My title underscores ambitions for our practice
moving forward with respect to the values inherent
in making dance together as communities of artistic
citizens. Given the opportunity to revisit inspirations
that were shared during Our Dance Democracy, I
turned to considerations of my training/learning in
inclusive dance practices with Peter Brinson in the
first years of the Community Dance Programme
at The Laban Centre in the 1980s. In those early
days imagining dance practice for community
practitioners and the public, we spoke of forging
agency in the world; of exploring modes of practice
that could help us make sense of the contexts
of our lives, and of learning the ways that social
assembly could help foster rich and integrated
societies.
Then, as now, public funding and resources were
failing communities. The branded notion of arts
and culture has, at times been oriented towards
the production and provision of an elite, in the site
of performance and the attending audiences. This
drive towards production and display rather than
fostering sustainability and agency has proven
to be a dominant feature of our times. Arguably,
and hopefully, we are experiencing change within
a burgeoning debate that calls for responsible
practices that transform and support communities
to make art as a response to their own lives,
experiences and ideas.
Those of us working in ephemeral, time-based
and body-based processes continue to struggle
to fit the model of tradable commodities. Our
preference to champion embodied value as an
impetus for our experience does not always
provide immediate evidence for an annual report.
In dancing we can explore what goes on when we
learn with each other; bringing attention to our
bodily selves as the vital site of our relations.
I continue to argue for the inherent value of dance
as a route to learning through bodily motion, for it
is here that we learn of ourselves as and from the
centre of our existence in a world that matters.
Through our engagement with dance we
echo thoughts shared by Elizabeth Grosz when
arguing that, “Art is the most direct intensification
of the resonance, and dissonance between bodies
and the cosmos, between one milieu or rhythm
or another” (1).
We know we live in curious times embroiled in
complex crosscurrents of debate that can a feel
distracting and at times, counter productive. In
such circumstances we might gain benefit from
fostering conversations that could help to identify
the support needed now for the artists, educators
and activists of future generations.
• How might we design modes of training and
practice to support our futures where, more than
ever, we will be dependent on the quality of our
interactions?
• How do we secure a place for arts practice to
ask dangerous questions of our ways of being in
association and ensure they are heard?
In exploring what can be experienced and
learned through engagement in cooperative,
collaborative art making, Phillipa Rothfield offers
us a valuable place to start simply, reminding us
that, “...the ethical is already implicated within the
domain of dance simply because we dance. It is
found in the tactile flow of information, from one
body to another (2).”
The support I find is an acknowledgement of the
inherent value of learning through bodily motion.
Through our time spent dancing we can recognise
that for each of us, it is our body that is the centre
of our existence in the world. Implicit in this is
the value to be gained with respect to our ethicaesthetic
enhancement, where learning experiences
attend to the manner of our dialogic relations.
In dance, we work within and through a broad
range of behavioural activities that can have
immediate inter-corporeal implications for the
ways in which we relate to one another, and
to our identity or to the roles we take or to the
art we make. We talk of ourselves as responsible
practitioners and of the relevance of the work we
do. Our work offers opportunities for transforming
lives in the communities with which we work, to
which we contribute and support. However, without
tangible objects to possess, this experiential
practice can be difficult to trade in a society where
the notion of monetary value significantly reduces
notions of value to more tangible products and
price than can be easily or immediately identified
by the enhancement of life experiences.
I am confident that we all continue to argue for
a view of experience in dance that intertwines the
social and the civic as features of our relations.
These experiences provide opportunity to realise
positive changes in ourselves and with those with
whom we work. It is here, in such encounters that
I recognise the means by which to forge enhanced
ethical awareness.
I spoke in Liverpool of a recent writing project
taking the title – Considering Ethics in Dance,
Theatre and Performance – where I explored the
tentative steps we take in learning how to relate
with one another and with our own life experiences.
The threads intertwined throughout the book
have helped me make sense of my journey as a
restless community arts practitioner. Whilst aware
of my debt to Peter I also want to thank Francois
Mataraso. From Regular Marvels published by
the Community Dance & Mind Foundation – now
People Dancing, in 1994 to, A Restless Art in 2019,
he has proven to be a trustworthy guide with
respect to the practice of making sense in the
communication of significant values and for a sense
of accountability interwoven within practice.
I continue to explore the complex intertwining
of the ways that we can learn through moving and
thereby enrich our experience from the challenge
of being-in-relation. It is here that I recognise
ethical-artistic practice with respect…
• to social communication
• to responsible and responsive engagement
• to the development of proficiencies or skills
or ‘well-made-ness’ with respect to judgment,
purpose, communication
• to the use of creative endeavour in making places
of interaction
• to our ways of recognising and of making sense.
These experiences come into existence beyond
the boundary of the formal art world, and teach us
how the world works and how our lives contribute
to the places we occupy and groups we live
amongst.
How can we learn to recognise our coimplication
with the places and cultures that
we are part of through our multiple ways of
relating? Examples can be found in work made
by self-conscious practitioners, often working
on the fringes of the arts sector, engaged with
social, economic or political critique. This is
practice that echoes appreciation of art-making
as a fundamental facility of our human ways
of communicating. Here, artistic responses/
experiments and sense-making are made by and
for people, regardless of the particular media
or practice through which they are realised.
