Having a Personal (Performance) Practice: Dance Artists' Everyday Work, Support, and Form

In a self-interview on "practice," dance artist Chrysa Parkinson gives a detailed account of what she calls her "personal performance practice":

I'm working in Montpellier at 6M1L/e.x.er.ce. And I'm touring with Zoo/Thomas Hauert and occasionally with Deborah Hay. And I'm teaching. When I'm not performing, I do a daily performance practice based on a combination of scores from Deborah and Zoo and other people. It has about six sections. Sometimes I help people devise daily performance practices (aka Personal Performance Practice, or PPP). Sometimes I just talk to people about how they hierarchize information and sustain themselves creatively. Sometimes I take part of someone's practice and add it to my own.

(Parkinson 2008, 81)

In the last few years, "practice" has become a widely used term, a powerful concept, and a popular activity among contemporary freelance dance artists working mainly in Western Continental Europe. In the introduction to a special issue entitled Practice in the Australian journal Critical Dialogues, dancer/choreographer Noha Ramadan (based in Amsterdam and Berlin) suggests that statements like "I have a writing practice, or 'xxx' is part of my artistic practice" are very common among dance artists today (Ramadan 2014, 4; italics in the original; see also Cvejić and Vujanović 2012, 151). Similarly, "practice-based performance" has also become a frequently used phrase. The ubiquity of the term practice becomes even more apparent, however, when dance artists refer to their work processes. Choreographer Rosalind Goldberg, for example, readily applies the expression when she details the production process for a current piece. As Goldberg explains, she and her colleagues, Stina Nyberg and Sandra Lolax, started out by "sharing their practices," (i.e., presenting and teaching them to each other) (Rosalind Goldberg, personal communication with the author during a joint residency at the Eskus–Performance Center in Helsinki, Finland, November 23, 2015). Moreover, many artists have developed discursive and body-oriented formats that explore the notion and implications of practice in their work. Apart from (self-)reflective texts and publications (like those by Parkinson¹ and Ramadan), artists' interest in practice also manifests, for example, in initiatives such as "Nobody's Business," which holds week-long sessions for the sharing of practices within the independent dance community. An online platform with the same name not only documents those events but also contains a collection of practices and provides guidelines for anyone who wishes to carry out a shared practice meeting. Other examples include the two-day Practice Symposium held in Stockholm in 2012, which used the format of an academic conference in order to propose and study different practices. Furthermore, the workshop "What's up, practice?," held by choreographer Stina Nyberg in Oslo in 2015, engaged critically with the impact of practice by asking what it once promised and what it has become today. The notion of practice, in other words, permeates contemporary Western European independent dance to such an extent that today some dance professionals, such as choreographer Litó Walkey, purposefully avoid the term or have decided to stop talking about the phenomena of practice altogether: "The talking about is taking over! … I think I may need to take a retreat from the 'about practice,' and just mainline on practice" (Zacharias 2012, 91). This article seeks to explore the phenomenon of "having a practice" in relation to expanded conceptions of support and artistic form, in order to contribute to an academic theorization of practice. In other words, I wish to write alongside artists' own explorations of "having a practice," since—despite reasonable concerns about its purpose (as we shall see below)—these explorations encourage a reflection on the complex issues of support and sustainability within contemporary dance aesthetics.

Surprisingly, the field of dance studies has, as of yet, paid little attention to the phenomenon of "having a practice" in the contemporary dance scene in Europe and elsewhere. One possible explanation has to do with the term "practice" itself. The myriad definitions of the term are also reflected in the field of dance, making practice a rather fuzzy concept...