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From Employment to Projects: Workand Life in Contemporary Dance WorldDunja NjaradiPublished online: 15 May 2014.

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From Employment to Projects: Work andLife in Contemporary Dance WorldDunja Njaradi

This essay discusses the question of labor in contemporary dance using the frame ofbroad changes in contemporary economy that generate some intensive debates onimmaterial labor, new modes of production, precarity, and austerity across differentdisciplines. Dancers around the world are affected by these changes, and this essayreflects on current dance labor practices by addressing terms such as projects, mobility,and time in the organization of work. I hope both to broaden a discussion on dancelabor and to map out anxieties, fatigue, and fear that characterize the Zeitgeist ofcontemporary artistic labor.

Keywords: Contemporary dance; Modes of production; Immaterial labor; Precarity;Mobility

The problem of the destiny of art in our time has led us to posit as inseparablefrom it the problem of the meaning of productive activity, of man’s “doing” in itstotality. (Agamben 68)

With a variety of responses from many performance studies scholars, a recent issue ofText and Performance Quarterly saw a passionate discussion around topics of teaching,learning, and disseminating knowledge within performance studies and the conditionsthat make these processes (im)possible. The themes in question framed the discussionat hand through “solidarities around day-to-day struggles of creating and maintainingperformance studies praxis within often hostile institutions” (Terry 223). Although

Dunja Njaradi is a Postdoctoral Research fellow in the Department of Performing Arts in the Faculty of Arts andMedia at the University of Chester, United Kingdom. Her research interests include traditional, folk, andcontemporary dance forms under globalization. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose critical andencouraging comments helped me develop this essay to its final shape. I am also grateful to the University ofChester for giving me time and support to develop my research interests. Finally, I am forever grateful to thedancers who were a vital part of this research, especially to Cosmin Manolescu, Ziya Azazi, and Igor Koruga.Correspondence to: Dunja Njaradi, Department of Performing Arts, Faculty of Arts and Media, University ofChester, Parkgate Road, Chester, CH1 4BJ, UK. Email: d.njaradi@chester.ac.uk.

Text and Performance QuarterlyVol. 34, No. 3, July 2014, pp. 251–266

ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) © 2014 National Communication Associationhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2014.911951

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most of the articles referred to the censorship incident at Villanova University in 2012,an underlying topic was certainly the question of labor of performance either inside oroutside academy. For instance, D. Soyini Madison’s essay most directly addresses thesephenomena by, first, questioning the meaning of labor in performance and, second, bychallenging “performance people” (209) to re-think conditions of labor in general thatbring inexplicable suffering in the world. The Performance Studies internationalconference held in Leeds, United Kingdom, in 2012, also oriented its program callaround questions of economy, labor, and industry. Questions raised by the organizerswere, for example: “How much do we work per week?” and “Where does the work endand life begin?” thus exploring shifts in performance industries and labor markets thatinfluence the work and meaning of performance-oriented work. In the 2012 PMLAspecial issue on work, Vicky Unruh directly relates the choice of topic to the 2008financial crash that shook the international financial system (733), while a 2010 issue ofJournal for Cultural Research testifies to a remarkable rise in studies of creative andcultural labor in recent years (Hesmondhalgh 231). Finally, a 2012 special issue of TDR:The Drama Review raised the problem of labor in arts through the topic of “precarity”and “the political action regarding contemporary neoliberalism and the scene ofperformance-based art” (Ridout and Schneider 5). It seems that the topic of artistic andacademic labor is increasingly gaining in currency. Probably the most comprehensivebook on labor in performance to date is Shannon Jackson’s Social Works, in which shequestions the aesthetic autonomy of art in relation to intersecting social, political, andinstitutional economies. In line with Jackson, Judith Hamera’s Dancing Communitiesanalyzes the aesthetic and affective work of dance by looking at labor of dancetechnique in several dance communities in the Los Angeles, CA, area. In this study, aswell as in “The Labors of Michael Jackson,” Hamera discusses the relationships amongtechnique, virtuosity, and the changing political economy of work in America. Aninteresting timeline is worth noting here. In the preface to the 2011 paperback editionofDancing Communities, four years after the first edition, Hamera gently re-frames thewhole book through the recent phenomena that threaten various world-making danceforms and practices through commercialization (xi). Her point is not to ponder thedifference between high art dance and its commercial, popular forms, but rather toexplore the points of their convergence: “at the intimate coupling of dance andprecarious” (xii). There is a slight terminological convergence at play here as well: infour years, the term precarious and “precariat” entered the general vocabulary of labordiscourses, especially including, artistic labor. A similar change is apparent in NicholasRidout’s musings on theatrical labor. In Stage Fright, Animals, and Other TheatricalProblems, he addresses, in an indirect way, the issues of labor in theatre, that is, theprofound invisibility of the actual labor in the consumption of performance (see alsoRayner). Ridout reports on the slightly “neurotic way in which theatrical labour isdiscussed” (101), which rarely rises to a political issue in any meaningful way. Only sixyears after this statement, Ridout will edit the abovementioned issue of TDR, thusdirectly addressing this genuine “state of affairs” (Ridout and Schneider 7) in a mostpolitical way. Artists themselves are responding to an emergent “precarity” of theirsocial and economic statuses. In the United Kingdom, it is the work of The

