Is dancing special? For those of us passionate about dance—about making it, watching it, analyzing it, writing about it, or doing it—dance and dancing seem special, and especially compelling. And in many ways it is, of course. Dancing integrates our physical and cognitive selves in ways that few other professions do. Depending upon the form and format, it can be emotionally meaningful, aesthetically charged, intellectually inspiring, affectively transcendent, politically stirring. It can help us create community and embody politics. But in other ways, dancing and dance making are not so unique. They share characteristics both with other arts and with other modes of work outside of the arts.
This special issue of Dance Research Journal, with its focus on dance, labor, and precarity, provides us with an opportunity to consider several questions that I want to take up here: In what ways do the conditions of production of dance shape the resulting experiences and products of dancers/choreographers? Of audiences? How are those conditions different from, or similar to, that for other modes of labor? What can the analytical lens of “precarity,” adopted from other discourses, reveal to us about the work of dancing? Is it new? And finally, how might our answers to these questions make a difference? And for whom?
An “afterword” is an odd genre. Coming at the end, literally denoting “words” coming “after,” it is posed as supplement, perhaps as summing up, or perhaps as springboard—coming after something and before something else—the afterlife of the preceding text. I am aiming for the latter approach here, as a springboard to thinking further, looking back at these intriguing articles in toto, and looking forward to some of the larger questions they can raise for our future research. Each article is largely anchored in a case study, or at least in a community, and by reading those against and across each other we can see some larger observations emerge. I sketch those here with an invitation to readers to argue, critique, expand, and chart your own springboards from this special issue.
But first, before we dive in, it is important to note the scope and limitations of this issue's collected essays for plotting emerging questions and observations. Most of the dance works under discussion in this special journal issue are made by professionals (or professionals collaborating with “nondancers,” that is, individuals not specifically trained to dance, as is the case with Natalie Zervou's article on professional dancers and their work with new immigrants in Greece). Or by those aspiring to be, or existing in the borderlands of “professional” (as Anne Schuh's essay on “Having a Personal (Performance) Practice” delineates). And there are more limitations, too, to the situations under examination and thus to the range of claims, or assertions, that we can make upon reading these essays together. These case studies focus largely on Europe with excursions to the United States and Argentina (both postcolonies of England and Spain respectively) and Senegal (a postcolony of France). There are significant similarities and differences across these sites, but they should not be presumed to somehow stand for a global experience, or for a global version of neoliberalism, even when they embrace multiple national or transregional configurations.
And the discussion in this special issue also focuses largely on work that is made for an audience—even more specifically work produced as “concert dance.” These articles are not considering social dance scenes, dance competitions, or participatory practices like “Dances for people with Parkinsons” or perhaps dances performed as a mode of worship. The social identity of the workers under discussion here is largely that of (professional, artistic) “dancer.”
And, we could say, precarity starts here—with these terms of identity: “dancer” and “professional.” Who is a “dancer” as the term is deployed in these articles? And what does “professional” mean in a field of work in which paid employment is a relatively small part of the life of many who regard themselves as dancers? What precisely is the relationship of paid and unpaid work, and how can we theorize it? How does that vary from one geopolitical setting to another? And, what difference does it make that these questions, about identity and paid employment, revolve around dance and not, say, music or visual arts, or designing automobiles, or being a barista, or a soccer player, or working in a clothing factory, or a member of the clergy? Or a politician? Or a scholar?
In coming up with this list of unlikely associations, I am trying to think around “dance”—to place it in a wider landscape of “work” and/or of things that people “work at”—of making or doing things. Of being situated differently in terms of cultural capital. Of being in for-profit and nonprofit worlds. Of having a “calling.” Each of these has resonance for dance and dancing—as practice, as product, as identity.
Within the purview of these articles, a dancer is someone who dances, with that being a formative part of her or his social identity. For scholar Anne Schuh, this helps us understand the notion of a “personal performance practice” (PPP). The PPP is something, she asserts, that dancers do. It helps them prepare to dance, to focus as an artist, to define themselves as someone who dances even if it does not focus on dancing itself (as a daily technique class might). In itself it is unpaid. Doing this thing, Schuh tells us, supports the daily life of the dancer. Her marvelous example focuses on Berlin-based Diego Agulló’s doing Tai Chi on the subway in Berlin, riding the rails, constantly recalibrating his balances, using the handrails for support. There is a self-centering in this practice, too, beyond the physical, and a self-assertion in choosing to do it in public.
This is a way of declaring, to any subway takers watching, that here is a different way of being in the world—instead of reading a newspaper, talking on the phone, or staring blindly forward on mass transit, one could be doing a personal performance practice. One could be living as an artist. In public. Although we might not call this art making, we could call this rendering a performative vision of being an artist. It is an enactment of the larger life identity of “dancer” even when “dancing” per se is not involved. Part of Schuh's argument here is that work/life are blurred for the dancer—it is hard to tell where the work of dance, and the work of building a life that supports dancing, ends.
