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Probing Precarity

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Labor and Aesthetics in European Contemporary Dance

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Abstract

The notion of precarity forms the starting point of my research. In this chapter, I introduce the discourse on precarity, the precariat, and precarious labor. I conclude that the socio-economic position of artists and the working conditions in the arts and in late modernity in general have increasingly become the theme of contemporary dance performances. Thus, I proceed from the hypothesis that precarity is reflected in the work and lives of the artists as well as in the aesthetics and subject matter of their artistic work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Own translation from Dutch.

  2. 2.

    Own translation from Dutch.

  3. 3.

    ‘The “dangerous classes” are between the walls’.

  4. 4.

    Own translation from French.

  5. 5.

    For a more thorough discussion on relational labor and examples from performances that deal with this type of labor, consult Pewny (2011a).

  6. 6.

    This paragraph is derived in part from an article published in Performance Research on April 16, 2018, by Taylor & Francis, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13528165.2017.1433374 (Van Assche 2018).

  7. 7.

    A more elaborate discussion on ELEANOR! and the discourse on the precarious has been published by Edinburg University Press in Dance Research (Van Assche et al. 2019).

  8. 8.

    Many of the ideas worked out in this section are inspired by the conference Dance Now: Work with(out) Boundaries, which was jointly organized by Katharina Pewny, Simon Leenknegt, and myself in March 2017 in Ghent, as part of the FWO-funded research project Choreographies of Precariousness. As a result, we guest-edited a special issue for Dance Research Journal together with Rebekah Kowal on the theme Work with/out Boundaries: Precarity and Dance. This paragraph is derived in part from our editor’s note published by Cambridge University Press on April 23, 2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0149767719000147 (Pewny et al. 2019).

  9. 9.

    For an elaborate description and analysis of this performance event and the conflict between Rainer and Abramović, consult Wookey (2014) and Kunst (2015).

  10. 10.

    This paragraph is derived in part from an article published in Research in Dance Education on October 11, 2017, by Taylor & Francis, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14647893.2017.1387526 (Van Assche 2017).

  11. 11.

    This is to some extent also related to what Shannon Jackson terms ‘social works,’ which are (political) art forms that help imagine sustainable social institutions and explore forms of interdependent support such as social systems of labor (2011, 14).

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  1. Gent, Belgium

    Annelies Van Assche

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Van Assche, A. (2020). Probing Precarity. In: Labor and Aesthetics in European Contemporary Dance . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40693-6_2

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