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Dangerologists, a dance-theatre group consisting of Broderick Chow and Tom Wells,who look at working life and labor through the prism of precarity. They explore thesephenomena both through their performance work and through workshops anddiscussions. In Belgrade, Serbia, in November 2013, Slovenian dancer and performerSaša Rakef performed a piece called “Saša Rakef’s Debt,” in which she tried to exploreand probe into new dialogues about personal debt in order to understand global practicalstrategies in facing the debt crisis. Rakef’s point of departure is her growing debt andblocked bank account, as well as its influence on the dynamics of her everyday life.

The discussions, publications, and performances above questioned the topic ofartistic and academic labor through changes in modes of labor and production inneoliberal capitalism, which brought about major structural changes across wideranges of economy, education, and cultural industries. This is the reason independentartists (whether visual, performance, or fine art), academics, and more generallycultural workers can understand and relate to these phenomena. In this article,however, I focus on labor in the world of contemporary dance. Historically, labor indance studies has been investigated mostly through discussions of dance in relationto labor movements (Graff; Franko; Morris) and/or national politics (Martin).Following the recent scholarship outlined in the introduction, I tackle this questionby addressing the more global changes in the regime of work under the dominance ofcommunication industries and service work (Hardt and Negri) and the consequencesof this change for dancers. The dancer will be analyzed as a paradigmatic example ofthe “immaterial worker” who—compared with other immaterial labor, which istoday hegemonic in producing goods and delivering services—“has a primarydignity” (Negri 218). I will discuss this phenomenon in relation to the severalinterrelated aspects of contemporary dance labor framed under projects, mobility,and time. In dance, this topic gained some urgency within recent research about themethodology of analysis in dance scholarship (Giersdorf) or the methodology ofcreating dance/choreography (Spångberg). The mind/body split of the dancer’s laborconnected to labor and modes of production is also important for dance scholarship.Jens Richard Giersdorf, for instance, discusses the intellectual/manual split in dancescholarship that occurred through the nineteenth-century and twentieth-centuryeducational systems, while Jackson similarly suggests that the opposition betweenintellectual and manual labor (or even theory and practice) is a false one insofar as itignores “institutional genealogies of knowledge formation” (Professing Performance 5).Certainly performance artists today increasingly seek refuge in the academy and awayfrom ever-so-precarious and insecure artistic and cultural public sectors. Dancersread philosophy! But they are equally required to be managers, administrators,technicians—and also, but only in the last instance—to dance. Priorities are, it seems,elsewhere.

Maybe a digression is needed here. My interest in modes of labor in dance began in2008, when, as a doctoral student, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork among severaldance communities in Europe and with selected male dancers. I focused on the dancecommunities in southeast Europe, most notably in Serbia, Romania, Macedonia, andTurkey, and my research topic was on gender and labor in contemporary dance in

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Europe’s “immediate outside” (Jansen). The major part of this research was carried outin different periods from 2008 to 2010, during which time I traveled to severalcountries to conduct interviews or simply to spend time with the dancers in question,watching them perform, rehearse, or run workshops. Although I focused on four maledancers, I included numerous other dancers, cultural workers, and managers in thisstudy. In addition to approximately thirty official (recorded) interviews, I drew uponinformal conversations and observations. The dancers with whom I worked all havedifferent visibility in professional dance—it was my intention, however, to work with“ordinary dancers”whose professional and life practices often go unreported. These lifepractices are, nevertheless, connecting tissues of the contemporary dance world.Finally, as this research expands over several years, I was challenged and forced to re-examine some of the findings, and to note subtle but existing changes between 2008and 2013 on international and local dance scenes. The global financial downturn of2008, which turned into a prolonged and painful fiscal crisis, had a major effect ondance communities in Europe and wider. The massive cuts in financial support for arts,culture, and education left their imprint on the independent artistic and culturalscenes, both in the European Union and the bordering countries, especially sincemany depended on the same European Union funding bodies. These scenes foundthemselves in dire circumstances. The final fieldwork on this essay was conducted inSeptember 2013 in Belgrade, when I included additional material and gained a freshperspective and again was faced with the fact that small, almost imperceptible shifts didtake place. These shifts are connected with the financial crisis and will be noted duly.

