Gillie Kleiman | GILLIE KLEIMAN

Fat Snap (a follow-up)

A close-up of a fat face glistening with sweat — *A still from a screenshot of You Are Here by Magdalena Hutter and Gillie Kleiman*

In this blogpost from 2017, scholar Sara Ahmed offers a lecture on the concept of the snap. She begins by describing a scene from a novel by Andrea Levy, in which a Black British girl ‘snaps’ in the context of a conversation with her white companions who seem unable to hear the particularity of their violent obliviousness in relation to an event that affected her more than it affected them. So she shouts. Ahmed writes:

If you have to shout to be heard you are heard as shouting. If you have to shout to be heard you are not heard. Think of how all her efforts to be heard, to get through that wall of silence, that wall of indifference, that wall of whiteness, come to nothing. Think of how all the frustration, that rage, can become a tipping point. It is only when you seem to lose it, when you shout, swear, spill, that you have their attention. And then you become a spectacle. And what you brought out means you have to get out. When we think of such moments of snap, those moments when you can’t take it anymore, when you just can’t take it anymore, we are thinking about worlds; how worlds are organised to enable some to breathe, how they leave less room for others. You have to leave because there is nothing left; when there is nothing left.

A snap is a moment where what was once just-about-tolerable becomes intolerable; the pressure is too much, and there is a break. But, as Ahmed writes, the snap is not the direct starting point of anything: ‘a snap is only the start of something because of what you did not notice, the pressure on the twig.’ This sort of temporality is complicated, I think, by thinking about who notices the pressure when, and what tactics are used to diffuse the pressure over time. I am thinking here of how fatness and dance interact, or how my fat life and my dance life come to apply pressure on one another in a fatphobic society.

Last Wednesday I snapped. I snapped at some horrible, supremacist, body-policing fatphobic bullshit I was expected to sit and listen to in the context of a work event. It was not even the last instance of direct, violent fatphobia I have experienced in a professional dance context in the intervening nine days. When I say that the deliberate and accidental fatphobia in my dance life is constant, and has been since I started dancing in an organised way as a very very small child, I mean it is a pressure that is sustained on an hourly basis. Some of it, like abusive language about fat people offered as a comment by someone who calls themselves a professional dance artist, on a post about a project of mine, on a social media platform it doesn’t interest me to use, is direct and nasty. (Have a look for it if you want, but I won’t be linking to it. It’s not very interesting.) Some of it is practical, like there not being comfortable dancewear available for me and my companions available in a reasonable way. Some of it is atmospheric, like the glances at my fat body the moment I walk into a dance studio, and the energetic environment that that creates. Some of it, like hearing second-hand that some people couldn’t engage with my last blogpost because they’re offended by the word ‘fat’, reminds me that if a neutral descriptor a person is using about themselves is a barrier to others’ understanding, there is a lot of work to do, including fat people (me) there-there-ing non-fat people about their sore feelings about a word that doesn’t even refer to them.

It has taken me a long, long time to recognise this as the violence it is. I accepted dance for what it appeared to be: a thin people thing, something I should be grateful to be included in as a very rare exception, where I would always have to be specially marked and definitely always have to be extraordinary to even be OK, in all senses. Over the past few years, I have had something of a fat awakening, partially realised by a short period of time when I was not fat, and suddenly everything in dance became easier. Not the dancing – I have always liked and been good at dancing – but the social and professional relations, the sense of acceptance in any meeting room, studio, or theatre. Because of how bodies work; because being fat is less a temporary situation for most of us than a normal state of being; because nobody has figured out how to successfully, safely, and permanently unfat a fat person (and I have no particular interest if they do), I returned to my natural large size and to entering into dance spaces as an anomaly, an irritation, a special case. This unfolding knowing alongside lots of reading, listening, and being with other fat people has gradually, slowly, inchingly lined up my ideas of fat acceptance with my ideas about what dance is and is for, to which I myself was always previously an exclusion: dance is an everybody thing, and the violence undertaken by the (usually but not always non-fat) people who control it to reproduce themselves as special and important in dance is really fucked up.

Because my feelings and thoughts about fat people and dance have taken time to transform – my own internalised fatphobia, especially in relation to dance, has been hard to unpeel – my snap last week acted as a kind of time travel. Ahmed writes of this delay: ‘a snap can be experienced as a delayed snap, once it happens, you can wonder with frustration what took you so long.’ Through this delayed snap, I was transported through my snap to both a past, where I still shared the worldview of the others present and especially those who wrote, spoke and published a script advocating for the stealing of bodily autonomy of minors through dance because they don’t like fat people. This is a world of norms, understood not as things that are usual or common, but carrying the fear of the socially-policed ‘should’. I was also transported to that dance world’s future, a future I am trying to conjure, where dance’s powers are never mobilised for the sake of abuse (towards anyone, for anything). This is the world of speculation, understood not as vague maybes but carrying the multiplicity and potentiality of the ‘could’. This time travel complicated the pressure between the two sides of the snap (the foot and the ground, the stick snapping between), producing in terms of affect not just anger but confusion and sadness, probably for lots of people in that room. In Ahmed’s terms, the world assumed as accommodating became a a wall, ‘a wall that comes up because of the body you have; because of what comes with you when you enter a room’.

