned within it. Through the example of Diego Agulló’s practice, the second section will elucidate how practice as support is generated, what support means in this case, and which activities are brought into conversation for this purpose. The third section concludes by discussing the extent to which descriptions of personal performance practices can be included in a broader perspective on current questions of art and daily life.
Eclectic Bodies and Mobile Lives
In contemporary dance, personal performance practice is situated in a broader discussion on training, creating, and practicing. In order to gain a better understanding of personal practice as support in relation to current working conditions, this section will sketch out—through a focus on eclectic training and mobility—what work with/out boundaries means in contemporary dance. Both eclectic training and mobility are related to the more general condition of neoliberalism, which produces a condition of precarity in both life and work (Standing Reference Standing2014; see also Lorey Reference Lorey2010). In this situation, “having a practice” has often become helpful, or supportive, for contemporary dance artists in Western Europe.
Dance training today is organized in an intensely eclectic manner, dominated by a “self-styled approach to training,” as Melanie Bales and Rebeca Nettl-Fiol demonstrate in their book on The Body Eclectic (Reference Bales, Nettl-Fiol, Bales and Nettl-Fiol2008, ix). In particular, they emphasize the shift away from training as learning vocabulary to a training that focuses on principles and approaches.Footnote 10 This process had already begun under Rudolf von Laban and other representatives of modern dance (Hardt and Stern Reference Hardt, Stern, Lohwasser and Zirfas2014, 153) but became prominent in the rise of alternative movement techniques in dance in the United States (in the 1960s) and in Europe (in the 1980s). These techniques are usually categorized as “somatics,” an umbrella term that includes Ideokinesis, the Alexander Technique, Body Mind-Centering, Feldenkrais, and the Klein Technique, among many others. The roots of these body techniques reach back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1960s and 1970s, they had stimulated new developments in the field of dance, especially outside of established institutions. By the 1990s, however, somatics had become an integral part of the teaching repertoire of many institutionalized dance programs.Footnote 11
In spite of this integration (or this usurpation), somatics are still popular among dance artists, partly due to the potential for physical and creative autonomy ascribed to these techniques. Here, the first-person perspective and perception of the body, understood as a form of knowledge in its own right, is key (Hanna Reference Hanna1986). Thus, one might learn both a gentle way of dealing with the body and discover creative movement potential. As somatics advocate that movement originates individually from each body, it therefore does not have to be enforced from the outside, for instance, by a superior choreographic authority. In order to experience one's (moving) body, somatics offer a great variety of approaches, often working with verbal cues or images (metaphors, anatomical drawings, objects) to stimulate sensations and the imagination. Somatics thereby generate processes of embodiment that are seen as “moving from within.” Deploying touch and body weight are also common procedures to create movement, understood in terms of its qualitative rather than its quantitative dimensions. Dance scholars like Doran George (Reference George2014), Isabelle Ginot (Reference Ginot2010), Sylvie Fortin (Reference Fortin2017), and Martha Eddy (Reference Eddy2002) have rightly challenged somatics for their suggestive power as well as their controversial narratives and rhetoric—especially with respect to the application of somatics, which sometimes even contradicts the aims of its founders—as well as their susceptibility to the perception that bodies are natural and free from all societal, cultural, and aesthetic regulations.Footnote 12 Yet at the same time, these techniques carry the potential to open up fixed systems. One important achievement of somatics is the breaking down of hierarchies between body parts or physical senses. Another is the possibility of producing shifts in the