October 2009: I am in Montpellier, France, where the prestigious “Six Months,One Location” program, organized by Xavier Le Roy and Bojana Cvejić, is takingplace. I am visiting a dancer who is participating in this program and we are sittingin the communal kitchen where other dancers are in the process of preparing theirevening meals and seemingly relaxing. They are talking among themselves, and theconversation revolves around jobs/money/projects, along with gentle gossip aboutpeople in the field and the so-called “star figures.” Some of the present dancers, Ilearn later, are also doctoral students. The way these dancers talked about what theydo and what seems important (and what bothers them as well) corresponds to PaoloVirno’s writings on the subjectivities in contemporary labor regimes, which nowemploy “the fundamental abilities of the human being (thought, language, self-reflection, the capacity for learning)” (40).

I soon discovered that these dancers are extremely articulate about what they do,about projects they are pursuing. In these conversations, the word “choreography”was almost obsolete and the understandings of what constitutes the work and worldof contemporary dance were diverse. In a way, this situation is not exclusive to theworld of dance. In his study on deskilling in arts after the readymade, John Robertsdiscusses a figure of contemporary artist that he terms post-Cartesian artist, which

is not a name for a particular kind of artist or even a particular kind of artisticvirtue, but, rather, convenient shorthand for a number of different social andcultural tendencies which have gathered force since the first two decades of thetwentieth century. (102)

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Contemporary dancers are affected in the same way with a plethora of social andcultural tendencies, and above all with dramatic changes in a wider economy. Dance“skill” is no longer defined by what the body can do, but by the way the bodyinterconnects with other bodies and spaces, and this is where the importance ofimmaterial labor should be discussed.

Immaterial Labor

In recent times, the economy of the Western world has been transformed dramaticallyfrom a Fordist model to a new, postindustrial one. As authors such as LindaMcDowell have shown, for a growing number of individuals entering the wage labormarket, this has involved an evident change in working conditions compared to thoseof previous workers, especially those of manufacturing industries. This change is thekey motif of recent theoretical discussions on waged work, termed “new capitalism,”“post-Fordism,” and “liquid modernity” (McDowell). Whatever term is used, a basicfeature of this is a switch from the manufacturing economy of the past to the serviceeconomy of the present. For the purpose of this discussion, the other important aspectof the shifts in new capitalism is the fact that in many economic sectors management“remodelled labour practices on cultural values associated with artistic labour (non-hierarchical collaboration, flexibility of response, trust-based exchange, and non-linearprocesuality)” (Doogan 186). These tendencies are discussed in some detail by JonMcKenzie in Perform or Else, in which he compares performance paradigms acrossdifferent disciplines and sectors of society. According to Michael Hardt and AntonioNegri, immaterial labor is labor that produces immaterial goods, such as a service, acultural product, or communication. In this sense, they identify the postindustrialeconomy as an informational economy insofar as “[t]he jobs for the most part arehighly mobile and involve flexible skills…, they are characterized by the central roleplayed by knowledge, information, affect, and communication” (285). Similarly,according to Arif Dirlik “the new worker [who is] modelled after the symbolic-analystis a closer approximation of the precapitalist artisan who has far greater control overproduct, and the process of production” (197). In the field of dance studies, it is SallyGardner who questions “dance–making” relations of production between dancer andchoreographer and the way this relation has been conceived or “imagined” throughconceptual tools of dance scholarship. She states that aesthetic modernism and dancescholarship conceived dancer–choreographer relations through a strict division oflabor (dancing vs. choreography). This aesthetic division can be further elucidated interms of industrial modernity

[b]y linking the ideology of the disembodied “work of art” to a particular,dominant mode of economic production … . The idea of “production” arising as itdoes within capitalism, suggests a subsuming of several arts within a totalitycontrolled and directed from the position outside of those arts. (Gardner 40)

If, following Gardner, we conclude that modernist thought had difficulties in conceivingof dancer and choreographer other than within a division of labor, then wemay ask what

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the situation with “postmodern”1 thought is. In fact, Gardner claims that modernthought privileged the finished product—a “work of art” (which in terms of dance wouldbe the choreography)—over a process of production (intersubjective and intercorporealrelationships between dancer and choreographer in the process of creating dance). Thenext section expands on these shifts from product to process and their significance forunderstanding dance labor.