One of Ahmed’s ‘travelling companions’ is the figure of angry woman of colour. Ahmed writes in this other text:

The figure of the angry black woman is a fantasy figure that produces its own effects. Reasonable, thoughtful arguments are dismissed as anger (which of course empties anger of its own reason), which makes you angry, such that your response becomes read as the confirmation of evidence that you are not only angry but also unreasonable! To make this point in another way, the anger of feminists of color is attributed. You might be angry about how racism and sexism diminish life choices for women of color. Your anger is a judgment that something is wrong. But then in being heard as angry, your speech is read as motivated by anger. Your anger is read as unattributed, as if you are against x because you are angry rather than being angry because you are against x. You become angry at the injustice of being heard as motivated by anger, which makes it harder to separate yourself from the object of your anger. You become entangled with what you are angry about because you are angry about how they have entangled you in your anger. In becoming angry about that entanglement, you confirm their commitment to your anger as the truth “behind” your speech, which is what blocks your anger, stops it from getting through. You are blocked by not getting through.

I am always nervous of finding analogues or even parallels between the exclusion of fat people and the horrendous marginalisation experienced by other people, in other ways, but here I find a sort of sideways connection that is helping me to think. Standing next to the figure of the angry woman of colour is the sad fat lass. This fantasy figure shares the structure of appearance with the angry woman of colour, in that her presence makes actual fat people entangled in sadness. The sadness appears as the motivating factor for speaking out, rather than a consequence of exclusion and disregard once some speaking-out has begun. For instance, most dance people might structure their relation to what I say as ‘Gillie is saying these things about the field of professional dance because she’s sad, and she’s sad because she’s fat’, rather than ‘Gillie is excluded from her professional environment because of fatphobia, and that makes her sad’. The ‘lass’ of ‘sad fat lass’ is crucial here, because of dance often being seen as a feminised practice; because of complexities thrown up by thinking about fatness and gender; and because of relationships between fatness and class in the public imagination, with ‘lass’ usually being a term used only in Scottish and northern English dialects like mine, deeply linked to working class places. It’s also important because lass really means girl, but is used affectionately to refer to adult women, usually to soften an interaction. Lasses should be gentle and fat lasses should be gentle and jolly. Sad fat lasses are lowly and simple, emotions base, politics absent.

This was apparent in some but not all reactions to my snap. In the room, I said that I no longer wanted to show my presentation slides because they contained images of very fat people dancing. One person – who truly seemed kind and good from what I could tell – said that it was OK, they’d support me. In a draft missive – which was changed – the organisation that had invited me wrote that they wanted to reassure the audience that I was OK. I had a couple of calls and messages from dear friends who thought I might need support. I did need support, and I got it from my amazing friend and am grateful and am fine. It puzzled me that I was seeing this communication that suggested I was having some kind of out-there mental health episode rather than a totally reasonable reaction to a vicious workplace. What Ahmed is helping me understand is that these pretty nice people were having a reaction to the figure of the sad fat lass conjured by my snap, rather than to the structural and systemic problem the snap exposed.

Ahmed writes that the snap is a moment. She says: ‘[m]oments become movements; moments can accumulate; worn threads of connection…Snap is about making what is necessary possible’. Let’s.

Thanks to Ruth Raynor for so helpfully offering the connection to Ahmed’s ‘snap’, when I told her about what had happened.

Enough is enough

Fat people dancing joyously — Image credit: Beth Olson Creative

I was invited to speak at a truly lovely event on Wednesday. A gathering of people working for organisations, large and small, or for themselves, all involved in community and participatory dance or dance in education. I was really inspired by this gathering: I found the tone to be energetic and respectful and positive and professional. It was excellently facilitated and I loved hearing about great practice happening across this region of England, far away from my own, in a very detailed way. I was touched to hear colleagues speak about challenges as well as lots of successes, and reach out for help honestly and without shame.

Two of the organisational workers stood up and talked about collective work that had happened around advocacy for dance in education. This is vital work and I was pleased to hear about it, in part through a short video addressed to policy-makers. However, one of the talking heads in the video, a senior dance worker in a major dance organisation, very flippantly said that a reason for dance in education is because a percentage (which I won’t repeat) of children in schools are o*ese. This word is starred because it is a slur, a deliberately stigmatising word to describe fat people only in order to separate us as ‘diseased’ and to try to force us to change our bodies. I remind you that forcing children to lose weight is child abuse.

I was the only fat person in the room. Moreover – perhaps – I am a fat dance artist working on and with fat, very visibly, with a range of institutions across England and abroad. From that position, here were my reactions on hearing a slur about bodies like mine – bodies like mine, but belonging to children – in a place of work:

“Fuck that!”, audibly to my table
Fear and rage, boiling insides and hurt; tears
Stepping out to speak to a senior member of staff at the organisation who invited me – an organisation I’ve been working closely and positively with on my fat-related work – whom I felt very much understood why I was upset, and who apologised, promised to take down the video and adjust the language, and do further work (and I believe them)
Re-entering the space, completely distracted, ruminating on how I could possibly stand up in front of a room of people when I have had to listen to how my body is something that should be changed by taking part in my artform
A mental shut-down; an inability to speak to people cogently

I decided that when it was my turn to speak, I would use the first couple of minutes to explain why I was so upset, and then move on to my prepared material on professional dance work with non-professional dancers, an area of work in which I am a qualified expert. This is something of what I said, not verbatim:

I am hurt because I am unsafe here
I am the only fat person in the room and I have had to endure hearing a slur about bodies like mine
I do not wish to show you images I have brought to share because they include fat people and this is not a safe space to do that
It hurts me that dance is used to police rather than empower bodies and people
Anti-fatness emerges only in concert with anti-Blackness and white supremacy
Anti-fatness is profoundly intertwined with ableism
If you think you are an anti-racist or an anti-ableist and you still think fat bodies need to change, I don’t believe you are really an anti-racist or anti-ableist

I then began to try and use my notes to speak about my area of expertise. I knew nobody was listening; I could feel it. I could also feel that the social contract around my role as an objective knower of stuff and my capacity to hold space for others to engage in that was broken. I could not trust anyone any longer. How could I, when I had had to listen how one of the purposes of my artform is to coerce children to change their bodies to be different to mine, because being like me is the worst possible thing?

