Instrumentalism and Impasse

Hetty Blades. 2018

This is an extract from Blades, H. 2018. ‘Dance’s Political Imaginaries’ in Ellis, S., Blades, H., & Waelde, C. (Eds.) (2018). A World of Muscle, Bone & Organs: Research and Scholarship in Dance. Coventry: C-DaRE.

As I’ve already stated, recent discourses in dance have drawn attention to the value of dance as a critical and knowledge producing activity, thus implying the form is capable of producing entities that circulate within the ‘knowledge economy.’ Others have argued against the instrumentalisation of dance and to consider its value as primarily noneconomic. This second argument is the result of socio-political developments over the past 30 years. For example, Geoffrey Crossick and Patrycja Kaszynska describe how UK politics in the 1980s led to art being Dance’s Political Imaginaries 100 valued for outcomes other than the work itself. They suggest, “A new approach to public sector management from the 1980s meant that arts outputs came to be appreciated for their non-art outcomes, and this drove the discourses of cultural value.” As a response, some dance artists started to consider the potential of the form to resist these instrumental paradigms, which saw the value of art as related to outcomes in areas such as wellbeing, industry, and commerce. For instance, choreographer Hamish MacPherson’s discusses the rubric of the ‘creative industries.’ He suggests that this, and related terms, have become dominant ways to talk about the arts, “Or maybe more accurately the arts have just been rolled into a bigger story about economic returns.” He suggests that Arts Council England, who are largely responsible for funding contemporary dance are having to ‘play the game’ by stressing the economic value of art, which MacPherson suggests undermines “all the non-economical things that art can offer us as humans.”

Referring to a speech by educationalist Ken Robinson about the value of dance, MacPherson suggests that,

Robinson’s point isn’t that we shouldn’t be put off by how hard it is to get a job in the arts, but that you don’t need a job in the arts for the arts to be valuable. In fact the ‘ineffectiveness’ of an arts education (in terms of its ability to get you a well paid job) is kind of its power – it is not playing by the rules of mainstream education that have been in play since the 19th Century, namely to serve industry.

MacPherson’s position is that dance’s value not only resides in noneconomic forms, but is entwined with its ability to not play by the ‘rules.’ This way of thinking about the value of dance is echoed in a collection of recent books in dance studies, including Lepecki’s Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance, Kunst’s Artist at Work, Laermans’ Moving Together and Burt’s Ungoverning Dance, each of which offer perspectives on the ways in which dance might oppose neoliberal capitalist markets, implying the form’s value is entwined with its ability to challenge the ‘rules’ of capitalism.

For example, Burt discusses experimental dance practices and argues that works have the potential to ‘ungovern’ themselves from the institutions that manage dance by disrupting the conventions of the form. He suggests that these practices “offer performative critiques of the economic and political system of neoliberal capitalism whose rules the market for dance must obey.” He further suggests that contemporary dance practices and resources are freely shared between artists, creating a ‘commons,’ as opposed to a market. He argues that sharing rather than selling resources challenges the neoliberal emphasis on markets and that therefore, the contemporary dance commons poses a challenge to neoliberal structures.

Lepecki describes neoliberalism as “a new kind of rationality, a new mode of reasoning, not necessarily the most amenable to those who happen to believe in thinking (thinking as art, thinking as thought, thinking as living), to those who trust the necessary opaqueness and complexity of life, those who believe in the vital importance of not having profit and self-profit as the only goal for life and its arts.” His argument is that dance can oppose this rationality due to the way it produces ‘singularities’ which disrupt normative modes of perception and experience and can in turn draw attention to and challenge the conditions of neoliberalism. Lepecki suggests that through its singularity, dance and performance can,

generate charged and vital problematic fields on which pressing and urgent political, corporeal, affective, and social problems are made visible and gather – not to find a solution, but to further the movement of problematization.

For Lepecki, dance’s political value lies not necessarily in its content, but in the spaces and experiences it cultivates. As is evident in Moran’s essay and Lepecki’s text, claims for dance’s political power are often made in direct reference to the form’s inherent, aesthetic value, which is tied up with the opaque forms of meaning and the ‘uselessness’ articulated by Hargreaves.

There is an interesting paradox lurking in these dialogues. The articulations draw attention to features of dance and performance —which it is argued are unique to these forms — and claim that these characteristics opposes dominant political ideologies. The discourses presented from MacPherson, Burt and Lepecki appear to argue for dance’s inherent value and resist the instrumentalisation of the form through market-driven paradigms. They also propose a form of instrumentalisation by suggesting dance can serve a political function. The implication of the argument that dance opposes neoliberalism suggests it has a useful political function. It seems, therefore that MacPherson, Burt, Lepecki and others might be opposed to the instrumentalisation of dance for economic means and the use of the form to further political agendas that oppose their own value systems, rather than challenging the usefulness of dance per se.