Projects

It is precisely this shift in modes of production and subsequent thinking aboutproduction from “work of art” to “process of production” that represents the biggestchallenge in making and understanding dance work. The importance of this changein the world of contemporary dance cannot be overstated. The concerns with modesof production are directly related to the modes of representation. Dancersincreasingly question if the mode of production can affect and change modes ofrepresentation (see Bojana Bauer 21). In Exhausting Dance, André Lepecki addressesnew ways of thinking about dance production, asserting that dancers/choreographersare now working on dismantling a stable product of dance, that is, choreography.Instead, there is an emphasis on the process—intercorporeal relations betweendancer and choreographer, dancer and audience. We can say that the research intothis relationship is what dancers are primarily interested in, as they move fromworking on dance productions/pieces toward dance projects. Bojana Kunst suggeststhat “the work that goes into creating a performance takes on a performativedimension—it is a process in itself and therefore demands an audience” (84). Theproject is definitely a buzzword of contemporary capitalism and perhaps IsabellLorey is correct in her rather bleak view that the projects are simply “short-term,insecure, and low-wage jobs” that are “becoming normal for the bigger part ofsociety: precarization is in a process of normalization” (qtd. in Puar 164). The actualdance performance as such (the project outcome) is the least important as the projectis not designed to produce a performance. Rather, the project itself is a performance,and the project/performance is, life itself.

We can relate this to the way in which Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello define the“new spirit of capitalism” as project oriented, defined through activity rather thanthrough “work.” This “activity” cannot stand for traditionally conceived work since itis intended precisely toward dismantling the opposition between work and leisure,but it can be only understood as life itself. Life

[that is] conceived as a series of projects… .What is relevant is to be alwayspursuing some sort of activity, never to be without a project, without ideas, to bealways looking forward to, and preparing for, something along with other personswhose encounter is the result of being always driven by the impulse ofactivity. (169)

It is precisely in the name of artistic freedom and more generally a “better life” thatFrench dancer Xavier Le Roy embarked on a dance career. He admits that when hestarted thinking about a dance career (he is also a professional biologist) he was

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attracted to the idea of dance work, which was quite different from the work of thebiologist in a laboratory. To him,

it meant somehow a confusion between the idea of leisure time and working time,another role and a different mode of living which I imagined being a differentunderstanding of the society [but later] I realized that actually this mode of lifemade of activities where the border between work, leisure, productive, unproduct-ive are confused, became a mode of life imposed by the transformation and thedevelopment of what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello call the “new spirit ofcapitalism.” (Le Roy n. pag.)

Thus, it seems dancers are largely, if only intuitively, aware of the “hidden catch”connected with the confusion of labor and leisure. But, how did this change happen?Bojana Bauer connects changes in European choreography during the 1990s with theshift in work following the dismantling of stable companies that precipitated “a lot oftalk about the socio-political status of the independent performing artist” (15). Shecontinues: “[m]ultiplying not only projects but statuses and positions as well, andexceeding the frames of what is determined as ‘work,’ the independent artist is mostoften identified as the paradigmatic exponent of immaterial labour” (15–16).

Similarly, Frédéric Pouillaude discusses changes in European dance practice, usingthe example of the French dance scene and identifying features of “mutation”:

The first feature consists of the dissolution of fixed companies. The team of stableand salaried collaborators—what one formerly called “company” is replaced bytemporary local coalitions, individuals handling their own artistic careers in anautonomous way, gathering around a defined project. (131)

He claims, however, that this intermittence is no longer something we should lament,as, according to him it was not due to economic factors. Thus, “the regime ofintermittence is not a compensation for an ideal salary-earning situation that everyoneshould strive to reach; rather it simply accompanies, at a social level and in anabsolutely essential way, a liberation fully assumed by the actors” (131). Pouillaudeseems to claim that the socioeconomic change of status of artists simply followed theirown desires for change. However, he is aware this shift in the modes of work andsystems of arts funding also have a defining influence on aesthetic autonomy. Takingthis issue further, Toni D’Amelio explains the inclination of contemporary Frenchchoreographers to explore philosophical concepts in their work in a similar manner,arguing that the emergence of a particular dance aesthetic in the late twentieth centurycan be partly understood through the mutual dependence of dance and state funding.She states that

[t]he way in which funding is applied for and distributed may also be fostering theconceptual turn of French contemporary dance. Civil servants looking over achoreographer’s grant application may not know how to “read” choreography, butthey may have read Barthes, for example, and this is shared culture on whichaspiring choreographers can call. Neither does dance scholarship escape this circleof mutually constituting influences. (100)