I put down the microphone, said I couldn’t do this, and walked out. And had a panic attack. I was looked after by a bunch of very kind people who wish me well and want to do better themselves.

I am so disappointed. I am disappointed that I was unable to do my work. I am disappointed that I was emotional in public. I am disappointed to have not been able to engage with other practitioners in a way that could have been more useful to us all.

The thing is, this is of course not at all the first time I’ve had to encounter fatphobia in my work in dance, dance research and dance education, which is the only professional work I’ve done for the past 20 years. It’s probably not even the last moment of overt fatphobia in a professional context that I’ll experience this year (with six weeks to go). What I think this account indicates, more than anything, is that I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of accepting looks, patronising comments and out-and-out namecalling in my eye- or ear-shot. I’ve had enough of fake liberalism and dance’s capitulation to fatphobic falsehoods to try and save itself from irrelevance. And I’ve absolutely, neverendingly had enough of the field using dance – glorious, wondrous, amazing, lifechanging, everyone’s dance – as a method to attack, punish, and abuse the bodies of fat people.

If you want to do better, the internet awaits your reading and listening. If you want me to guide you through what I know of ‘how not to be awful to fat people’, you can pay me. Otherwise, you and your fatphobia can fuck right off.

To higher-earners in the arts:

Image: Buster Keaton on a dangling ladder with another person below, from silentlocations.com

To higher-earners in the arts:

This is mostly directed to those of you who work in building-based organisations. I know most about dance and performance, and a bit about theatre. If you don’t work in those fields don’t think I don’t mean you. I do, but the details might be different. I trust you can do the translation. I’m also mostly thinking from the position of an independent, freelance artist.

I am not the best person to be writing this, but I am the one writing, so I suppose I’d better just get on with it. I have some inherited wealth due to an early parental death, which means I have housing security and an elderly Honda, and I am quite sure that if I was in a very difficult financial position I would have access to more resources to keep myself safe and well. This is not true for all people, and certainly not all people in the arts, and certainly not all freelance artists working in dance, theatre and performance. For the past ten months I have been working in a university and bringing in just over £2000 net a month. This is around twice to three times what I have typically earned in the rest of my career. The contract ends in less than a month.

So here it is: when I hear you saying that you couldn’t live on less than your £50,000+ salary, your £40,000+ salary, or even £30,000+ salary, or even your £20,000+ salary, what I hear is that you could not live how I do year to year. I hear that your life, with its big house and decent car and holidays and nice clothes and first-hand furniture, is better than mine, and that you couldn’t imagine having a life like mine, with its modesty and worrying. I hear that you think my clothes aren’t as good as yours, or my food, or my social choices, or my excursions, or how I spend my time. The way you spend your time is better, and you couldn’t spend your time the way I do; the way you spend your time needs more money and you absolutely couldn’t do without it. You couldn’t share your home with someone who isn’t your family. You couldn’t not buy another coat this winter. You couldn’t go to the scruffy gym. This is very painful.

Sometimes when I try to have discussions about this with people who earn more than me I see in them a sense of admiration – aren’t I good at organising my money? Aren’t I good at not ‘treating’ myself to a really nice bottle of wine? This is annoying. I’m not good at this because I’m good at this. I have no special talent. I have had serious necessity. Other times what I hear is that it’s not so much that your life is better than mine and you couldn’t do differently, but that my life is good enough for me. Somehow I am deserving of my more frugal way of doing things. But it is not good enough for you.

Let’s be clear here: I do not believe in social mobility. Social mobility is a ruse. Again: social (we mean economic, of course) mobility is a ruse. Not on a personal level; during my childhood my parents acquired more wealth so now more money than their parents. It is easy to forget that social mobility is a ruse when we see such examples. Outwith the arts, though, we still want people to do work that is typically lower-paid and that we consider less valuable. We want this work done always, whether or not you personally are middle-class or whatever. We still want people to work with our waste; we still want people to serve children food at school; we still want people to work on the factory floor; we still want people to clean; we still want people to care. This is what I mean when I say that social mobility is a ruse. We can’t all be middle-class; we can’t all be in graduate jobs when not all the jobs are graduate jobs. We don’t need or want everyone to do typically middle-class jobs, so we should hope for a better life for everyone, regardless of the kind of work they do.