power dynamics between choreographer and dancer. The price of this freedom (beyond the previously mentioned problematic aspects) is an eclecticism in training forced by a trend toward individualization inherent to somatics (see also Vujanović and Cvejić Reference Cvejić and Vujanović2012; Hardt Reference Hardt, Quinten and Schroedter2016). Based on the motto “do whatever feels good,” dancers feel free—virtually obligated—to test out different techniques, design their own training agendas, and listen to what they understand their bodily needs to be—in short, to support themselves. In terms of work with/out boundaries, this freedom aligns with neoliberal values of life-long learning, fostered by a thriving workshop culture and the expectation of self-responsibility within a deregulated job market. It must be noted that, today, this workshop (or open classes) culture often serves as an alternative educational site, as dance artists’ biographies and profiles are no longer coherent and uniform. In Berlin, for example, many emerging artists have not completed formal dance training but join the field from other professional backgrounds or with training in other areas of the arts. However, eclectic training not only involves somatics but can also encompass “disparate practices” (Bales Reference Bales, Bales and Nettl-Fiol2008a, 2): “In fact, there is just about any kind of ‘training package’ you could imagine going on these days” (Bales Reference Bales, Bales and Nettl-Fiol2008b, 15). Bales and Nettl-Fiol term this situation a “bricolage” (Bales and Nettl-Fiol Reference Bales, Nettl-Fiol, Bales and Nettl-Fiol2008), understanding it also as a means of creating “balance” (Bales Reference Bales, Bales and Nettl-Fiol2008b, 16). Although this comes close to what I wish to tackle here, through a focus on personal performance practice, the concept of bricolage still refers to a genuine realm of dance training or body practices taught in universities and workshops. Put differently, bricolage alludes to what happens in the artist's studio and is thus solely related to what—in a strict (and long since deemed invalid) sense—is understood as the sphere of art and focuses solely on physical training, whereas, as we will see in more detail in the next section, examples of personal performance practice can reach out to what is often referred to as context.Footnote 13 Furthermore, personal practice can involve activities other than bodily movement, such as reading, writing, tarot card laying, having coffee, or Skyping with friends. In her text on personal practice, Noha Ramadan describes it as “what artists are doing aside from production, training, and research that nonetheless feeds their work and their sense of self” (Reference Ramadan2014, 5). Similarly, choreographer Diego Gil (who also completed a doctorate in philosophy), in response to Ramadan's question about practice, notes, “I begin to remember our talks about the things we do when we are neither inside the dance studio nor in the midst of production. I remember we talked about the sense of guilt that comes from doing many things almost simultaneously, and not feeling something concrete emerge from them” (Gil Reference Gil2014, 10).
A further explanation for the rise of eclectic bodies can be found in the way that work in dance is organized today. As dance artists usually take on freelance work and short-term projects, they have to show a high tolerance for flexibility and mobility. Susan Leigh Foster's concept of a “hired body”—describing a landscape in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s marked by “a new cadre of dance makers, called ‘independent choreographers’” (Reference Foster and Desmond1997, 253)—remains true today when it comes to the role of the dancers.Footnote 14 Entrepreneurial dancers are continually asked to master different styles, a demand that also involves attending workshops all over the place. For Foster, this situation causes a gravitation toward uniform homogenous appearances, as different styles are summarized “beneath a sleek, impenetrable surface” (Reference Foster and Desmond1997, 255). Despite its outward conception by some practitioners as an individual need, the above-mentioned culture of exploration and experimentation, of constant learning and unlearning, thus reflects a deeper socioeconomic shift within the contemporary dance system.