This particular “conceptual turn” in French dance D’Amelio attributes to the changesin artistic labor, wherein artists increasingly depend on sporadic grant applications,

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even if theatres in France are heavily subsidized by the state in comparison withother European states.2 My research material, however, profoundly challenges anddestabilizes the question of specific national and cultural policies. The dancers Iworked with all have, to a degree, international careers, providing, of course, thatthey have the “right” passports or work permits. Theatres in France may have beenheavily subsidized by the state, but that does not make much difference to Serbian orRomanian dancers working in France. Actually, Igor Koruga, one of the intervieweddancers, is trying to build up his career in Berlin and Belgrade simultaneously,struggling to root himself firmly in both cities (although he works on projects inother European cities as well). He admitted how he increasingly experiences salient“closing doors” policies across Europe: in the sense that without “correct” workpermits it is more and more difficult to find support.3 This trend is increasinglyevident in the last few years. According to Koruga, international scenes of Swedenand Germany (where he does most of his work), are slowly becoming more nationalby supporting local artists only. Living in Berlin without a permanent work permit,Koruga experiences what he calls “a constant state of temporarity” (he even re-termed contemporary dance as “temporary dance”), and he talks about his precariousposition:

I’ve told you already how the situation is in the state of constant insecurity, aninsecure life. Maybe it is important to note that whenever I talk to the people fromdifferent professions, they are always impressed, it all looks fascinating to them.They see you travel, you meet a lot of new people…. But in reality it’s one hell ofan exhaustive life. For me it is difficult because I find it tiresome to change bed[s]every two-three weeks, to be in [a] different place, in a different city, to constantlyshift realities and contexts, to forget whom did I meet and when… it all becomesmentally overbearing. And health-wise… all that changing of climates andenvironments reflects badly on my health. Finally… that sort of intensive lifewhere everything is temporary and somehow blurry, well, we talked about thisalready. In fact, everything appears to be concrete and transparent but in realityeverything is superficial… as if… I don’t know… it all extends across your privateand professional lives.

Koruga summarized perfectly the intersections of private and professional in dancers’lives and the potential damages of “project-led” work. He also, however, opened up adiscussion on mobility and the constant movement that characterizes the lives ofordinary dancers. This will be further explored in the next section.

Professional Dance and Global Mobility

The late twentieth century will be remembered as an age that put a definitive emphasison mobility over stasis. As a consequence, Aihwa Ong notes that “[t]ransnationalmobility and maneuvers mean that there is a newmode of constructing identity, as wellas new modes of subjectification that cut across political borders” (18). Increasedmobility has been theoretically connected with changes in the meanings of home andcommunity (Di Stefano; Kennedy and Roudometof), new forms of labor (Parreñas;Smith and Favell), and new forms of identity (D’Andrea; Featherstone; Christiansen

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and Hedetoft). Discussing the changes in the modes of artistic labor, Kunst assertscontemporary artists are in the process of constant mobility that requires flexibility andgenerates a sense of uncertainty. Nothing seems to be stable and solid except projectdeadlines, and the sense of space is generated and experienced as a consequence ofmobility (29). Dance studies developed a specific, if somewhat limited, take on the topicof dancers’ mobility. For instance, a whole issue of Dance Research Journal (Scolieri)was dedicated to an investigation into the impact of immigration and mobility ondance under globalization. Containing several articles about dance revivals inimmigrant communities and refugee camps across the world, this issue follows theglobalization of dance forms and their impact “back home” (Bosse; Chatterjea; Hamera“Answerability”), as well as the historical impact of early-twentieth-century immigra-tion to the United States on modern American dance (Foulkes; Graff). These studiestypically presupposed a clear separation between a “back home” culture and a “new”adopted culture that challenged dancers and dance forms in numerous ways.Sometimes this separation was seen as extremely dramatic, such as in the case of theCold War defection of Soviet ballet stars such as Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova,and Mikhail Baryshnikov. As David Caute notes, “[t]he ballet dancer’s defection wasthe most spectacular of all: ovations, flowers, embraces—then, a flying ‘leap tofreedom’” (qtd. in Scolieri x). Although these studies are immensely important, there isan apparent lack of research concerning the mobility patterns of “ordinary”professional dancers whose dance aesthetic cannot be seen as situated in the traumaticrupture between “back home” and “new” cultures, but rather perceived as constantlyon an almost-schizoid move. In short, the scholarship mentioned above treats dance ascultural currency, survival strategy, movement therapy, and social and political action.On the contrary, I wish to draw attention to the mobility patterns in dance seen as a job,and the dancer seen as a worker in the increasingly precarious creative industries.

