Dorothea Zeyringer with Emilia Lichtenwagner and Nora Jacobs - Private View

While there are costs and wages in the contemporary dance sector and attempts to capture and marketise the sector, dancers share a common pool of resources through respect and through recognition of mutual benefit. The fact of sharing these points to a provisional coming together of individuals with often different artistic experiences and aspirations. They are in effect a fluid, nomadic community built on acknowledgment of difference rather than one whose unity is based on solidarity against outsiders. Because contemporary dance artists share cultural and aesthetic resources as a commons, they are usually alert to the need for self-defence of the commons in general. In the face of attempts to close it down, they work towards keeping it open. This results in works that evade capture by the apparatuses that are at work within neoliberal cultural institutions – dances that open up a liveliness that is otherwise deadened by ideologically determined impositions of normative values. To live the open is a political matter, and it is spaces in which to imagine living the open that some recent contemporary dance works propose.

Ramsay Burt’s lecture will be followed by a discussion with Gurur Ertem and Janez Janša.