As April's special issue of Dance Research Journal, “Work With(Out) Boundaries: Precarity and Dance” (2019) attests, one of the field's most enduring preoccupations is how the “Age of Precarity” affects dance. The phrase has many connotations, from a political world marked by upheaval, extremism, and global refugee and climate crises, to a neoliberal economy in which a smokescreen of freedom belies profound financial insecurity. In his ambitious book Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Theatre Dance and the Commons (2017), Ramsay Burt explores how a conceptually rigorous movement of contemporary dance has staged new critiques of the far-reaching effects of neoliberalism and global instability. For those interested in the intersections of dance and philosophy, this text furthers the conversation on how dance can embody a wide range of challenging philosophical concepts and debates on the state of the human condition in late capitalism. Among Burt's important assertions is the unique capacity of the dance community to support a free circulation of information in the wake of institutional efforts at privatization.
Divided into eleven chapters, Ungoverning Dance is meant to be read as three thematic sections in dialogue with recent philosophical movements. Chapters 2–4 take on dance virtuosity and labor under neoliberalism and post-Fordism through the works of Italian Operaists such as Toni Negri, Paolo Virno, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, as well as the French Jacques Rancière. Chapters 5–8 reference a range of philosophers—Levinas, Arendt, Nancy, and Blanchot—to define the nature of responsibility under neoliberalism: both the changing conditions for how we relate and care, and the artist's obligation to challenge and critique through their work. Chapters 9 and 10 consider history and memory as choreographic devices and as cultural constructs through the writings of Walter Benjamin, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Henri Bergson, and Susanne Langer. Burt's engagement with such a vast range of theorists will be quite dense for the unfamiliar reader, but his descriptions of dozens of fascinating dance works make their relevance clear. Due to the breadth of topics covered in Ungoverning Dance, this review will focus on major themes from each section, such as the significance of “ungoverning” dance and the commons, virtuosity, relationality, and history.
Ungoverning Dance’s choreographic case studies, while not limited to “European theatre dance,” come from the movement variously called conceptual dance, non-danse (non-dance), and l'art déceptif (deceptual art) by scholars and critics. Burt coins the term “ungoverning” dance in a nod to André Lepecki's Exhausting Dance (2005): “By ‘ungoverning’ dance, I mean giving it independence from its institutional constraints through aesthetic deconstruction” (4). Often antivirtuosic in a technical sense, these works are either explicitly or implicitly anti-institutional, and disrupt the boundaries of performer-spectator relations. As Burt writes, in the years following the Judson Dance Theater's pivotal contributions to dance making, two dominant interpretations of its lessons emerged. American contemporary dance developed an interest in embodied movement and somatic practices and has since become a leading force in dance training. Meanwhile, European contemporary dance furthered the form-questioning radicalism of Judson and conceptual approaches of the visual art world, and, according to Burt, has made more significant choreographic innovations. The difference in the political potential of these choreographic branches becomes the topic of chapter 2, but the artistic sensibility that Burt loosely characterizes as European is his focus for the remainder of Ungoverning Dance.
In chapter 1 Burt introduces a central concept of Ungoverning Dance, that of the commons. With its roots in medieval land sharing, the term has come to mean a shared resource of a community, including knowledge or language. Burt applies this notion to the freely available resources and knowledge of the dance community, from movement practices like contact improvisation, to organizations like Movement Research and Independent Dance. The dance community globally circulates its techniques and somatic movement approaches in a system larger than the contributions of any one person, and dancers continually draw from this commons for their individual choreographic ideas and aesthetics. The commons evades the profit-minded engine of capitalism, and is thus constantly under attack from institutions that would seek to privatize its resources. “Ungoverning” dance uses aesthetic means to reveal and resist the mechanics of privatization of such common-pool resources.
Chapter 3 shows the dance commons in action, comparing the circulation of educational videos such as William Forsythe's Improvisation Technologies (1999/1994) with attempts to privatize and exploit dance knowledge, such as Beyoncé Knowles's infamous 2011 plagiarism of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's Rosas Danst Rosas (1983) and Achterland (1990) for the video “Countdown.” As a tool of the commons, Forsythe's video allows its community to grow and develop democratically from below. Rather than privileging certain master purveyors of information as the apex of virtuosity, Burt proposes—citing Ranciére—that anyone has the potential to learn and create on their own if given the means. Meanwhile, in the de Keersmaeker/Knowles case, Burt points out that, in response to the notorious appropriation of her choreography, de Keersmaeker invited the global public to create individual versions of Rosas Danst Rosas. She undermined an attempt to coopt her choreography for capital gain by creating an opportunity for public education and individual interpretation. Writes Burt, “these emancipatory acts are political ones because they challenge the deadening effect large corporations are having on dance knowledge as a common-pool resource, and by encouraging new ways of thinking and living” (71). Corporations would use and retire dance like a fashion trend, whereas de Keersmaeker's invitation to re-interpret old choreography gives futurity and continuance to dance knowledge.
Burt points out that such choreographic “emancipatory acts” have a virtuosity in their conceptual deftness that differs and perhaps even responds to concert dance's normative technical virtuosity. Political theorists have shown that technical virtuosity can be exploited for profit in late-twentieth-century capitalism. But the virtuosity of “ungoverning” dance reveals what dance alone can bring to institutional critique, and what aspects of “bodily knowledge and awareness … cannot be objectified” (62).