Having conducted her doctoral research on a dance community in Brussels,Belgium, dancer Eleanor Bauer rightfully questions and problematizes the notion of“community” not only as a result of globalization—a questioning that challenges theconcept on numerous levels—but also, more significantly, due to the nature of dancework under globalization. Being a professional dancer herself, she is in a privilegedposition to depict this new reality of dance work characterized by the constantmoving and complete lack of separation between the private and professional lives ofa dancer. She writes:

Now, when I look at my calendar and it appears more as a list of cities andcountries than anything else, I am aware of that which I was not critical ofbefore…. When 90 percent of my contact with friends and loved ones is onlineinstead of in the flesh, I am aware of the chasm between social and professionalneeds that grows within such mobility. When 80 percent of my friends are in theperforming arts field or are also professional relations, I am aware of conflationbetween the social and professional spheres that takes place in this field. When Ipay rent and receive my mail in an apartment that I will only spend a total of twonon-consecutive months in in [sic] 2007, and when I only spend ten days a year inthe city I call home; when the only place I have voting power (however fictional itmay be) and pay taxes (however poorly they are spent) is a 24-hour commute

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away, and when I have people in three different cities asking me when I am cominghome; when I have my own toothbrush in three other cities… when my entireartistic career feels like it is on hold when my laptop is in the repair center, makingme realize that the new requirement for an artistic autonomy and productivity isno longer A Room of One’s Own as Virginia Woolf would have it, but a Mac ofone’s own—a port for interconnection rather than a space for solitude… I realize Idon’t have to invent a performative answer to these issues—my life has becomeitself a performance of them. (60)

Eleanor Bauer’s comments are useful in understanding the mobility patterns of almostall the dancers I interviewed. For instance, one of them “owns a toothbrush” in Vienna,Italy, Istanbul, Turkey, and Grenoble, France. Furthermore, it is not only that there isno time and space left for private life outside the professional sphere, but also that thereis less and less time left for rehearsals, which results in not only a quicker creativeprocess and a shorter lifespan for each project, but also an increase in the massivestrains and pressures put on dancers’ bodies. This aspect of dancers’ lives is notsufficiently discussed in dance studies literature and certainly is not on the agenda ofthe creative industries (see MacNeill). Although the question of training and “bodywork” of dance is a topic for another essay altogether, it resurfaces again and again inthe narratives of the dancers I met and was lucky to work with. Concerns abouttraining, aging, and exhaustion were at the forefront of these narratives—mostly voicedin relation to schedules, deadlines, or time in general.

I Don’t Have the Time

Overwhelmingly, the dancers I interviewed had extremely busy schedules and theybarely found time to meet with me—some of the interviews were conducted on trains,for example. Many of our discussions started with talking about project deadlines, hardwork, and lack of time for anything. For this reason, project-based work means thatsometimes these dancers do not know if they are going to be paid for it or not. ToVassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos, the expression “I don’t have thetime…”—which I heard so many times during my research—is an explicit statementof the contemporary worker’s subjectivity. This includes an embodied experience ofrestless movement across the continuous time of life, that is, intermingling work andnon-work, work and leisure, and so on. Drawing on Karl Marx’s notion of labor powerand alienation, Tsianos and Papadopoulos conclude that the expression “‘I don’t havethe time’ is the paradigmatic figure for the subjective internalization of non-disposalover one’s own labour power” (10). For Marx, too, labor power is a function of time:what a worker “sells” and what distinguishes him or her from the slave is his or hercapacity to reproduce labor power for a limited amount of time. Daniel A. Novak,following Marx, concludes: “The laborer is only ‘free’ to become a commodity once thereproduction of his or her body becomes both a function of time and an embodimentof time—what Marx calls a quantity of ‘congealed labour-time’” (137). Thus, thedissolution of the distinction between work and non-work time is what rendersproblematic the new regime of work. Since the immaterial laborer cannot sell his or her

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labor power for any fixed length of time, in exchange for a fixed wage, he or sheresembles the slave more than the worker. This resemblance is often recognized by theworkers themselves albeit in unexpected ways. Andrew Ross, for instance writes aboutso-called Webshops that characterize developing media industries wherein jobscomprise of flexible, part-time contracts, and eighty-five-hour workweeks withoutemployment benefits and health care. These conditions paradoxically create “employ-ees so complicit with the culture of overwork and burnout that they have developedtheir own insider brand of sick humor about being ‘net-slaves,’ that is, it’s actually coolto be exploited so badly” (12). A similar situation is noted by AdamArvidsson, GiannioMalossi, and Serpica Naro, who explored working patterns in Milan’s fashion industry.They reported how despite being mostly underpaid and overworked, fashion workersin Milan, Italy, expressed high levels of job satisfaction and considered their workgenerally gratifying. Arvidsson, Malossi, and Naro describe these workers as “creativeprecariat.”