This invites us to consider our work as dancers in relation to that of other professions that similarly require endless daily preparation and refinement of skill, such as musicians, or athletes. In these cases, the individual who claims to “be” a musician or athlete must be able to produce that specialized skill (musicianship, athleticism) on command, on any day. This requires endless daily rehearsal, whether that be of tour jetés or ball dribbling skills. This skill development and maintenance is different than that required to participate in many other professions, such as, say, law. In the United States at least, upon being admitted to the bar (admitted to the legal profession via a specific exam), one has the right to appear professionally in court for the duration of that certification. For dancers, the ability to “dance” requires no certification but instead daily demonstration of abilities.
Here is a time to pause—to ask: Is this about the difference between having “work” and having a “career?” Can you be a dancer if most of your life is spent on a personal practice, on a “second” job or “day” job to support yourself so you can pay for daily technique class, for studio rental? If, in fact, you dance daily but, say, rarely perform for an audience? If you rarely have the opportunity to demonstrate those expert skills that separate you from the general populace?
These articles suggest that this is a life built around creating the possibility of dancing. Is this a difference between having “work” (a job) and having a “calling?” The latter is often applied to a religious realm in which making money is incidental. Indeed poverty may even be embraced, a sign of deep commitment. The goal might be to minister to the needy, support the spiritual life of the worshipers, serve as a guide to moral behavior, and so on. While this can be done professionally, it can also be a way of (unpaid) daily life, without a place in a formal infrastructure of say, an organized religion. The larger goal is a transcendent one. Like the arts, spiritual practices are often conceptually placed outside the marketplace (which is not to say organized religions are somehow outside of capitalism). They are about being and doing.
If we dig deeply into this comparison, we can find all sorts of differences. But the larger parallel I want to make here is that of doing something that is central to one's sense of oneself in the world, regardless of whether or not it results in paid employment commensurate with the time, skill, and commitment required to sustain that identity. This type of endeavor places the practitioner in a marginal position in terms of some aspects of social formations, but may also provide recompense in terms of cultural capital—cultural capital that is accrued in part by the conception of the practice precisely as being somehow “beyond” the calibration of capital —as “priceless.”
In many contemporary countries and communities within them, the “arts,” as a sphere of practice and as product, are seen as having little monetary value. The marginalization of the arts in, for example, US public school systems, is a measure of how little they are valued as a core competency of contemporary citizenship. At the same time, for a very few elite artists, artworks and performances are highly valued—note that the British artist David Hockney just had a single painting sold at auction in November of 2018 for $90.3 million dollars by Christie's auction house in New York City, a record for a living artist (Addley Reference Addley2018). A tiny percentage of visual artists support themselves through the market in this way, and the same is true of performing artists. But the sale of an arts commodity (or of artistic ability) is just one dimension of the art world.
Sociologist Howard Becker, in his now classic Art Worlds study of how the arts are organized in the United States, describes a series of concentric circles of specialized knowledge and ability cultivated over long periods of time to nest the “expertise” of “artists” at the center of communities of art students, critics, and aficionados who support the “world” of that type of art making (Becker Reference Becker2008). This support can take the form of writing reviews, signing up for classes taught by artists, attending concerts or gallery openings, studying the art form formally by taking classes and informally as an autodidact, and purchasing a commodity (art object) or ticket to a performance. We can follow Becker's lead to chart what I think of as (following Foucault) the “conditions of possibility” for dance making and dancing in the realms under discussion in this special issue (Foucault Reference Foucault1994).
These conditions include the role of the state in supporting or not supporting artistic production, and the notion of a world outside of capitalistic gain: a “nonprofit” sphere, which is highly developed as a philanthropic counterweight to neoliberalism's market-driven ethos in some countries (like the United States), and not in others (like India). Useful, too, is the sociological conception of formal and informal economies—the former being more subject to state regulation than the latter, which can include anything from informal barter systems among neighbors to illegal drug empires. Arts practices and products often thrive in the informal economy, even if they aspire to the formal economic sphere of commodity capitalism and state support.
By placing dance in these wider spheres of valuation—economic, political, and social—we can see the ways in which it is both unique (requiring the prepared body, making an immaterial “product”—an experience) and in which it is similar to other sorts of systems of production and exchange (“working for free,” “payment in kind,” having a value outside of monetary valuation—a transcendent worth, and so on). The result for many dancers in some parts of the world is unregulated conditions of employment, the potential for exploitation, and the necessity of finding paid employment either loosely related to the work of being a dancer (teaching, modeling for art drawing classes, or doing bodywork like becoming a massage therapist, for example), or totally outside the artistic sphere, like being a waitress.
