Abstract
I address the physical and mental consequences of doing everything fast, mobile, and flexible. In performances of precarity, contemporary dance artists publicly address the plural forms of precarity and precarity’s penalties on one’s physical or mental state within their artistic work. The core of artistic precarity seems to be grounded in the fact that an artist is never certain whether their work will be appreciated by a choreographer, a peer, a programmer, a critic, or an audience and whether the quality of their work is ever good enough to be considered a genuine artist. I discuss the consequential issues of burnout with the help of the performances Only Mine Alone (2016) by Igor Koruga and Ana Dubljević and Crisis Karaoke (2016) by Jeremy Wade.
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Notes
- 1.
Own translation from Dutch.
- 2.
It should be noted here that the authors employ the notion of slavery in a more figurative sense to refer to the idea of subjugation. With respect to the historical and social concepts of slavery, their use of the notion should not be understood as a condition in which an individual can be considered property of another individual deprived of any human rights. Instead, here it expresses a submission to a dominating influence that is not another human being but more an abstract entity, like ‘time’ or ‘neoliberalism.’
- 3.
I did not pose the question of ranking one’s future worries in the Brussels survey; therefore, I cannot make any comparative analysis here.
- 4.
Own translation from Dutch.
- 5.
This analysis is highly reworked from an earlier version published in Research in Dance Education on October 11, 2017, by Taylor & Francis, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14647893.2017.1387526 (Van Assche 2017).
- 6.
I should note that Cvetkovich’s ideas relate to people in all kinds of work situations (including tenured jobs).
- 7.
The observations here are based on a performance in the Bitef Teatar in Belgrade, on April 28, 2016.
- 8.
The original performance was in Serbian, but I have received the translated performance text and a subtitled recording.
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Van Assche, A. (2020). Burning Out. In: Labor and Aesthetics in European Contemporary Dance . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40693-6_9
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