In this light we can explain the “scenarios” that resurfaced quite often in thenarratives of the dancers I met (although they tended to have much gloomierperspectives of their jobs). For example, a Romanian dancer runs an almost entirelyvirtual cultural organization, the existence of which depends on insecure funding.Just for the time being, he is able to employ people and rent an office space. Whenthere is no money, the organization is the dancer himself with his computer in hishome. Likewise, many dancers conveyed desperation after none of the projects theywere working on for a while were approved, meaning that they were not going to bepaid at all for the work they had already done. Or take the account of a Serbiandancer, who states that he is always on the verge of starvation since his work is of thekind that earns him a fair amount of money per project, but then there are notenough projects to keep him going. A parallel narrative was provided by a Turkishdancer: he believes he is paid fairly well per performance, but there is no money forthe creation and rehearsal process at all. Similarly, the Romanian dancer revealedthat a serious back injury had a major impact on his professional life, resulting incareer re-orientation. He stopped dancing and started working on cultural and dancemanagement in Romania. He describes the reasons for his career change as follows:

Last year, I was still dancing in one of my first productions “Serial Paradise” whichI created in 2003 and last year we had five or six performances in different cities:Amsterdam, Berlin, Rotterdam…. And I was really feeling like….There is amoment when you do the lighting for the performance, when you do management,when you do performance; it is not possible anymore. So, I made the decision tostop dancing at least for a while…. Also my body is getting old and without thepossibility of doing training every day it is impossible to continue working on somany projects. One has to travel, to always be getting on the plane, to adapt todifferent situations. (Manolescu)

What is interesting here, and what generally comes across in all the narratives of thedancers I interviewed, is the interconnection among issues of aging, exhaustion, andan overall feeling of fatigue. As seen from these remarks, dancers are now multi-skilled “total” workers. Their job descriptions include technical developments and

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regular rehearsals (technical demands for dancers have increased over the years);management and public relations for their projects; and the constant mobility thatrequires immediate adaptation to new circumstances.

The social lives of dancers, as immaterial workers par excellence, certainly displayambiguities inherent in concepts such as “immaterial worker” and “the multitude” asdiscussed by Virno and Hardt and Negri. The ambivalent but still strong relation ofmy interviewees to their nation states shows the fragility of this new social class interms of defining a common ground of political action. This is evident through theirstories of survival within artistic and cultural sectors during the economic crisis of2008. These stories of “survival” mark what Tsianos and Papadopoulos see as “avacuum of protection” that characterizes contemporary immaterial work, which is“the almost existential condition of vulnerability felt as constant state of being inevery moment of everyday life” (12).

Still, the investigation of dancers’ lives has great importance for understanding ourcontemporary political present; not because they are paradigmatic examples ofimmaterial laborers, but because they are living labor in general. Contrary to Hardtand Negri, who emphasize the importance of immaterial workers in understandingcontemporary labor and conceptualizing resistance, Tsianos and Papadopoulosassert that “[d]eterritorialisation in post-Fordism cannot be conceived in relation toimmaterial labour itself but in relation to the imperceptible experiences of thepossibilities and oppressions pertinent to living labour” (18). Tsianos and Papado-poulos contrast living labor against immaterial labor to chart what they term thecondition of contemporary “cognitive capitalism.” Thus, they claim that

[t]he constitutive moment of contemporary system of production is not primarilyits cognitive quality but its embodied realisation. In an attempt to overcome thesomatophobia of the cognitive capitalist approaches we want to discuss thecomposition of living labour as an excess of sociability of human bodies. (19)

Since dance’s work is to create affective sociability and to transform the space inwhich it dwells, it is where dance comes in as a paradigmatic example of living labor.This is not, again, to allocate to dance (performance) a certain default position ofresistance, but to pave the way to understanding dance as living labor, and livinglabor (its possibilities and oppressions) as the driving force of contemporarycapitalism. Thus conceived, a focus on dance studies brings us back to the questionof the weaving together of one’s personal and professional life in artistic work. Inwriting about the life and work of early-twentieth-century dancer Doris Humphrey,Marcia B. Siegel questions the kinds of affective attachments artistic life and workemploy in order to continue with the practices wherein “sacrifice [is] so great andmonetary rewards so poor” (70). Finally, it is precisely this perspective on the“practice of the everyday life” in the world of professional dance that may illuminatethe shaping of cultural practices and formation of emerging identities, as well asoutline alternative political strategies of the future.