They disseminate particular ‘messages’ and/or
meanings and are grounded in the locality and
encounters where they are formed. It is through
our engagement with such experiences, shaped
in communities of art making that we can shape
understandings of our lives. This is echoed in the
words of Iris Murdoch who succinctly says, “art is
for life’s sake... or else it is worthless (3).”
The World Health Organisation (1946) identified
health as “...a state of complete physical, mental
and social wellbeing, and not merely the absence
of disease or infirmity”. The European Charter on
Environment and Health (1989), further suggests
that “...good health and wellbeing require a clean
and harmonious environment in which physical,
psychological, social and aesthetic factors are all
given their due importance.”
Underneath, what are arguably utopian
definitions, lies an acknowledgment of the
reciprocal impact of our external environment
with our internal experience of ‘personhood’.
Our lives are interconnecting so without sufficient
attention to the complex interactional nature of
our experiences and means of communication, we
will only progress towards a dulling and narrowing
of life experience and expectation. To contribute
positive change to this lively context,
• What might socially engaged practice offer to a
civilising society?
• What might be a role for the arts as an intrinsic
feature of a society rather than as an economy?
With the shift to the political ‘right’ all
governments have emphasised the virtues of
competition, the market and financial success –
over other life and community values. According
to the British Social Attitude Survey – there has
been a fall in public support for policies that
redistribute wealth and opportunity. This is a
shift that we see reinforced daily in media hype
and twitter feeds that espouse separatism, and a
dismantling of social infrastructure. They praise the
achievements of individuals without noting that
these achievements are seldom the result of solo
endeavour.
There are, of course, various interplays that
exist between the creation and experience of
performance as part of our culture. The focus
promoted here is to think about performance
making that strives towards socially engaged art. In
valuing our work, we need to be ready to champion
the experience of moving and making dance works
that are overtly corporeal, perceptual and social. In
these ways, we might recognise dance as a border
discipline with the body at the centre.
Within and through dance, we are able to
traverse different nomadic identities with respect;
to the work we each have explored in coming to
know ourselves, to the work we do in cooperation
and to the work done in partnership with ideas
and contexts and others. Experiences of dance
can offer a host of informal learning cultures
that are shaped as a responsive pedagogy of
embodiment/of culture/of communication/of
holistic development.
Experiencing dance can offer powerful routes
towards positive societal and personal change. In
dance education (of all sorts) we create spaces that
are conducive to social cohesion in culturally and
politically diverse communities. Therefore, let us
state the claim; dancing is a form of identity making
and of world making. It can shape our own ways
of being. Understanding moving and being moved
matters in a world that is increasingly struggling to
recognise social value in community.
In Dancing in a World that Matters, our ethics
reveal themselves as the only way to effect and
to see positive change. Here, I am intertwining
aesthetics, ethics, creativity, collaboration, artmaking
and education as constituent features in
the generation of knowledge, and of our learning
by being in-relation. This is a lively, complex place
of learning where we need to learn what it means
to negotiate. The situation is made all the more
intricate when we realise the many entanglements
through which we relate on a daily basis and the
lively online interfaces that we have to learn to
navigate. Attending to ethics as an integrating
feature of practice can help us consider interrelational
sensitivities and responsibilities through
the ties we share in terms of work, neighbourhood,
family relations or dancing communities.
Looking towards practice
In the multitude of events involved in the creation
of a dance work, the embodied significance of
the transmission of relations resides in the micropractices
between those involved, affect. It is
here that we each can learn to give attention
to the small details and nuances that shape our
shared identity. Here, embedded within our shared
processes we can recognise that,
Ethics is, about all manner of behaviours
towards being-in-community with others, and
our selves. It clearly concerns co-creation,
collaboration, self-expression, self-determination
and collectivity, all integrating through a shared
reliance and simply stated, ethics tells us to, ‘...do
as you would be done by’.
Ethics is present in the metaphors that a
performance might evoke as much as it is the
embodied vision realised in the form of a work.
Ethics is ultimately the presence of reflective
self-consciousness that enables us to share a
collective imagination and responsibility for
ourselves and for others.
For political theorist and philosopher Jane
Bennett, the adoption of what might be thought to
be codes of behaviour may well be an indispensible
part of ethical practice, even when exercised
only through enforced obligation. She goes on to
propose that we adopt the values to be found in
facilitating ‘...ethical generosity’ as a way of being
sensitively responsive, somehow in touch with
what it means to be aware of our encounters with
ideas and with the world (4). As a mode of learning
and a manner of practice this could prove to be
advantageous with respect to ways that we relate
as social beings. The wealth within our practice
requires this ethical stance.
Relations through ethics in practice
Through experiences gained working in creative,
social contexts, where we generate ideas, there
are opportunities to comprehend the values
inherent in our interconnectedness. In aligning
ethics and aesthetics in the collaborative processes
of art/dance making, we can orient our lived
experiences towards a fuller appreciation for the
animating impact of moving. The quest is to put
artistic, social practice to work with respect to our
ethical and aesthetic attention and to the felt sense
of our being in association with the others with
whom we work.
Info
F.Bannon@leeds.ac.uk
www.dancehe.org.uk
References
1. Grosz. 2008:24
2. Rothfield 2015
3. Murdoch, 1997, 218
4. Bennett, J. 2001. The enchantment of modern life.
Princeton, NJ [u.a.]: Princeton Univ. Press