Current Trends in Contemporary Choreography: A Political Critique

In his 2011 bestseller Work! Consume! Die!, the notorious British comedian Frankie Boyle complains that culture is firmly in the grip of the political authorities and capitalist system:

I think punk was the last time they let anything happen. After that, they decided to tighten the fuck up with what was allowed into the culture. Maybe if you work in some marginal area, like comics or sci-fi or dance, maybe you are doing something interesting, but the mainstream of culture has got a lot more policed. ( my emphasis)

(2011, 96,)

In referring to dance’s “marginal” status within the cultural sphere, the leftist Boyle is clearly not thinking of entertainment TV shows such as Strictly Come Dancing, but of dance’s “high art” genres. But is dance really—as he surmises—a field immune from the impact of dominant ideological and economic powers? Where Big Brother does not wield control over cultural content?

This issue is timely given the current interest in (re)definitions of capitalism and liberal democracy in the wake of globalization, and the questions over the response of the arts in general (and dance specifically) to a new set of econo-political paradigms. This said, my article is neither concerned with dance works that are overtly political in terms of their subject matter, such as Johann Kresnik’s or Lloyd Newson’s, nor those strands of continental European “conceptual” dance—to use a somewhat contested term—which engage in a more or less open discourse about the economic appropriation of the arts and related matters.¹ Rather, my interest is in the recent trend towards participatory, collaborative, and what are termed immersive² modes of performance. Aesthetic choices are rarely politically neutral, and the current preference for these strategies—a legacy, as I shall argue, of the 1960s and 1970s postmodernist departure from the “traditional” creative processes of Western theater dance—manifests a certain type of ideological perspective. But this “politics” often dwells beneath the surface of consciousness, in some cases figuring only implicitly in the intentions of creative artists themselves.

This article will engage with the aesthetic strategies and implicit political stances of such works, questioning the rhetoric of many of their practitioners and commentators who suggest that they are liberatory, transgressive, and challenging to the societal and/or artistic status quo. In so doing, it will draw on a range of early twenty-first-century contemporary dance and performance artists from a variety of countries to illustrate the proliferation of these trends across the Western world, situating and illuminating them within a theoretical framework that integrates dance, performance, business, and political studies. I shall specifically consider how aesthetic forms and audience–performer relationships have aligned themselves with developments in the modern market economy and, as an overarching theme, contemporary political concerns: in particular the widely disseminated discourse about democracy. Allusions to democratic parameters, where they are explicitly voiced, are frequently associated with suggestions of social amelioration and progress—in essence the notion that dance can propagate or at least mirror a freer, more equal, and therefore “better” kind of society.

Choreography, Democracy, and Capitalism

Late 1960s and 1970s performance theories abounded with calls for a democratization of theater and theatrical processes, which also encroached upon postmodern dance. These discussions were intertwined with a critical assessment of two decisive factors in public affairs—the political and financial systems—tending to associate traditional theater forms with undemocratic (or at least not “sufficiently” democratic) governmental structures as well as capitalist economics. Few writers are as succinct as Norman Brown in Love’s Body (1966):

Representative institutions depend upon the distance separating the spectators from the actor on the stage; the distance which permits both identification and detachment; which makes for a participation without action; which establishes the detached observer, whose participation consists in seeing and is restricted to seeing; whose body is restricted to the eyes. … Representative institutions depend upon the aesthetic illusion of distance. The detached observer, who participates without action, is...