I say this because when I have brought up the massive pay inequality between some non-artists in the arts (managers, directors, academics etc.) and independent workers, particularly artists, there is a sense that there is a ladder. The people at the top of that ladder have worked even harder than those at the bottom: they have maybe worked for decades to develop a career. Yes, they have put the hours in. But there are still the people at the bottom of our ladders who are suffering because of low-paid and precarious work. The people further up the ladder feel they are not exploiting those lower down because maybe once upon a time they were paid less and lived in a cramped houseshare and didn’t have much spare at the end of the month. There are several reasons why I cannot stand for this argumentation:

I graduated from my undergraduate degree in 2008 (I had been working in community dance semi-professionally since 2001, but that’s by the by). Remember 2008? The crash? Then do you remember 2010? Austerity? My entire career, pretty much, has been during austerity. There has been little public funding for the arts and state support has been shit, and increasingly so, over the decade. When the people who are at the top of the ladder were at the bottom, it was before all of that. When they were at the bottom they had more support and there was more funding. I have read the reports.
Not all the people at the bottom of the ladder will ever move from there. I think of some of my heroes, independent artists of the highest calibre, in my not-very-humble eyes, who are still scrabbling for cash month-to-month. Not everyone can climb the ladder.
However you cut it, if there is a ladder, the bottom rungs are made up of the lowest-paid workers. They are keeping the ladder from falling. You, high-earners, are literally standing on their shoulders. You think you paid your dues? Do you? FUCK PAYING DUES:
1. Paying dues means that you have to have the resources to pay. It is by nature exclusionary.
2. PAYING DUES MEANS SOMEONE IS SUFFERING! NOW! SOMEONE IS SUFFERING NOW!

I hear the arguments about high salaries being necessary to attract the best talent. I disagree. I think different people are suited to different sorts of activities and have multiple motivations for doing the work they do. If people are motivated by money then perhaps they can go and work in another sector where salaries are generally higher.

I hear the arguments about these high-paying jobs being very responsible, difficult, and demanding jobs that actually take up 80 hours a week. First, if you are in one of those jobs, you are in the position to shift the working culture to delegitimise overwork. If you don’t do this, you are making a rod for your own back, and for everyone else. Stop it. How about splitting the job in two, working less, and making space for another person to work in the arts? Then you wouldn’t need to be compensated so richly in a sector where people are suffering, trying to pay their damn dues. I don’t want to legitimise hard work as the source of money, because that’s not how it works (I can think of too many examples to make me think you can’t too), but many of the independent artists I know who are paid poorly also work very hard.

I hear the arguments about independent artists choosing to make the sacrifice of decent, stable income because they get to be liberated in their work, follow their own curiosity, choose with whom to work and so on. We get to have fascinating conversations and think the world anew. It’s really great. But we are also working in a system and are hemmed in by that; we also do shit-tonnes of admin and often more, because we don’t have the benefit of scale; we also have to meet the needs of many clients and stakeholders and partners. Further, all arts workers get the benefit of working in the arts. You too, high-earner, get to have creative conversations and dream up new ideas and think about the relationship between the arts and society. AND you get paid a proper salary.

I really want you to think about this. Without independent artists (who are currently working precariously), there is literally no point to your job. None. It is absolutely meaningless. What you do every day has no value. It is worthless. You need independent artists if you are the CEO of a dance organisation, the artistic director of a theatre, the boss of a sector support organisation. You know that there will be an endless supply of us – not because ‘we can’t do anything else’ in some romantic way, but because of a set of conditions including promises from the sector and its related HE organisations that a career is possible – so you know we are expendable. This is exploitation of the highest order. It is absolutely disgusting. If you care one bit about cultural life – about the human beings you see every working day – then you will do something about this. How dare you not do this.

(An aside: the organisations in which you work were never set up to do this. They were established to support and organise and lobby for and present artistic practice – I am certain of this in dance, because, again, I have read some of the reports, but I expect it to be the same in other fields. Because of many things (professionalisation of arts management, a dogmatic belief in and practice of trickle-down economics which doesn’t work anywhere, the way that organisations often sediment and become more conservative over time etc.), the whole thing has flipped. Now it’s the organisations – and the people earning salaries in them – who set the agenda, and artists are asked to supply goods according to those agendas. You can change this.)

So, you see, dear high-earner, this ladder business has to stop. It has to stop now. I am sorry that you suffered, that you ‘paid your dues’, on your way up this ladder. The ladder was always unfair and you managed to succeed, probably some privilege and a lot of talent and skill. The ladder didn’t have rungs for lots of talented, skilful, creative, determined people who just couldn’t get on its rungs. Now, I am asking you to use your weight to lever the ladder on its side. Yes, you will get less. You should literally be paid less for your work. You should. I am saying that. Yes, it will take time for you to acclimatise to being paid less, and you will have to reorganise your personal finances, but I am still asking you. Because underneath it all – the assumptions, your peer group’s expectations, the unjust promises that were made to you – I really, really, really hope that you don’t want to be complicit in exploiting the people around you.

I will help you do this. Contact me.

