The future of dance and/as work: performing precarity

Didactic-Artistic Tools and Artistic Works Demonstration Contribution to Students’ Artistic Skills Development

“…The Beta Standardized coefficient, .845 for the main group of subjects, and .528 for the comparison group of them of didactic-artistic tools explain, respectively, 84.5% and 52.8% of the variance in the total score of artistic skills development caused by didactic-artistic tools. The result was coherent with the abovementioned research studies (Lafrenière & Cox, 2012;Perez-Fabello & Campos, 2011;Van Assche, 2017;Meltzer & Schwencke, 2019;Stipech & Mantaras, 2004;Xhomara, 2022;Hallam, 2010;Younes, 2012;Budkeev et al, 2016;Koutsoupidou, 2008;Puppe et al, 2020;Roslaili et al, 2019;Adams, 2016;Davidson, 2018), who argued that didactic-artistic tools predict artistic skills development. To sum up, hypothesis # 1: Didactic-artistic tools predict artistic skills development of arts master students, is supported.…”

“…Adams (2016) indicated the link of creativity between dance and drawing; at the same time, Xhomara (2017) revealed that 28.1% of the variance in art academic progress has been influenced by lecture attendance; and project-work impact significantly the students' academic results (Xhomara & Hala, 2021). Inside the art field is measured a high positive relationship among three components: artistic analysis of the idea, artistic practicing, and artistic skills (Perez-Fabello & Campos, 2011;Van Assche, 2017); meantime, approximately half of the variance in art achievement may be explained or accounted for by structured learning and practicing (Xhomara & Karabina, 2021). Therefore, there is evidence of a positive relationship between didactic-artistic tools and the artistic skills development of the students.…”

Projects, Precarity, and the Ontology of Dance Works

“…In the second part of the video, they perform a rap, critiquing the conditions and requirements of funding systems and encouraging viewers to rethink their relationship to the artist-funder hierarchy, thus commenting on working contexts for UK-based artists and indirectly responding to Lee's point regarding the dependence of independent artists on competitive funding systems. Both of these “tutorials” echo Pewny's discussion of artists whose work “performs the precarious” through its aesthetics (2011), and draw to mind Annelies Van Assche's description of the “performance of precarity,” during which “artists perform their own working and living conditions as their way of broaching the topic of the pressing situation of socio-economic insecurity in which they are forced to live” (2017, 238). The content comments humorously on what it takes to make dance in precarious working contexts.…”

“…Given the scarcity of resources for contemporary dance and limited opportunity for stable funding, a large proportion of dance that is produced in the UK and the USA is done so through short-term projects, thus consideration of the implications of this structure on the ontology of dance is important. Many scholars discussing precarity in performance making have drawn attention to the role of project-based work (Laermans 2015; Puar 2012; Van Assche 2017). Here, I ask what kind of entities are produced during projects and explore the commodity form and (im)materiality of these outputs, probing the relationship between the ontology of dance and the socioeconomic context within which it is produced.…”

Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! Moving from European Discourses on the Precarious and Art to the Realities of Contemporary Dance

“…However, particularly within the creative professions, the coerced precarisation induced by the neoliberal state and the market is complemented by precarisation as choice, or what Lorey (2006) describes as self-precarisation. Creative workers are willing to sacrifice material benefits for the sake of immaterial ones such as artistic pleasure, temporal autonomy, a free work environment and opportunities for self-realisation (Lorey 2006;Laermans 2015;Van Assche and Laermans 2016;McRobbie 2016). This attitude dates back to the much older, romantically inspired artistic ethos of self-expression and the related idea of 'art for art's sake', which Pierre Bourdieu (1993) has linked to the notion of a symbolic economy primarily oriented toward the accumulation of symbolic capital instead of the pursuit of material-economic gains.…”