3. Dance: The Old New Community Field

To discuss the "dance community" is to conflate the professional/artistic realm and the social realm. Herein lies the difference between field and community. Community is a paradigm within society and social relations, activated or performed on a social, personal, inter-relational level, and dance is the profession it does or does not form through, the idiom it does or does not exchange as currency in order to build further ties, the common interest around which a community can be activated, the field from which it does or does not grow. So when we say "dance community" we ask about the social within the professional or artistic. How are social affinities built as based on artistic affinities, and vice versa? Here we must invite a third term – that of culture, which effects the formation of communities as common identity.

Hannah Arendt defines culture as the relationship between society and its objects: Culture is neither society nor art, nor religion, nor entertainment nor sports for that matter, but the nature of the relation of one to the other, of society to its objects. Culture is the attitude in operation when society and its “enlarged mentality” (Kant, Critique of Judgement) or common sense (suggested in French as “good sense” or le bon sens) confronts the images, products, and events of that society. If culture is that which forms between society and its products (including art), and community is that which forms between members of society, then we see that culture and community are of a similar nature, potential fields of activity completely determined by how they are enacted, and whose centripetal force is agreement.

Culture influences community in alliances formed over similar cultural attitudes. The arts thrive on intercultural interest (which is a cultural attitude in itself) so we may not all share cultural history, but like everyone else, we gravitate towards those with whom we feel common in our attitudes towards cultural objects. Human beings seek social interaction with those who share an appreciation for the same books, music, art, games, foods, beliefs, ideas – cultural alliances are a determining factor of how sub-communities divide themselves. Commonality creates community, and the activities of communication, exchange, and the sharing of interests within a community confirm and solidify its existence. This is where the conductors of "common sense" come into play. Curators are granted the power of judgment to determine what is presented to society and to the field, and in discourse, where the critics are granted the authority, common attitudes towards those pre-selected objects are formed. This is not to say that we agree on the things we are presented with, on the contrary we rarely ever do, but the theoreticians, critics and dramaturges, those with discursive authority, curate the references, lexicon, and frames of analysis that circulate as tools for production and reception. All those at work in the "cultural sector" participate in the formation of the relationship between society and its product(ion)s. As performers, as people onstage, we inherently produce an attitude in relationship to the society that watches us. Performance is a product of society that opens the movement of cultural attitudes in the opposite direction, from the product towards society. Because our artistic media are human beings, we have a particular handle on the between-space of culture: our art is social.

Dance and performance are not only social in their presentation, but in creation as well. When collaboration and interaction are the basic premises of creation, we are working constantly in a cross-influence between social and professional, i.e. the community and the field, where the two planes merge into one. There are of course, as always, exceptions, as in working with written scores and other such processes that attempt to remove this social aspect from the artistic process, but in general, to work in our artistic medium requires a great deal of social skill, so to utter such a conflation as "dance community" is perhaps not such a crime, and to investigate what is sociologically specific about community in this field is not arbitrary. But furthermore, to think what we can do with this massive amount of "people power" that convenes in performance unlike in any other media is to engage a notion of community towards productive aims rather than avoiding community as all that which is besides the artwork.

I realize that I do not propose something new here: critical thinkers and makers in the performance field have turned their attention towards the modes of art-production as an engagement of politics within their artistic praxes since the 1960's. Over the years, a recurrent proposal to harnessing this people power potential is collectivity. Several artists interested in consciously engaging the social and collaborative nature of performance-making rather than taking it for granted have subsumed individual identity and authorship into a uninomic (and sometimes utopic) whole at one time or another. But as we know, this approach is difficult to sustain given the monetary and symbolic economies of our field that more readily invest in hierarchical structures and unavoidably attach recognition to individuals. Furthermore, with less and less sustained structural support in general and more short-term project support, the combination of an economy that wants star-figures and contains less long-term contracts is a double-blow to the collective. With no boss, no contract and often unpredictable income, the maintenance of a collective requires the strong and persistent commitment of each participant who has to fight the currents of the freelance market pulling them into the undertow of the massive, individualistic, globe-trotting dance labor force. Therefore, even if not geographically tied, the collective proposes an obsolete idea of community – that of a relatively localized and isolated group of intimates. It is important to finally define here these two basic versions of the term "community", even if it's obvious: the old-fashioned and the contemporary. An old-fashioned definition of community connotes physical presence and cohabitation, the sharing of practical survival needs, vital support and care, and stems from the ways of life established by an agricultural society, therefore confining community geographically and materially. A contemporary definition takes into consideration newer forms of communication and exchange towards increased mobility, and stems from a post-industrial society where both the individual workers and the businesses themselves have multiple specializations and extreme flexibility. Hence, communities today are built often on physical absence and virtual presence, communicating through mobile phones, Skype conferences, chat rooms, blogs, the digital exchange of texts, images, and files. Working with such a contemporary reality, there are also now a number of individual artists as well as located institutions taking interest in how these platforms of communication can become a deliberate part of their working processes. Today's artistic collective no longer lives in the same house, but on the same open-source web page.

While other professions in this contemporary model can leave the physical farther behind, the dancer cannot. We may be affective laborers, but we are intensely material. The performing artist today inhabits and maneuvers within a perfect hybrid between the old-fashioned and contemporary definitions, the analogue and digital representations of community. For as dancers we have to be physically present in order to create and perform (with the exceptions of a few, let's say "conceptually oriented" examples) and on the other hand, the international scope of professional networks we move within reflects the breadth and distance facilitated by and inherent in the contemporary definition of community. So what we in the performing arts grapple with is a combination between "a room of one's own" and "a Mac of one's own"; our actual work in the studio is equally vital to our profession as are our networking capacities, particularly on an international level, hailing multi-city co-productions and residencies (and still working below minimum wage) in order to gather sufficient resources to realize even mid-sized projects.