I’m a goddamn hypocrite

Fantastic stock image off the internet

As I wrote to the brilliant Selina Thompson a few days ago, and partially in relation to a conversation I had with Aaron Wright of Fierce Festival on Facebook, I am in the process of seeing the extent to which I am a hypocrite in lots of ways. This particularly pertains to my professional life. Here are a few combos, many of which are related to one another:

Everyone can make art

The only art worth my attention is made by people who know what they’re doing in my terms

—

All culture is important, including vernacular, DIY and outsider forms

I want to be an arbiter of what is important and not important along with people who think like me

—

I want how the arts are organised to completely change because the systems are unjust

I just want to have more power in the systems because I am right and know best

—

There are endless ways to appreciate and value art

My values and measures are the right values and measures

—

We need a plurality of articulation around artmaking and artgoing which includes non-professional doers and thinkers

I have had education about this so I know better for sure how to articulate everything about my field

—

It is great to have people cut across disciplines e.g. architects in choreography, especially when it suits me

You can only be in or supported by a field if you know its full canon and, crucially, have suffered at the hands of its crap system i.e. ‘paid your dues’

—

An artist is a worker and should use worker-organising methods to improve their conditions (e.g. unions)

The category ‘professional artist’ should be dismantled so everyone can make stuff without it being a profession, with all the difficulty, exploitation, exclusion and creative stifling that that brings

—

I have thought in the past that the best way to deal with these doublethinks is to hold them within myself, managing myself as best I can, sort of ignoring bits and shrugging them off. Coronavirus is awful and watching an already-rotten government completely mould into a foul stink with no real hope for an alternative whilst actual human beings suffer the great, grave consequences has been terrible. Of course. Of course I would not have had life go like this. But what it has afforded me is a bit of time not to be scrabbling straight into the next thing, a bit of spaciousness in my life in the broadest way, and that has made me see not only the hypocrises in which I am engaging but also the weight of their psychical burden. I can’t go on like this. It is too disintegrating, too heavy. To overcome my hypocrisy might mean giving up a lot, probably a lot of what I am holding onto as some sort of essential value I have in myself. I have much more work to do. I’ll write more about some of this soon.

Incomplete reflections on being an amateur in public

Image: Andrew Wilson

I have been thinking, speaking and writing about the virtues and challenges of non-professional performance for about five years. Five years! Mostly this has been about contemporary experimental dance, authored chiefly by professional choreographers and presented in professional venues and festivals, where at least part of the performing cast are non-professionals. If you want, you can read my PhD online and find out more about that.

In my thinking and writing I have been in a particular position: that of the professional. I am a choreographer and do other things in dance, so I can’t even pretend I occupy any other sort of role than a Professional Dance Person. In my doctoral research I leaned into this, and tried to think from that position, rather than taking up other possibilities in the research, such as interviewing non-professional participants in the projects that I was making, watching and analysing.

I am not my work. I do things other than my work. I have meditation and yoga practices, I am part of a Buddhist study group, I exercise, I see my pals, I watch the telly. But since lockdown began, I’ve been able to start doing other sorts of things that I thought I didn’t have the skills to do. I’ve started a small vegetable garden – I can see my corn, lettuce leaves, butternut squashes, tomatoes, courgettes, radishes, spring onions and the rest as I sit at my desk. I have become pretty absorbed in the details of sourdough baking, learning about different sorts of flour, discussing the bulk fermentation with my housemate before agreeing to shape, and learning that autolyse is pronounced auto-leez. It turns out that growing things and baking bread don’t necessarily require specialist skills and aptitudes, but they do require time and headspace. Both of these pastimes overall need more time waiting than they do action, as I wait for the kale seedlings to grow strong enough to start the hardening off process, or wait for the sourdough starter to become ripe after feeding. But they also need the time to think and do research, to read recipes online and scour the Royal Horticultural Society’s research on slug repellent. They need the time to send a more experienced friend a message and get it back and have a whole conversation about whether it’s better to do a short fermentation on the counter or a longer one in the fridge. It takes time to absorb new vocabularies; many of the words I’ve used in this paragraph I simply didn’t know twelve weeks ago.

Though I have shared some of these two new hobbies with friends directly or via social media – who could resist posting a cracking, crackling freshly-baked 70% hydration boule on Instagram? – I am doing them in private. They are not for public consumption. My five courgette plants, currently flowering gloriously, will not provide enough fruit for their delicacies to be assessed beyond my immediate household, especially with current restrictions. There is something glorious, for me, about doing things that are non-essential, productive, and just for me. Of course I could buy lovely sourdough bread or get a gardener in, in principle, if not in terms of actual means, but I like the process of stretching and folding, of getting my nails filthy, of observing the robins as they observe me as I repot the seedlings. I even like the mental management of it all, setting the timer for fermenting and figuring out how many days before the frost will end I can start to take the plants outside for holidays. The doing of it is the pleasure, quite as much as the material reward.

Having said that, I think there’s something to discuss here about the relationship between the material and the immaterial that would benefit from a little pause. I am not writing, here, with what I would consider a scholastic agenda, and am really trying to avoid turning this into an academic paper because that would undo something for me right now. Perhaps, as I find myself writing this, I am indicating that this writing, too, is becoming a hobby, and that I am relishing it in a way that I have not had access to for really quite a long time, because my writing has made me money or got me qualifications or both. Like many others, I resist the distinction between material and immaterial in terms of labours, just as much as I am not comfortable with imagining that performance-making is really immaterial, because it seems to undo more nuanced understandings from all sorts of practical and academic fields – including my own, in dance and dance studies – that so robustly and thoughtfully rebuild divides between body and mind, between process and outcome, between the doer and what is done.

I am getting a bit lost here, but I don’t mind, because I am doing this because I feel like it. I am enjoying stopping and watching the bluetits out of the window eating from the birdfeeder where my housemate has put some leftover pastry. (Interesting about that birdfeeder: I bought some fat balls from Waitrose and they disappeared in about a week. I thought I couldn’t afford to sustain the songbird population of Heaton with such gourmet dining, so I bought a massive tub of them from Home Bargains. They’re not interested.)