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Postscript: Belgrade 2013

September 2013: In Belgrade, Koruga explained the profoundly exhaustive nature ofhis life as a freelance dancer. Humorously, he described his life as a constant rush forvisibility and continuous grant-application activities:

Bojana Cvejić illustrated the situation correctly through the example of thatcartoon character Wile E. Coyote chasing after the Road Runner…and somehowthat constant rush for something…. Sometimes, it makes me wonder what exactlyam I chasing after? What am I fighting for? I mean you are constantly in the modeof applying for something…constantly writing applications. We were alreadytalking about the kind of life this is…. Basically, you are getting off your parents’support to become dependent on some institutions which support you for the timebeing…. In fact, it’s all very sad in a way. It’s one profoundly lonely life, you arealways on your own.

A thought struck me here suddenly. When I began this research in 2008, althoughsome disparate voices were tackling the topic tentatively and/or indirectly (see BojanaBauer; Kunst) discussions of artistic labor connected with “new forms of capitalism”were almost nonexistent. As outlined in the introduction, this situation changedcompletely, and there is an increasing interest in precarious labor. For instance, whenasked if dancers themselves and amongst themselves discuss the question of labor,Koruga reiterated that dancers not only talk about it, but they talk about is so muchthat it became almost like a “fashion.” This move is significant. Further, it is worthnoting that the way Koruga talked about this “trend” did not leave much room foroptimism or change.

This shift toward the visibility of the problem that nevertheless does not harbor itssolution, is the shift, I believe, from the acute experience of crisis (in this instanceglobal economic crisis) to normalization, coupled with the process of the physicalwearing out of a population that Lauren Berlant calls “slow death.” The accounts ofmy interviewees, especially in more recent interviews, denote exactly this “wearingout”: being constantly on the move but not getting anywhere; always working (if youare lucky, that is), but always earning “just enough”; feeling exhaustion and healthdeterioration; and feeling helpless. Perhaps adopting the notion of slow death at theend of this essay is an ample, if bleak, endeavor to look at dance in the spaces ofordinary life. It is to look at dance not as a performance (event), but as a plethora ofmechanisms that make it possible (or not). To invoke Berlant again:

Slow death prospers not in traumatic events, as discrete time-framed phenomenalike military encounters and genocides can appear to do, but in temporalenvironments whose qualities and whose contours in time and space are oftenidentified with the presentness of ordinariness itself, that domain of living on, inwhich everyday activity; memory, needs, and desires; diverse temporalities andhorizons of the taken-for-granted are brought into proximity. (759–60)

This texture of the ordinary lives of “ordinary” dancers did not approach danceperformances as events that make “out-of-ordinary” and “extra-ordinary” interven-tions into ordinary lives. Rather, I analyzed the “out-of-ordinariness” of ordinary lifeas a discrete but salient backdrop of artistic performance work. Although focusing on

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the increasingly important and emergent topic of labor in dance, I illuminated, Ihope, that all performance is social—to follow Jackson broadly—as it depends onvarious social, political, and institutional economies, which often remain hidden inthe appreciation of artistic work. These economies are also something that each artistunwittingly has to negotiate—it is the dilemma that Koruga faces when placing hispractice:

I was always interested in collective, social situations to explore in my work andthis is where my artistic allegiances lie…. The difficulties with this kind of workare…. How to avoid community art? How to avoid communism that we have hadin real socialism but not by becoming the opposite? These are the questions I willbe grappling with all my life.

Notes

[1] The term “postmodern” is not without its difficulties. In this article, by “postmodernity” Imean “contemporary modernity” as outlined in Hardt and Negri’s Empire.

[2] Unlike Lepecki and Pouillaude, D’Amelio localizes the “new turn in contemporary dance” toa particular French avant-garde scene. Notwithstanding the differences in understanding, thedance phenomena they each describe is the same.

[3] The citizens of the non-European Union bordering states, including the citizens of Romaniaand Bulgaria, which are European Union states, need secure, permanent jobs in order toobtain valid work visas, which is difficult for artists whose work is usually short-term andcontract-based. Alternatively, dancers may acquire yearly stipends for short-term projects(for instance, Tanzstipendium by Berliner Kulturverwaltung) or they can enroll in education,thus acquiring student statuses and visas. All of these options are, at best, temporary.

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