In “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed …” (Reference Monten, Bales and Nettl-Fiol2008), dancer Joshua Monten posits that these precarious working conditions produced new forms of responsibility and new zones of conflict. In order to protect themselves from becoming homogenous hired bodies, dancers now need to learn how to handle different material:
Learning how to negotiate conflicting technical demands has become an inevitable component of formal dance training in the twenty-first century … to the extent that technical training is about instilling instincts—patterns of movement so consistent that the body can respond correctly in an instant—having too many training techniques can be quite problematic. (Monten Reference Monten, Bales and Nettl-Fiol2008, 61, italics in the original)
This “new” task can be considered a necessity for “metatechnique,” in response to the changing global economy, as well as technical and radical aesthetic shifts in the late twentieth century. Following Randy Martin's investigation of dancers’ agency and processes of “self-governance” (Reference Martin1988, 175), Meghan Quinlan understands metatechnique as the ability “to negotiate multiple bodily techniques” (Reference Quinlan2017, 35), which she sees as embedded in techniques such as Gaga, which blur the line between technique, choreography, and improvisation.Footnote 15 While it remains debatable to what extent, as per Quinlan, metatechnique helps to keep styles discreet from each other, for our purposes, it is crucial to note that contemporary dancers are constantly asked to find support to navigate the field in which they are working. Chrysa Parkinson, who is currently the director of the New Performative Practices MFA program at DOCH-Uniarts in Stockholm and has taught in the United States, Australia, and Europe (for example at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels), notes that students do not necessarily navigate this situation with a specific end point in mind. As such, the agency of the dancer and the requirements of the market come into play in other ways than the discussion on metatechnique would suggest:
I notice my students devising principles, or thought-maps, mythologies, wish-lists, moral codes … some substructure that helps them navigate or synthesize or do some other thing that I don't know exactly what it is … But isn't that just that they get training and then become good enough at what they want to do to actually do it? No. They often redefine being “good at it” by redefining “it.” (Parkinson Reference Parkinson, Ingvartsen and Chauchat2008, 82, italics in the original)
Following Parkinson, dancers also engage with the various liberties and obstacles inherent to their current working conditions in order to modify training itself and to adjust it to their own circumstances, which indeed can be experienced as supportive. Here, an interesting aspect of what we call personal practice comes into view, which also applies to the practices discussed in this article, as this process of adjusting and reformulating can reach beyond a narrow concept of creation toward other areas, such as the everyday or private sphere, thus mobilizing and shifting not only the line between training and choreography, but also the line between working and private life. Blurring those lines also supports an art system focused on the new. Today, most choreographers appreciate the ability of dancers to independently find artistic solutions during the production process—a well-known phenomenon in dance often conceived of in terms of “collaboration.” Bales and Nettl-Fiol note that “choreographers are often interested in, and in fact inspired by, the idiosyncrasies of their dancers” (Reference Bales, Nettl-Fiol, Bales and Nettl-Fiol2008, x). Contemporary training institutions seem to encourage this development. For example, even the BA program at the Inter-University Centre for Dance in Berlin (HZT) (which notably shares studio space with dance artists from outside of the school) do not solely emphasize dance training but allow instead for a focus “on the students’ own artistic goals” within a course entitled “BA Dance, Context, Choreography” (Inter-University Centre for Dance, n.d.). Today, education in dance often requires numerous competencies, which move far beyond the traditional requirements of formal dance training, involving cross-media capabilities, discursive and conceptual skills learned by reading and discussing critical or postmodern theory, and managerial skills for administrating potential funding and setting up a marketable personal profile. Yet it remains debatable (and an issue for future case studies) if these developments truly produce “new” and unique formulations, or if they rather reproduce homogenous and repeating aesthetics (as described by Foster Reference Foster and Desmond1997), facilitated by the various sharing formats circulating in dance. Due to their focus on exploring and experimenting with one's own body, somatics seem promising as a means to achieve the artistic goals of developing a new and own language. Therefore, it is not surprising that many personal performance practices include somatics, although somatic practices and personal practices are not one and the same.Footnote 16 It is fair to say that somatics provide the tools needed to cope with the very situation—an expanding dance field and a market that rewards singular artistic positions—that they helped to create in the first place.