As scholars we face a parallel employment situation, at least in some countries right now, in which highly trained professionals often face years of poorly paid underemployment, lack of legal protections, or poor physical working conditions (no offices) because that which they produce (the ability to produce new knowledge) is not highly valued by the society that would employ them. The precarity of the professoriate has been accelerating in many parts of the world, like the United States, the European Union, and Australia, since the 1980s, with the rise of “polytechnics” to replace universities, and the “adjunctification” of professorial appointments, which produces employment conditions akin to what dancers have faced for decades, at least outside the protected realm of state-sponsored employment in a few countries. It is important to realize that this is not new. A PhD is no longer, and has not been for several decades, a guarantor of employment in the academy. Rather, like the audition economy in the arts, it merely prepares you to be considered for an appointment should the opportunity to compete for such a position arises. In this way, academics are becoming more like dancers—freelancers in a gig economy hoping for permanent employment.
But this level of precarity in dance is not new, even if some of its current renditions are. As Hetty Blades argues in this volume, the current conditions of employment (short-term grants, choreographic residencies) now result in dances made in bits, marvelous yet “incomplete” work, that is forever heading toward an imagined future of completeness when the whole work will (hopefully) be shown in ideally produced theatrical conditions. And Jose Reynoso draws our attention to new attempts to “share creative credit” for choreographic work between the named choreographer and the dancers she or he works with, an innovative way of redistributing value when little monetary sharing may be available. But in other ways, at least in the United States, little has changed since the 1970s. For many a professional, the goal is still to garner enough weeks of paid employment in order to qualify for unemployment checks when the pay runs out. For others, performing is done without payment at all.
Another condition of possibility involves dance that does have some monetary support either through its sale in the marketplace, or its sale in the political sphere—being part of international “development” projects, for example. As Gabriele Klein shows, this dance marketplace has “slots” just as other commodities do. “World music” for example, is not really about the world as an even playing field, selling the latest experimental composition coming out of Julliard alongside conjunto Tejano music of the US/Mexican borderlands. Similarly, “African dance,” in a global marketplace—improbably designating the dance of an entire incredibly diverse continent—similarly has to navigate specific visions of what that can be (i.e., what sorts of dance can fit under the umbrella of “African contemporary dance”) when funded by the circuits of liberal consumption from the former colonial center, or by the nation building postcolonial state at home. Klein and her consideration of Senegalese choreographer Germaine Acogny warns us that the category of “African dance” exists in complicated relationship to “contemporary dance,” and as such draws our attention to the colonial and postcolonial epistemologies of modernism and innovation that structure both the production and consumption of dance in postcolonial contexts.
Aside from this implicit call for grappling with political histories, we are now also thrust into the challenge of conceptualizing who the audience for contemporary, transnational concert dance is. We need to ask how does the larger question of audience relate to the issues of precarity and labor?
Are audiences “precarious” too? What are the conditions of possibility for generating an audience? Does dance need an audience? Style, venue, price, and the cultural capital of attending are all components of audience attraction. So, too, is the wider notion of the social valuation of the arts in general and of specific art forms and specific styles within those forms. In order to fully consider the effects of precarious employment in the concert dance world, we also have to consider its effects on audiences.
And finally, precarity has had and continues to have a shaping influence not only on dancers, dance making, and audiences, but also on the larger demographics of the dance world(s).
An important question to consider is who can afford not to be paid? Given the precarity of the dance world, and the slim chances of making a living from this as one's primary form of employment, who enters this world and who doesn't? Who feels they can take the risk?
Is the world of concert dance (if we can speak so broadly) comprised of individuals from the middle and upper classes who “can afford to fail” to make a living at dancing? Do single mothers (in countries like the United States without universal childcare) leave the field when they have children to seek a mode of employment with more predictable income and benefits like health care (in countries like the United States without universal coverage)? Given the still disproportionate intersection of racial categories or national origin categories and lower incomes in many countries, are the majority of concert dancers members of more elite groups in whatever the social configuration of that nation's populations are?
Surely national contexts and national histories matter here, as Juan Ignacio Vallejos demonstrates in his article on dancers’ labor organizing in Buenos Aires. Huge variations in support for the arts and for artists, for dance in particular, exist among nations and across regions. Significant differences in the role of the state exist, and these too can influence who is a dancer. Specificity is key, as the case studies in these pages show.
We can understand dancing as a practice that emerges from specific conditions of possibility: modes of production, historical legacies of forms and of valuation. We must place dance in the wider frame of social formations which align value, opportunity, prohibition, and access across a field of affordances—which define “the arts” as a category of activity and meaning, separate from other categories, such as “philosophy,” “politics,” “medicine,” and “business.” These are false oppositions of course, but they inscribe the larger conceptual geography of legibility—of how action in the world becomes meaningful in specific times and places. In this way dance, while unique, is not so special after all. It, like many other endeavors, is framed by matrices of possibility that provide and limit opportunities, shape what the product can be, gather communities, and translate value either into prestige or monetary value. Charting these alignments can give us a more three-dimensional understanding of dance as work, as calling, as practice, and as something made in the world, and help us intervene to create new values, affordances, and structures to reduce precarity in the future.