—

I got lost and now I’m attempting to find myself in this, again, a few weeks later, with a different train of thought.

I have begun another new hobby. I have started a radio show with my friend Marian. We are very good friends and have been for many years. We are of different generations, not that Marian would ever tell anyone how old she is or indeed when her birthday is. Marian has supported me through all sorts of terrible and marvellous life moments, and is north Newcastle’s finest agony aunt. I’ve often thought that she would make a wonderful advice-giver on TV or whatever, so when I realised that the great Star and Shadow Cinema had begun a radio station I thought I might try and convince her. She was up for it, as long as it wasn’t just about her giving advice but about the two of us discussing people’s problems.

Maybe I’ll just say a small thing about the context. Star and Shadow Cinema is a volunteer-run venue in Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne. It currently owns a building on Warwick Street which was formerly a carpet shop. Inside there is a cinema, a gig venue, a cafe area and other rooms that are used for other things. Lots and lots of people volunteer at the cinema to different degrees of intensity. Officially I am a volunteer because I have had an induction but I’ve done very few shifts. I go in and out of feeling like I want to be involved for many reasons which I won’t unfold too much here (but maybe later).

Because the radio station is part of the Star and Shadow, it too is volunteer-run. This doesn’t mean that the people doing things don’t have skills. Like me, many of the people work professionally in the arts and come with different sorts of capacities from their work and other places. But in most cases the work that people do with and for the Star and Shadow isn’t part of any work as we might know it in a remunerated sense, it’s not counted towards a particular project or measured against a timesheet. (I know timesheets are rare in the arts but they do exist, either practically or sort of psychologically, because I have an internal one inside myself and it has been co-constructed with lots of other people during many professional arts activities, in a tacit, odd, compliant-resistant dance. What I mean is that I’m sure I’m not the only one.) This is absolutely, totally the best thing about it.

When I am working on my and Marian’s show – entitled We can’t promise anything: advice with Marian (and Gillie) – I am truly answerable to nobody. I can discuss issues practical and creative with the other volunteers working on the radio station, but unless I’m doing something really ethically problematic nobody will intervene in any way. Some programmers and broadcasters are really into getting people to listen, but the truth is that I don’t mind if you listen or not. It is such a relief to me to do something that is addressed to a public without having to do some of the worst bits of my job, like convince people that experimental cultural artefacts are worth their while (I think they are, I just loathe the persuading part). I don’t know much about broadcasting and don’t even listen to the radio that much, so am entirely unconcerned with being good or pitching to a market – again, I’m not doing this to get money and I’m not doing this to get people to listen. I am not and do not wish to be a professional radio host. There is no market. O! There is such freedom in this!

I am reminded of when I was sixteen and I was obsessed with dance. Like, really really obsessed. I went to six classes a week, every week, as well as ordinary school. If I saw the word ‘dance’ written down I would get excited (remember this is before one could watch one’s fill of dance on the internet). In the holidays, I would beg Dance City in Newcastle for use of any empty studios and get my friends to come down and I would just choreograph dances. Loads of them. Different genres of dance. Anything. I had so many ideas. Up until this point I had probably seen no more than 10 professional performances (and lots of youth and community performances), so I didn’t know to what I was relating, and it didn’t occur to me to care. I just wanted to do it. It was fun.

I don’t have this relationship to making performances now. I am too knowing; I am too educated, too experienced, and have seen too much. And I’m invested in the market: I want to make money from what I’m doing, and be perceived well, and generate some value for myself and the world. It feels totally fraught, fragile and tense at the same time, shallow of joy. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy lots of it: I have mostly been doing the related job of teaching dance and performance for the past nine months and though it has been great my richest conversations came in those moments when I was working with Greg on our show. Making art is fantastic. But ‘being an artist’ has so many drawbacks.

Making the radio show with Marian doesn’t have those drawbacks. It has some similar elements to my professional work and it is mighty fun to exercise those whilst doing something totally else. Being an amateur in public is a different ride to making stuff at home just for myself: there’s a sense of being seen, making something for others to enjoy not more than me but in order that they can join in with my fun.

The more I write about this the more I realise that there’s much more to say. But like my radio show this is a non-professional blog, so this doesn’t have to be perfect or exhaustive (I remind myself). So I’m going to stop now. More soon.

Preliminary thoughts on the Freelance Task Force

Image: Mary Wigman’s ghosts, because it’s never not relevant

I have been appointed to the Freelance Task Force. I am being backed by Jerwood Arts. Here are some very brief thoughts about that, written hastily and in a long form (There are headers for navigation/selection of what you want to read). I might change things as I go along, even after I post it. My thoughts are maybe not that important but I am finding it increasingly important to write my thoughts down; this is part mental health self-care 101, part a wish to log something of my thinking about this and other things in this moment, and part a desire to speak publicly about some of this. I think that these reasons are in any case intertwined and I am interested particularly in the personal and interpersonal and social and political impact of publicness of thought (see Virno, Arendt and so on, and I’ll certainly have to, because I can only now remember the headlines), and I intend to say more about that a bit later.