Chapters 6 and 7 address relationality under capitalism, considering how the solo can stage new potentials for the self to relate to the world, and how “duos” can visualize the complexity of friendship in our current age. Burt compares the solos Self Unfinished (1998) by Xavier Le Roy, Piezas Distinguidas (1993–2003) by Maria La Ribot, and 3Abschied (2010) by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, with the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's 2002 dialogue with choreographer Mathilde Monnier on the danced solo, and Hannah Arendt's distinction between the public and the private. Solo dance can reveal the self and demonstrate how to live with oneself, writes Burt. But it can also show how one relates to a world in motion. Successful solos create a counterintuitive sense of incompleteness for the audience, and can un-work the primacy placed on the individual choreographer under neoliberalism. The three case studies challenge normative perceptions of woman, human, virtuoso, and more, utilizing the singular body to their advantage where multiple bodies would necessarily read as an exploration of relationships. One missed opportunity of chapter 6, however, is an account of the economic significance of the solo under neoliberalism. Among emerging choreographers in the United States, at the very least, many have attested to limiting their works to small casts or solos out of the inability to offer substantial compensation to other dancers. How does necessity force or complicate the work of the solo in demonstrating “living with oneself” in this age?
Burt clarifies how dance making itself is culturally situated in chapter 7, on modern relations seen in four “duos” of same-gender dancers from different cultural or training backgrounds, including the French choreographer Jérôme Bel and Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun's Pichet Klunchun and Myself (2004), and the English choreographer Jonathan Burrows and Italian-English composer Matteo Fargion's Cheap Lecture and The Cow Piece (2009). Following the work of philosopher Luce Irigaray, Burt asserts the elusiveness of friendship and what it reveals about the conditions for relating in our world. Irigaray writes that friendship exists between two people but is neither of theirs, drawing them closer while allowing them to protect a part of themselves. But time, history, culture, and trauma also have their effect on what exists between two people. Like the course of the friendships one will have in a lifetime, these “duos” of contemporary friendship succeed in creating a bond to varying degrees: some are generous with each other and their audiences, others reveal competition, power imbalances, and transactional motives.
Chapter 8 continues with relationality under capitalism by thinking through the ethics of responsibility and how bodies respond in improvisational environments. Burt's unexpected case studies for this chapter, Steve Paxton's Magnesium (1972) and a 2011 blog post by Egyptian choreographer Adham Hafez written during the “Arab Spring,” both demonstrate how we prepare our bodies to embrace impact and the unknowable. Burt here draws from Emmanuel Levinas's theories of an inherent potential for violence that exists when one relates to another and a base watchfulness that consciousness maintains for the body. As Erin Manning explains Levinas, there is a distinction between being responsible for the other and responsible before others. In both dance improvisation and political protest settings, it is “safer and more productive” to be responsible for the safety of oneself, which “allows the relatively autonomous motor actions to take their course and allows the work to continue making itself through the dancers’ commitment to it” (176). This explanation of the ontology of the body under duress is not only a strong takeaway from Paxton's aggressive early experiments that eventually led to contact improvisation, but a meaningful way of understanding how the dancing body translates to the uprising body.
In chapter 9 Burt takes on history and memory through what he calls “re-works”: dances that “deliberately revisit pieces that are still within living memory” or are still recalled in traces by acquaintances of the artists (187). Burt writes on works that intend to trouble how we conceptualize history, and in some cases destabilize the colonialist and gendered narratives of canonical dance, such as Faustin Linyekula's La Création du monde 1923–2012 (2012) and Fabián Barba's A Mary Wigman Dance Evening (2010). Following Walter Benjamin's skepticism of newness-as-progress, he proposes that history and memory can be uniquely challenged in dance. When dancers revisit past works, they process memory through the body: they can question which bodies can stake a claim in history, mine it for ideas that are still relevant, and recognize what no longer stands. These choreographers learn “to dance in the subjunctive … to engage in an imaginative dialogue with a reimagined past” (208). What might have been, and knowing what we now know, what can still be?
Each chapter of Ungoverning Dance inspires new thoughts on how dance endures or else thwarts the implications of this “Age of Precarity.” Another three chapters even take on specific choreographic devices– chapter 2 comparing how nakedness and musical interpretation have been differently utilized in American and European dance contexts, chapter 5 proposing laughter as a form of “radical passivity,” and chapter 10 considering how still tableaux and freeze-frames emphasize “the virtual nature of dance performance and its potential to trigger the process of imagining.” Ungoverning Dance is a formidable set of studies on dance and the commons, and at times the nature of their connection across chapters can be opaque; certain challenging terms and comparisons could be further pursued, including the reason for grouping these choreographers. Since many do not fit in under the umbrella of contemporary European theater dance, such as Linyekula, Barba, Hafez, and Paxton, it's crucial to consider cultural contexts to understand their full political impact. Moreover, future studies might consider how the amorphous institution of the “official dance world” (187) shifts from ballet and modern companies to one of major, singular European choreographers such as Le Roy and Bel who are supported by relatively hefty museum and theater commissions. In Ungoverning Dance, Burt clears a crucial path for further study of dance and labor, economy, relationality, and institutional critique. We might take up his baton and learn how to best defend our beloved dance commons.
