Belgian scholar Annelies Van Assche's Labor and Aesthetics in European Contemporary Dance: Dancing Precarity charts how the precarious conditions of creating concert dance influence the aesthetics of the work. Her study combines sociological fieldwork with textual analysis, allowing her to make connections between choreographic pieces and dancers’ everyday experiences. During 2016 and 2017, Van Assche collected quantitative data from 157 self-identified contemporary dancers, and qualitative data from 14 informants situated in Brussels and Berlin. She argues that the precarity experienced by contemporary dance artists emerges within the form and content of their work. Rooted within Pierre Bourdieu's sociological framework and influenced by Michel Foucault, the book dissects the habitus and forms of subjectivity engendered by participating as freelancers in project-based contemporary dance scenes. Van Assche details her informants’ challenges and stresses alongside their tactics of resilience.

As Marxist and feminist standpoint methodologies have illuminated, the position that one writes from influences the kind of questions one asks and the analysis one undertakes, especially on the themes of labor and material relations. Van Assche's research emerges from her own experiences in Brussels, where she worked as a production manager at P.A.R.T.S. between 2011 and 2014 before pursuing scholarly study. In March 2017, she collaborated with Katharina Pewny and Simon Leenknegt on a conference, titled Dance Now: Work with(out) Boundaries, which led to the trio, alongside Rebekah Kowal, guest-editing a special issue of Dance Research Journal, Work with/out Boundaries: Precarity and Dance (Reference Pewny, Van Assche, Leenknegt and Kowal2019). Writing from the standpoint of a participant observer, Van Assche devotes her research to the dance community that circulates through schools like P.A.R.T.S. Like many types of people who are thinking through questions of labor and precarity (union organizers, lumpenproles, and so forth), Van Assche's social location and context shapes the approach she takes within this project.

The book offers three framing chapters—“Introduction,” “Probing Precarity,” and “Field of Inquiry and Methodology”—before launching into the analysis of her fieldwork. Van Assche centralizes the term “precarity,” which she understands as a multifaceted condition of the Post-Fordist period that is psychological as much as economic. Part 1, titled “Lifestyle and Survival Artists,” discusses the desires of dance artists for freedom, creativity, and self-development, and how these impulses lead them into the precarious position of piecing together gigs, grants, and side hustles. Alongside documenting the ways artists have learned to navigate this precarity, Van Assche examines the aesthetic consequences as artists make what she terms “tactical pieces” and “precarity solos,” or works that are inexpensive, adaptable, and transportable (106). Part 2, “The Fast, the Mobile, and the Flexible,” illustrates the demands on dance artists to inhabit these three qualities as they tackle the challenges of funding, residencies, freelancing systems, tax structures, visas, cross-border travel, and short performance runs. Part 3, “Burning Out and Slowing Down,” analyzes the effects of this precarity on dancers’ mental health and reflects on what policy changes and forms of collective care might address the concerns of this demographic. Interspersed throughout the book, Van Assche discusses a handful of pieces—created by Eleanor Bauer, Jochen Roller, Igor Koruga, Ana Dubljević, Liz Kinoshita, Jeremy Wade, and Michael Helland—that she describes as “performances of precarity,” or works that stage some aspect of the dancers’ experience of precarity (28).

Van Assche contributes to understanding the consequences of freelancing and to broadening methodological approaches for interpreting contemporary dance in Western Europe. She does an excellent job of representing the effects of precarity on dance artists’ subjectivity. She connects the wider economic conditions to “feelings of anxiety, stress, and panic related to the threefold chase [the fast/mobile/flexible] and their precariatized minds” (236). Capturing the particular sadness and mania of contemporary dance, the book offers a poignant sense of the freelancer's experience and what it feels like inside of these conditions. While dance scholars frequently read dance pieces as texts divorced from their conditions of production, Van Assche points to further relationships the field can explore between aesthetics and the concrete conditions under which choreographers create their work. Additionally, Van Assche provides an example of how to combine quantitative and qualitative data with analyses of choreographic pieces. She includes charts that document the average monthly income of her survey participants and the time they spend on different categories of work. The book contributes an uncommon amalgamation of research methodologies, which can open further interdisciplinary connections between dance studies and the sociology of art and culture.

Presenting a potential limitation, Van Assche focuses on a particular demographic in isolation—that of college-educated, white workers in Europe whose experiences come to stand in for a more generalized condition. While she claims about her quantitative study that “the majority of the respondents still remain above the poverty line and are for the most part white, middle-class and European citizens” (89), this choice of scope significantly impacts her analysis of precarity. The qualitative study does not include race as a factor within the selection of informants. While writing about a particular dance genre (experimental or avant-garde dance), Van Assche uses the definite article: the contemporary dance scene, the dance profession. She writes about this genre in isolation from other types of dance and contexts in which people receive wages to dance (for instance, dancers who perform in commercials, or those who work at nightclubs). The study does not consider how the experiences of precarity differ between dancers who engage in the sphere of artistic projects and those who do more heteronomous forms of labor, suggesting a need for a more intersectional approach. Perhaps the paradigmatic worker in twenty-first-century capitalism is not a conservatory graduate stringing together residencies and grants, but rather a refugee who has fled Syria and now dances at a nightclub in Brussels, turning tricks with EU businessmen. Within the scope of the study, Van Assche's analysis lacks some framing of how semiautonomous artistic activity differs from waged-labor.

Van Assche's book iterates a trend within dance and performance studies to cite the later writings of a group of male autonomist thinkers—Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt—and use their claims as a point of departure.Footnote ¹ Although Van Assche does a competent job applying their concepts, the book would be stronger if it engaged with the debates that circulate around their characterizations of Post-Fordism. In addition to challenges from feminists and other streams of Marxist thought, scholars in the humanities have critiqued the immaterial labor hypothesis, which frames labor power as indistinct from life in general, as a lens for cultural analysis (Boyle Reference Boyle2017; Brouillette Reference Brouillette2014; Jackson Reference Jackson2011; Roberts Reference Roberts, Dimitrakaki and Lloyd2015). Lazzarato himself abandoned the term “immaterial labor,” suggesting a need to rethink these characterizations of contemporary capitalism (Cvejić et al. Reference Cvejić, Petrešin-Bachelez, Théodoropoulou and Vujanović2010, 12).

These questions about theoretical framework aside, Van Assche's book will likely resonate with anyone active in the hustle of big-city dance scenes. Her astute fieldwork and “feel for the game” (as Bourdieu terms it) illuminate the unspoken dynamics of trying to show work within venues known for presenting new or experimental dance. Also relevant to arts administrators, the book can help those involved in running dance organizations learn more about the experiences and needs of their constituencies. As I read, I found myself substituting “dance artists” for “PhD students and adjuncts,” drawing parallels between the dance field and the conditions of academic life. Her discussion of dance artists’ willingness to self-exploit provoked reflection about my own experiences and motivations: Why exactly did I agree to write this (unpaid) review? Why have I been teaching as an adjunct for five years? In what ways do I neglect forms of collective struggle and cave to the gravitational pull of individualist careerism? Van Assche's exploration of precarity can help us attune to the ways that self-exploitation and smarm show up within concert dance, academia, and our lives more broadly.