I considered applying to at least a couple of organisations once I’d seen and somewhat understood what the Freelance Task Force was becoming. I was a bit disheartened to see so few dance organisations get involved, and I hope that maybe something else is coming on that front (but I’m just guessing so don’t take that as a trade secret or anything. Nobody has told me anything). I am often involved in conversations about how the interlinked fields of dance, theatre, performance and Live Art (always capitals, right?) are organised, and I find that the way that I think is suited to considering structures, processes, and policies. I think in a way that is often considered utopian but I’m up for that and most of the time what people appear to mean by that is that it is outside of what they think is possible right now, or desirable right now, or palatable right now. I really love being part of such discussions but mostly I am driven by the need for action, and have taken part in all sorts of bits and bobs over the past decade-and-a-bit feeling a bit frustrated a lot of the time. The Freelance Task Force seemed and seems to me like a really bloody great idea and I’m pleased it’s happening and I’m pleased I’m doing it; it feels to me like a useful and unusually well and collectively resourced continuation of lots of other threads of action that have happened in my area of work. It is not unusual for freelancers to get together and try and change things, but it is unusual for organisations to get behind such actions in this way. This is good. I am hopeful.

But I’m feeling so sick about it. So worried. Here’s why:

I worry that I am not the right person

I know that each organisation involved had its own process for selection, ranging from formal recruitment processes led by HR teams to more informal conversations with existing individuals and networks. I was backed via an in-between process, where those of us who were from the relevant fields were asked if we would like to and then there was a vote after that. Originally it was going to be a name out of a hat which would have been fine, but I and others suggested we decide between ourselves. For reasons of time, I understand, a vote was the only possible way, but it’s not perfect by any means. I had a freak out as I voted, another one when I found out I had been selected (which precipitated two very long conversations with friends to help me unpick it – thanks Andrew and Beckie, you wee legends), and quite a lengthy back and forth by email and a conversation with Jon and Lilli from Jerwood before I felt I could even in my current discomfort take on this work. I have had another freak out seeing all the announcements on Twitter which is what has motivated me to write a bit. I don’t know if I’m the right person, but I do think I can contribute a lot to this action and have the will to bring my capacities and competencies to it. I do wish I’d realised or asked if it could be job-shared and I’m sorry now that I didn’t. I’ll know better for next time that that’s something I can ask about.

But to be clear: I don’t think I’m doing this because I’m special somehow. I see the congratulations being passed around and have been the recipient of some of them, and it’s nice – thank you. The ‘right person’ doesn’t exist and the ‘best person’ doesn’t exist. I’m not the winner of a prize; I was selected through a process that is one step up from winning a raffle. This is work, and work that I think could be really important if we do it thoughtfully. I want to do this work, but I don’t need to be celebrated for doing it.

I worry about the issue of representation

I have seen already on social media and on the posts of organisations language around representation – in the sense that a freelancer is representing an organisation, or representing a city or region. This is not how I have understood it at all. I work in dance and performance and live in Newcastle upon Tyne. There are few dance artists and choreographers and there are few participants from the Northeast. I have experiences of each but they are mine. I have lots of colleagues and friends who have similar experiences to me but they are also different. Jerwood has made it very clear to me that I represent only myself, not the organisation, and I think that that is good and right; otherwise the whole drive of the exercise is lost. But I also don’t think I’m in the business of representing anyone else; I do not need to represent anyone for my contribution to be helpful, effective, maybe with some insight and innovation and grounded in some common experiences. I will solicit outside information and undertake conversations as I see necessary once we begin the work, but I need to be conscious that I am being paid and others aren’t, and I don’t want to take something for nothing.

Further on the issue of representation, I don’t much like the idea of an organisation or person representing a place just because they are there. This would be a very bad idea indeed. For the past decade I have had, for instance, a very challenging relationship with the major dance organisation in my city (which has, thankfully, improved for the most part). Just because they are the only building-based dance organisation in my city does not mean they represent dance in this city or this city in danceland. Moreover, I don’t want to be a representative decided by other than that or those which I would be representing. The dance artists of the Northeast, for instance, would probably not have chosen me, but dance artists working in a particular frame might have, or artists working in the intersection of dance and live art, or maybe dance artists who have a foot in the game in academia. I’m not at all sure about any of these, but I draw attention to them to show how little I think it is helpful to take on the work of representing in this case. In a way this is rather more apparent because the organisation paying my fee is funder working nationally and across disciplines through non-state-funded means, so my ‘constituency’ is less clear. This does not mean that I do not consider myself responsible or caring for others in my field, but I think it does mean I can speak my mind and heart and be flexible and communicative about to whom I am relating in different ways depending on how the work develops.

I worry if this is the right conversation

I worry that we will get caught in the details of performance and its organisation and end up having interminable and well-rehearsed dialogues about…all the things we always talk about for which I am too wound up to list. My position this morning is that I want to zoom out as we plan our Zooms, and prepare for a bigger conversation about the relationship between the arts and neoliberal mechanisms. Without doing that we will forever be tinkering at the edges, trying to get a little bit more money for being a little bit more commercial until the possibility of artmaking to change everything for everyone completely disappears. I want to think, rather, about how to sustain a rich cultural life for everybody and what the role of freelancers is in that. This might mean all kinds of really difficult things, like dropping our desire to be the arbiters of what is culture and is not, the end of careerism, uncoupling performance from spectacle-making and showing off, stepping aside for other forms of culture to take centre stage. This can’t be anything but hard and will require a real examination of views and actions, not least my own.