Mobility is a crucial factor and expectation in contemporary training and in the different production steps of choreographic projects within the independent scene in Europe. Although dance is indeed prospering in cities like Berlin, it still lacks a sustainable subsidy system and wealthy sponsors. In Berlin specifically, there are approximately 300 choreographers, 3,000 dancers, and 1,400 performances per year. Yet, the sector commands only 3 percent of the city's cultural budget (TanzRaumBerlin, n.d.; for an extensive survey of the socioeconomic position of dance artists in Germany and Europe, see Sabisch Reference Sabisch and Brauneck2017). Out of necessity, the sector functions on a kind of modular production scheme. Combining grants from different funding agencies and the private sector with monetary, spatial, and administrative support from production housesFootnote 17 and residency programs, artists split their projects into parts, completing them step by step in different (inter)national locations, and at different, not necessarily successive, intervals. By performing different roles (choreographer, dancer, dramaturge) simultaneously, artists will ideally fill emerging slots with other projects. Because of this, dance artists are continuously travelling, even before the obligation of touring their completed pieces is factored in. In such a situation, a personal practice is experienced as supportive. Rosalind Goldberg explains that, for her, practice offers continuity in a mobile and decentralized life: “If you travel a lot, you need a practice” (Rosalind Goldberg, personal communication with the author at a private residence in Berlin, January 15, 2013). One might add that the various sharing formats that artists have initiated around personal practice provide a sense of solidarity within a neoliberal sphere of entrepreneurial self-responsibility. Ironically, the flip side of this highly mobile way of producing is the feeling of stagnation during times of inactivity, such as when funds are not received, or during the early stages of a dancer's career when jobs are scarcer.Footnote 18 Personal practice helps dance artists to perceive themselves as being active, as “the thing, which I do, is already something” (Stina Nyberg, Skype conversation with the author, June 25, 2017). This way, personal practice becomes a highly relevant means of support, allowing for sustainability in the daily lives of dance artists, helping them negotiate the technical, aesthetic, mental, and socioeconomic requirements of their field: “Practice—however defined—is something which helps sustain what we do, a kind of creative spirit-guide through the precariousness and complexity of our lives” (Ramadan Reference Ramadan2014, 5). How precisely a specific personal practice as support is generated by bringing body practices and commuting routines into conversation will be illuminated in the next section.
Tai Chi on the Subway: Daily Life, Context, and Form
As we have seen, personal practice can engender the modification of training contents and movement forms as well as create links to a specific context beyond the limits of work. But how are different areas of work and life brought together in generating movement through personal practice? What does support mean when interweaving those areas into a personal practice? By discussing examples of personal performance practices, this section takes a closer look at how they interconnect various areas of a dancer's life—such as daily work routines, leisure time, or personal friendships—with the creation of dance forms. Finally, this section presents a preliminary conception of the shift in the aesthetics and forms of dancing brought about by personal practice.
In his online blog, Berlin-based artist Diego Agulló gives an account of his daily performance practice. Although he has no formal dance education and works across media, Agulló often integrates dance or movement-based forms and is a well-known actor in Berlin's contemporary dance scene. Thus, he serves as an example for an independent dance field characterized by steadily expanding borders, eclecticism, and flexibility. Under the headline “Injecting the Anomaly. Practicing in the Subway,” Agulló explains, by means of images and text, that his practice consists of doing Tai Chi while traveling on public transport in Berlin, where he uses the train's handrails in place of the usual wooden Tai Chi staff. This practice came about after he realized how his embodied Tai Chi practice clearly influenced his use of public transport:
On a normal day I can spend at least 1 hour in the subway… . Some months ago, while holding on to the pole of the subway car, I realized that my hands were already practicing without me noticing. I am used to regular exercising with the Tai Chi stick and since the pole has the same diameter as the stick, my hands automatically started to engage the rest of my body into the exercises. (Agulló Reference Agulló2018, grammar has been corrected from the original)
Agulló’s story about practicing during his commute is just one example of many that demonstrate how dance or movement artists use specific spaces, times, and facilities—usually not associated with their professional activities as artists—to exercise and experiment. In a similar vein, in the booklet accompanying his piece Dance (Praticable) (2006), which was based on Body-Mind Centering (BMC), dancer and choreographer Frédéric Gies, who was head of the master's program in choreography at DOCH-Uniarts in Stockholm from 2012 to 2018, described his leisure-time BMC practice. He and his dance colleagues practiced BMC in the studio during the development of the piece, and he would also regularly do so at Berlin's techno club Berghain:
During this period, I was having quite an intense nightlife, going out almost every weekend and spending hours and hours dancing on the dance floor. Closing my eyes, letting the vibrations of the beats infiltrate all of my cells and lose my mind in the dance. I used to observe what was happening in my body when I was reaching these trance-like states while dancing. I used to observe other people dancing as well. It became evident for me that a lot was happening in the endocrine system. Thus, I started to play consciously with my endocrine glands in my dance. BMC on the dance floor! Sometimes I reached very extreme states this way. Berghain was my “playground” for it at that time. (Gies Reference Gies2008, 26–27)
For Berlin-based dance artists, the extant club culture seems particularly attractive. In conversations with the author, dance artist Maria Scaroni, who regularly collaborates with Meg Stuart, among others, and emerging dramaturge Mateusz Szymanówka agreed on the importance of clubbing, although Scaroni underlined that she does not go there to “analyze” dance: “I do what the other people do.” Still, she noted that there is a zone of “transit” in which leisure time and professional interests intersect (Maria Scaroni, personal communication with the author at a private residence, Berlin, March 22, 2018). For Szymanówka, clubbing has long been an important part of his life, even while still living in Warsaw, or before he was professionally involved in the dance and performance scene. Now, it seems normal to him to go out dancing with his fellow artists during their involvement in a production. Though he himself has never attended a formal dance class, he noted with a wink, “I have a raving practice” (Mateusz Szymanówka, personal communication with the author in Berlin, March 24, 2018).
Let's return to our first example: Agulló practicing Tai Chi on public transport.Footnote 19 How are different areas and activities of work and life brought together in his personal practice? How is movement generated in his practice? Agulló’s blog post implies that consistency is important to him. He not only refers to his exercises as “practice” and thus aligns them with a discourse of recurrence in personal performance practice. He also writes about how he sought to render the time spent commuting more “meaningful” (Agulló Reference Agulló2018). Therefore, his focus was not on creating a one-off occupation, but rather to find a practice which could turn his frequent journeys into a meaningful activity. Further, the photographs included in the blog post show different moments on public transport, underlining the idea of regularity. We see Agulló on Berlin's subway (U-Bahn) and on the aboveground transport (S-Bahn) systems, in tunnels and on ground level, during the day and at night, on crowded and empty trains, next to fellow commuters, and wearing different clothes. In addition, the photographs exhibit several styles, as if they were taken by different people, with different cameras and at different points in time. By integrating one element of dance work, namely the body practice of Tai Chi, into daily routines (in this case the artist's commute), he not only creates a high level of consistency in practicing but also brings together two areas of his work (and life). Interestingly, Agulló himself addresses this issue as a sidenote: “[the public space's] function is to provide spaces for repetition and insistence, spaces for integration where it is possible to institute something” (Reference Agulló2018). In so doing, he adjusts the body practice of Tai Chi to suit an everyday action. Key to this process, it seems, is an aestheticization of the everyday, since this practice is not simply about holding the handrails of a subway car in either a random or a purposeful fashion. Rather, Agulló adds a dancer's attentiveness to the activity, thus enhancing it. One might suggest that Agulló even receives a certain pleasure from it that goes beyond a simple use of the handrails—the journey becomes a performance informed by Tai Chi, thus aestheticizing the unavoidable transit time. As sociologist Axel Honneth (Reference Honneth1992) details, the sociological concept of aestheticization describes a phenomenon wherein “the subjects in developed, rich, countries in the West do not relate to their daily lives by utility but aesthetically” (Honneth Reference Honneth1992, 522; my translation). While in the past, everyday life and actions were determined by the “need to survive,” it is now the individual's cultivated “preferences” and “tastes” that shape decision-making and thus daily life (Honneth Reference Honneth1992, 523; my translation). Whereas the argument for an aestheticization of life is based on the difference between functional and aesthetic actions, in this case, they go hand in hand, thereby accounting for an artist's life situation, which is situated in the somewhat paradoxical realms of daily precarity in the midst of a highly developed and wealthy Western European environment.
