Performance, Dance and Political Economy: A Provocation

This text is a provocation addressed to my fellow co-editor, Anita Gonzalez, and to our contributing authors. It sought to initiate our discussion about the relationship between bodies (though the prism of performance and dance) and political economy, articulate the importance of these terms and the increasing significance of their interrelation, and pose the questions to which we invited the contributors to respond

The Oscillation of Contemporary Bodies Between Biopolitics and Necropolitics: Tania Bruguera’s Wrestling with Power Structures

The DOI is not validated.The article examines Tania Bruguera’s works 10,148,451 (2019, Tate Modern, UK) and the three versions of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (2009 and 2014, Havana; 2015, Tate Modern). Thinking with Achille Mbembe’s work on necropolitics, Lauren Berlant’s on “slow death,” and Michel Foucault’s on biopolitics, Paramana suggests that 10,148,451 addresses the collective subject and critiques contemporary necropolitics, while the versions of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 address individuals as political subjects, and comment on the panoptic gaze and contemporary biopolitics. Through her analysis of these works, Paramana shows how Bruguera’s work is created to comment on the specific political economies in which it is presented, how the perception of the work’s politics differs when presented in different political economies, and the insights therefore the work might offer to them. Paramana argues that Bruguera’s work has often achieved more than local and national governments and that her “symbolic work with activist parameters” is surprisingly more efficacious than her activist work. The article concludes with the insights Bruguera’s work offers for the future of bodies in the 21st century.BRIEF Research Award (“Brunel Research Initiative and Enterprise Fund”) 2019–20, Brunel University London

Re-Turning to the Show: Repetition and the construction of spaces of decision, affect and creative possibility

The contemporary moment, if we are to intervene in and radically change the current social and economic system, demands that we return to, rearticulate, reimagine and redefine concepts, goals, desires and relations. Returning to performance works that continue to haunt us, that have left us with the feeling that something has not been articulated about their importance, might help us rearticulate our relation to the world, to others, our place in and the function of current systems. In this article, I return to Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On and specifically to its first presentation in 2001- a time when a great deal of participatory work began to be made - to offer a different articulation to those offered so far. Drawing on the thinking of Wendy Brown, Gilbert Simondon, Jeremy Gilbert and John Protevi, I examine the work's economy of relations, its consequent production of the social and the potential that emerged from it. I focus my attention on the sociality produced in a specific moment in this presentation and the role of repetition in it. I suggest that, in that moment, a disequilbrium caused by the work's dramaturgy resulted in a shift in the system of the work which afforded the spectators repetitive intervention in it and allowed for the work's potential to emerge. Using Simondon's theory of individuation (2005) and Gilbert's (2014) articulation of it, I argue that the work's production of sociality created a space of decision, affect and creative possibility, that enabled practices of thinking, relation and action, that any democratic institution should be informed by, enable and repeat. I suggest that it is such practices that constitute what I define as ethical encounters. While The Show is not conventionally considered to be a participatory or socially engaged work, I maintain that it achieves some of the claimed or intended, but often not delivered work of contemporary participatory performance

The contemporary dance economy: Problems and potentials in the contemporary neoliberal moment

Michel Foucault suggests that ‘conduct’ is not only something we do, but something that is done to us, as well as a behaviour or practice that is an effect of other forms of conduct. How is the conduct of the dance field – in the different ways that Foucault is referring to it – affected by, and affecting neoliberalism? What is dance’s role in the contemporary neoliberal moment? These are the questions I unpick in this article. I do so, first, by using Foucault’s thinking on neoliberalism and the relationship between conduct, biopolitics and neoliberal governmentality in order to illustrate how bodies of individuals and that of society are affected by the neoliberal economy. Wendy Brown’s work on neoliberalism, which builds on Foucault’s thinking, is interweaved in this discussion to allow me to address neoliberalism’s function and effects in the contemporary moment. Second, I examine some of the problems of the contemporary dance economy as I, and other scholar-­‐practitioners, have identified them, and address their relationship to neoliberalism, conduct, governmentality and biopolitics – how they result from conducts suggested by neoliberalism or helping it do its work by becoming conducts of the field. I propose ways we might address them, suggesting that it is urgent that we do so if we are to advance the field and resist neoliberalism. For this,I use examples from conversations that recently took place in the field, such as at PAF London (2015), Sadler’s Wells Summer University (2015) and Resilience: Articulating Dance Knowledges in the 21st Century and Post Dance conferences (2015). I argue that dance has an important role to play in changing today’s world, but needs to come to terms with what I refer to as its ‘fears’, assert itself and take action. In many ways this article constitutes a critique of the contemporary dance economy; a critique that, by showing the relation of our conduct to conducts imposed by larger economies, aspires at articulating our role as central to both advancing the field and effecting social change

Performance, Dance and Political Economy: Bodies at the End of the World

The accepted manuscript archived on this institutional repository is embargoed indefinitely. Re-use is not permitted. All rights reserved.This book examines the relation between bodies and political economies at micro and macro levels. It stands in the space between ends and beginnings – some long-desired, such as the end of capitalism and racism, and others long-dreaded, such as the climate catastrophe – and reimagines what the world can be like instead. It offers an original investigation into the relation between performance, dance, and political economy, looking at the points where politics, economics, ethics, and culture intersect. Arising from live conversations and exchanges among the contributors, this book is written in an interdisciplinary and dialogical manner by leading scholars and artists in the fields of Performance Studies, Dance, Political Theory, Economics, and Social Theory: Marc Arthur, Melissa Blanco Borelli, Anita Gonzalez, Alexandrina Hemsley, Jamila Johnson-Small, Elena Loizidou, Tavia Nyong'o, Katerina Paramana, Nina Power, and Usva Seregina. Their critical and creative examinations of the relation between bodies and political economy offer insights for both imagining and materializing a world beyond the present.https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/performance-dance-and-political-economy-9781350188693