Opening Remarks, “Dancing Economies Conference” (February 20, 2015)

Thank you for being here, for supporting Society for Dance Research, and for showing your interest in what seems like a timely topic for a variety of reasons. My welcome remarks are based around things I have been reading, rereading, or remembering. They also will provide a bit of a backstory as to how this conference idea emerged. In between you will hear about a precarious dance, precarious lives, precarious conditions, precarious positions, and a call to arms.

I begin with Randy Martin. Sadly, he passed away recently. He was not yet sixty years old. I do not know the details of his death, but I do know about his impact, contribution, and significance to the field of critical dance studies. He was a wonderful orator. I saw him speak several times as a graduate student, and I was amazed at his ability to speak carefully, insightfully, meticulously without notes, without any “eh,” “ah,” “um.” It was as if he had written his academic essay and then memorized it before speaking it in public. US dance scholar Anthea Kraut and I asked him once over dinner how he did it. I do not remember his answer now. I do not think it matters. I do remember that he was very modest. In hindsight I wonder if what seemed to me such meticulous attention to the ethics of words and ideas was really due to his training as a dancer: learning how to share embodied ideas carefully and respectfully with other bodies in the dance studio, practicing to be attentive, compassionate, and physically/psychically present to other bodies around him. The awareness of the fragile nature of the visceral body, a choreographer or dancer's ego, the risk involved in materializing your ideas onto your body, the precarity of showing your work in a studio, a workshop, to a friend, outside, on a stage—of finding funding. Risk and precarity: constant partners in the dance studio. He knew all this way before he even started writing about it. Dance Studies seems to always know things before so many other disciplines figure things out.

Last winter, I had been reading the special issue of TDR, Precarity and Performance, and noticed Martin's contribution entitled, “A Precarious Dance, a Derivative Sociality.” Performance studies had been exploring issues of precarity, and I wondered why not dance specifically? Dance already is a precarious activity, profession, condition; you use your body constantly, you can get injured easily, your career depends on the ephemerality and transient nature of your body or of bodies who dance for you. Dance relies on other people, other bodies: audiences, dancers, critics, scholars. Sometimes you cannot fully know these other bodies, but you feel some ethical responsibility to them. As philosopher Judith Butler writes, “There are others out there on whom my life depends. People I do not know or may never know. This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition I can will way” (Reference Butler2004, xiii). Indeed, it cannot be willed away, Judith.Footnote ²

Here, I think of our precarious conditions in the university: our responsibility to our students, our research topics (living or dead), to our colleagues, coinvestigators, to the field, to ourselves—our often overworked, overanxious, overly ambitious selves. “It is not a condition that we can will away.” So what can we do? Productivity requires expediency, but it is expediency that undermines the potential for radical shifts in the social to occur. If someone suggests taking time to try out, rehearse new ideas, options, this type of responsible commitment is met with a supercilious pause.

Speaking of a pause, I found it remarkable that when Germany insisted Greece pay back its loans, the Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, not only wrote a New York Times opinion piece, but he quoted German philosopher Immanuel Kant as a reminder of the categorical imperative that enabled and validated European intellectual dominance for several hundred years. It was this need to remind that I found fascinating:

So then what is right for us now? What does the retreat to Kant's categorical imperative, or perhaps even the Greek structure of feeling called “φιλότιμο or philotimo” (a difficult word to translate but one that addresses a love of honor, a sense of duty, and compassion), incite?Footnote ³ How is it that we need to be reminded to go backward (in time/space/history) in order to go forward? Why did we forget these basic (dance) steps to begin with? What are the stakes in rehearsing them now, again and again? Going back to get our bearings, to center ourselves—or to shift weight from one leg to another, to gain an impulse, momentum, to find a reason, a direction, or even just the simple impetus from which to go forward.

What type of alternative communities and states of being has dance always been setting up? How can what we do here in the studio, in our classrooms, in our research practices model a way for all bodies to ward off the constant threat of disembodiment that neoliberalism portends? Ultimately, we cannot be fully owned, but if we inhabit the web of neoliberal capitalism, we must move around spaces that have incentives, derivatives, and opportunity costs. We move to engage with Kant (“the rational and the free escape the empire of expediency by doing what is right”) while also hesitating: What is right? What is right? I pause here, mostly for fear of colluding with violent epistemologies that both universalized and excluded, and that constructed an epistemological scaffolding without fully thinking about the consequences of what it takes for us to navigate our ways on, through, and up it (if we even want to get on it in the first place).

I offer no answers, but I invite you into a space of contemplation—a space to see the forest for the trees, a forest clearing: the site of Baby Suggs' sermons in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Maybe what we really need is to embrace our overworked and undervalued cognitariatFootnote ⁴ bodies and remember that our bodies are already right—and that we have to work with other bodies, bodies who may not find our bodies “right” or “valuable” to create something “right” together:

Thinking between a fleshly reality and an earthly one, either in a forest clearing or at the end of a working day somewhere, perhaps a dancing economy might emerge, one that mobilizes our bodies in alternative modes where we don't have to know what is “correct” a priori, but instead we can discover it as we dance along.