Through this process of interweaving different areas of work and life, as well as different types of actions, movement generation is coproduced by the site-specific materiality of public transport, modifying both—in this case, the body technique of Tai Chi and the form of Agulló’s commute. Other examples of personal practice, for instance Berlin-based Lea Kieffer and Rocio Marano's Ninja Practice, bring other dynamics into play—here, the dynamics of friendship. Agulló gestures toward this process of material formation when he details the differences between a Tai Chi staff and the handrail on the train: “The pole does not move, so it requires a different approach to the exercises” (Reference Agulló2018). The photographs also point to another difference: whereas the Tai Chi staff is made of wood, the handrail is a smooth metal pole, glossy silver or painted bright yellow. It follows that “sensing the magnetic-like feeling of the metal pole in a subway wagon” (Agulló Reference Agulló2018) will engender different body forms through the practice of Tai Chi than the usage of the classic Tai Chi staff. Other materialities also influence the process of body formation, such as the stop-and-go rhythm of the trains, the stench, and the physical contact with fellow commuters. These kinds of formations might be partly viewed as processes of synchronization in which the individual rhythms of diverse elements (a rhythmically structured body, formed through the practice of Tai Chi, the jerking of the trains, the noticeable movement of other passengers) mutually affect each other in such a way as to create dynamic interrelations of form, which may also, over time, shape the body (regarding the research on synchronization in cultural studies, Brandstetter, van Eikels, and Schuh Reference Brandstetter, van Eikels and Schuh2017).
How does a practice function as a support? Agulló’s desire to make an everyday journey “meaningful” (Reference Agulló2018) is revealing in this context, as the act of commuting alone does not suffice as support. In this particular case, support is achieved through the combination of two activities from different areas of his life by means of adjusting a specific body technique to different locations and situations.Footnote 20 This encourages the possibility of practice anywhere and everywhere, contributing to its stabilization and thus creating a sense of continuity within the mobile life of contemporary dance artists. As Agulló describes it, “Every situation can turn into an opportunity for continuing practicing” (Reference Agulló2018). Therefore, taken to the next level, a Tai Chi practice established on the subway could be put to the test on an airplane. In his text “Was trägt?” (literally “What carries?”), performance scholar Kai van Eikels interrogates the act of carrying by following up on Tim Ingold and the movement practice of contact improvisation as a delay in the act of falling (Reference van Eikels, Weltzien and Kapp2017, 198). Carrying becomes a continuation of “numerous lines … of movement, that create opportunities for each other” (van Eikels Reference van Eikels, Weltzien and Kapp2017, 200; my translation). Looking at the etymological roots of the word “support,” from the Latin portāre (to carry), it is possible to conceive of the support received from a personal practice such as Agulló’s as an extension of lines of movement through different, unexpected, circumstances. This example of practice reveals a range of possible supportive dimensions, which, as Jackson describes, can range from the “‘undermounted’ but [can] also [be] imagined in motion and as laterally relational,” and “necessary to sustain an entity that seems to be, for all intents and purposes, ‘living’” (Jackson Reference Jackson2011, 31). In Agulló’s case, support is not limited to the physical support of grasping onto a handrail, nor to the infrastructural technology of the public transport system rendered visible by supporting Agulló’s art making by taking him from A to B. The support of travelling on public transport can also be located in the potential occurrence of a (technical and choreographic) movement experience, as well as in the mental aspect of “having a practice.” However, in this transformation of traditional techniques into daily actions, in which traces of one's own life (and work) can be found, the precarity of creative work environments does not disappear. To the contrary, dancers might even offer themselves up to it, both by arranging the system to become manageable within their own lives and by sustaining links between art and non-art and between work and daily life. Now even traveling on public transport turns out to be work—even though it might seem pleasant.Footnote 21 Thus, this example of Agulló’s personal practice should not be understood as a successful support for the precarious artist without any contradiction, but as an incentive for a discussion on sustainability and work with/out boundaries in contemporary dance aesthetics, and the relationship of personal practice to those discourses.
