This document is the author's post-print version, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer-review process. Some differences between the published version and this version may remain and you are advised to consult the published version if you wish to cite from it. ____________Re-Turning to The Show: Repetition and the Construction of Spaces of Decision, Affect and Creative Possibility.[{note}]1 Katerina Paramana Introduction: On necessary re-turnsThere are some works that, despite our falling in love with new work, we return to again and again. There are some works that become ghosts --friendly ghosts --that stay with us, because they have affected us in a certain way; because they have produced certain effects on our thinking and feeling not only about art, but about the world, how we relate to it and to others. This haunting, this remaining present, is often because something about them has been left unsaid; something has not been articulated about their importance. Or perhaps, as times and the socioeconomic landscape change, they become relevant, again, for different reasons. In our contemporary moment, the governing rationality of neoliberalism[{note}]2 'economizes' all areas of life (Brown: 2015), affecting our relationship to others, to ourselves, to time and space, and exacerbates inequality and injustice. This moment demands that, if we are to intervene in and radically change the current social and economic system, we perform an act of repetition: that we rethink, relook, reimagine, that we return to, re-articulate and redefine concepts, goals, desires and relations.And these haunting works become places where we might want to look in order to rearticulate our place in the world, our relationship to multiple others, our place in and the function of current systems. For me, one of these works is Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On.Jérôme Bel, again? The Show Must Go On, again? Yes. Again. The work itself is a repetition; one that exposes its construction and repeats, in front of our eyes, again, how systems work and how we might function in them. The ongoing discussions by theorists, artists and reviewers of dance and performance on Bel's work in general and The Show's construction and relationship to dance in particular[{note}]3 have made him and his manner of making work an institution, despite and because of both: a) his uneasy relationship with the contested and ill-defined economy of
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.
Tino Sehgal's performance Ann Lee was first presented in 2011 at the Manchester Art Gallery as part of the Manchester International Festival's 11 Rooms. It has since been performed in several gallery and museum spaces, including the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York (2013), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2015) and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2016). In my experience of the work at the Manchester Art Gallery in 2011, the title character, played by a twelve-year-old girl, entered the white, cube-like space in which I waited with a dozen more people: 'Hello. Nice to see you. My name is Ann Lee', she uttered, sucking out of the room like a vacuum any sound made by the spectators. The effect of her utterance and her demeanour were entirely strange. A blue-eyed girl of no more than twelve years old had commanded everybody's attention with a simple greeting. It was not what she had said, but the manner in which she had said it. I was looking at a young girl, but I could barely recognise her as human. It did not feel as though she was acting, which is what made this feel stranger. The colouring of her voice, its lack of subtext, the neutrality of her body gestures, all made her seem like a foreign creature. She looked us in the eye with no reservations, without the shyness usually accompanying a girl her age. She was humble, but her humility was that of a mature, knowing person. I remember taking a step back, leaning with my back against the wall in need of more distance to observe and understand what I wasencountering. Yet, there was no room -physically or temporally -afforded to me for this until after the performance ended. For the time being, I was arrested by her gaze.
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