I worry that I am too ‘radical’

In my circles of mostly very leftist arts practitioners who are engaged with political and critical theory and often different forms of social action, I find myself with many who share my views. This is pretty normal I reckon, and OK. Lilli from Jerwood reminded me in our discussion that people on the Freelance Task Force will be from many different sub-sectors of the field, and scrolling through Twitter I see that I know hardly anyone, when I know mostly everyone in my little corner. In this corner, I think most of the people I’ve spoken to lately are willing to change almost everything. People talk eloquently and in an informed, considered way about how to dismantle and completely change the organisations we hold dear – beloved Lois Keidan of LADA stepped down this week to allow her organisation to do something like that – and are quick and, in my view, right to connect the cultural sector to other parts of society and the economy to think about how we establish better conditions for artwork, artists and audiences to be well. I want to think forensically about what we really want to keep and what can be put on the compost heap. (I really mean what, not who, though sometimes I do think there are cultural workers who work like they’d rather work in the corporate sector and I wonder why they don’t just do that. But that’s for another time.)

For me, there’s a lot to be put on the compost heap – once all the disease and infestation has been taken out, and burned.

I worry about how we will organise ourselves, how we will relate to other conversations, and how we can disagree usefully

Related to my concern about representation comes to my concern about how we will talk to one another. This is a very big and diverse group of people. We will not want to speak about or do the same things. I’m pretty happy about this, within the worry. But I have also been part of lots and lots of different threads of work like this, and don’t want to repeat the problems. Consensus-based decision-making is unlikely to work entirely. Voting doesn’t work very well for such things. I don’t want some people to take on loads and other people to be twiddling their thumbs, wondering if they’re missing something; I’ve been on both sides in different contexts. I prefer a syndicated approach. By this I mean that we talk together and then everyone does what they need to do, supported and buoyed by the others who want to do that supporting and buoying. There might be groups of people who want to do the same action together or in a mini-chain or collective of some sort. Though I worry about this, I love thinking about such structures, and hope we can come to a solution, even if this is a shifting one.

There are other useful and difficult conversations happening about the future of our field – as is apparent, this is actually maybe twelve overlapping fields, or a corner of one, for me – which do not have the resource of the Freelance Task Force. They have a different resource: groups of smart, caring people who want to make things happen, but are mostly not being paid for their time in any visible way. I want to stay in those conversations not representing the Freelance Task Force, Jerwood, or anything at all, and also not there to sort of harvest and take back, as if the Freelance Task Force becomes another institution to report to. At the same time I think I can be asked to consider taking on some work that otherwise someone else would do unpaid as part of the paid time I have. This is a really tricky thing to manage.

I need to be able to disagree with people. Gillie, remember how you said you needed to be able to disagree with people? I must remind myself. I find it very difficult. How can we make it useful and not horrible? I don’t want to go to bed fretting all the time. Maybe this is just personal work, but maybe it will also be a texture of what we do.

I worry that the gatekeepers won’t listen to us anyway

Some of the organisations who have backed a freelancer could be considered gatekeepers. In fact, all of them could be to one degree or another, and I do think there are degrees. There are also bigger gatekeepers that are directly part of the life of dance, theatre and performance: very large institutions who are supposed to have a trickle-down influence and responsibility, key funders both state and otherwise, local authorities and the MHCLG which pass down monies from central government to local authorities, and the different governments of the four nations of the UK, including Westminster. There are less direct gatekeepers, like private landlords and their supporters who treat renters like crap, and prevent people, including cultural workers, living well; there are people, bodies and systems who make it possible for people to get state support necessary for a decent life; there are educational organisations who promise careers when they know there are none and that’s not the point of education anyway. How can we do this differently? I don’t want to pander to these people and systems but I do want to be heard.

I think I have great ideas. Of course I do – they’re my ideas coming out of my head emerging out of my unique conditions. For instance, I have been quietly trying to figure out how to get each National Dance Network member to pay a freelancer to go with them to each meeting and have a seat at the table, and have been routinely told that that’s impossible or not useful (why can’t I decide, we decide, what’s useful?). Fuel and the others have made this thing happen, and it seems somewhat similar, so it is after all possible, it’s just that the right person had the right idea and was heard by their peers. I feel quite often dismissed by colleagues in institutions, as if I don’t understand how they work or am some silly little artist. I don’t need to understand how everything works to have ideas, and good ones, to even have complaints or demands (I could write more about that but Sara Ahmed is your person on complaints and maybe Kathi Weeks on demands, and many others). These institutional workers often think they can tell me everything about my work, and they don’t know how I or often anyone does choreography and performance-making in the details of practice. But I am expected to listen and take it on, and often I do because it’s at worst well-meaning and at best fascinating, rewarding and genuinely helpful. (Actually at worst it’s a control tactic, an abuse of power, a way to drive down self-esteem and sustain an asymmetrical power dynamic but that is also for another time.)

I am very worried that the gatekeepers have lost the power to listen. I mean this on a very personal level, but I also mean that the structures have had to tighten up so much, have retreated due to scarcity and fear and the sheer volume and variety of demands upon them, that there’s no good way for things to change, no good way to slacken the gluten in the dough enough to add in another ingredient which could change the whole, make it tastier and richer and more nourishing.

—

I really want change. This initiative has arisen out of the coronavirus crisis, but has been so needed for so long. No, that’s not right. I want revolution. This task force can’t provide it, and I imagine many of us don’t want it. That’s OK, as far as it goes, but I hope that knowing what my drive is can be helpful for me and for others. As I wrote when I was putting myself forward to my peers for selection, I have no interest in finding ways to reset what has forever been an unjust and unsustainable way of making art. There are other ways and we can choose them.