Here, it becomes apparent how a personal practice explicitly creates correlations between processes of formation in daily life and in dance. How might personal practice relate to a broader shift in the aesthetics of dancing? One can presume that Agulló’s daily Tai Chi practice on public transport (he speaks of an hour per day) not only transforms his Tai Chi practice over time, but also that his body is transformed by Tai Chi—a body which, in its own form, then enters the dance studio and informs various processes of production in dance or in his teaching in workshops. Another way to think about such a shift in forms appears when we consider the making of art as a response to the world where it occurs. In the example here, Agulló’s world has changed: the specific means of Tai Chi commuting have become part of his artistic reflective space. In this way, through their personal performance practices, dance artists trigger a kind of noninstitutional process of formation “in the wild,” often shaped by personal working and living conditions, by leisure activities, or by friendships—in short, by what is commonly perceived as the context of artists’ lives. Analyzing personal practice, its procedures, and compositional strategies not only raises awareness of the aesthetic implications of precarious working conditions but can also shift the focus toward dance actors on all levels of the production system, who significantly influence the choreographic production with their bodies, movements, and dramaturgical suggestions and procedures. Despite its problematic connection with precarity, personal practice still echoes those actors’ call for due recognition of the value of their continuous work as dance artists alongside classic choreographic work.
What (a Perspective on) Practice Offers: A Call for an Expanded Notion of Form
“Lying on the couch as a practice. Sitting still doing nothing as meditation. Raving as contemporary dance. Why can we not just do stuff without being all like: Well, I as an artist am interested in what I call ‘doing stuff’” (Nyberg, e-mail correspondence with the author, September 1, 2018). In her frustration, dance artist Stina Nyberg illustrates that personal performance practice is without a doubt intrinsically connected with the economic dynamics of the art market. “Having a practice” increases the marketability of artists and is part of their self-fashioning. However, rather than participating in this line of critique, this article aimed to open up the exploration of personal performance practice to the complex questions of sustainability and support in contemporary dance worlds and to its relationship to its aesthetics. Following Shannon Jackson's exploration of “the contingent systems that support the management of life” (Reference Jackson2011, 29), it seems crucial to avoid hastily blaming artists (or other social actors) for failing to fulfill their own (political) purposes. Instead, it is key to grapple with the frictions and ambiguities that constitute the contemporary moment of work with/out boundaries. I believe that accounting for such ambiguity, which is characteristic of the social reality of independent contemporary dance, can instigate further discussions—useful for both practitioners within the field and dance scholars. Aligning with Jackson's notion of support enables us to make visible the often-hidden systems and networks that not only shape our lives but also mold art. This is part of a deeper shift within performance studies, in which, more recently, scholarship on the relation between art and daily life has increasingly emphasized that a view on the processes of aesthetic creation and production cannot be limited to the studio or the stage. Thus, (rehearsal) processes must also be understood as decentralized and scattered (Matzke Reference Matzke2012, 105; Kleinschmidt Reference Kleinschmidt2018), and analysis of staged work cannot be limited to the actual performances (Warstat Reference Warstat, Heinicke, Kalu and Warstat2017, 39). The phenomenon of personal performance practice, which is to a certain degree temporally and spatially connected to “actual” training and “actual” rehearsals (consider the half-hour warm-up during which dancers each follow their own routines) as well as to creation, accords with the demand for an expanded conception of form. The notion of support allows for the daily work of dance—in which personal rituals of practice reside—to be made visible in order to track its connections with dance forms and aesthetics. As previously mentioned, this article is based on the assumption that in the long run, practice brings about a subtle, gradual shift in style and in the aesthetics of dancing, often stimulated by the quotidian moments of support. Through an interpretation of personal performance practices, this article suggests an understanding of dance and choreography that foregrounds the dance artist's everyday perspective. In other words, the point is not only to give dance artists on all levels of the system—with their concrete working and living conditions—due credit for their contributions to artistic processes and productions but also to acknowledge this position analytically.
