Weights and Pressures: Precarity and Democracy's Legislative Subjects

• Main Authors: Merriman, Victor, Black-Frizell, Sarah
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: bureaucracy; choreography; Creative Industries; dance; democracy; home; human flourishing; identity; nation
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss40/5; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/2015/viewcontent/KK_2040_2C_202023_205_20Forum_20Kritika_20on_20Dancing_20Democracy_20in_20a_20Fractured_20World_20__20Merriman_20and_20Black_Frizell.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

This short essay introduces the Our Dance Democracy (ODD) project (2018–present) and the contributions to this Forum Kritika, “Dancing Democracy in a Fractured World.” The latter includes articles, provocations, and creative responses in visual and poetic forms. Dance is an art form positioned between artists and audiences, on one hand, and institutional structures— including funding regimes and performance venues—on the other. As state and civil society infrastructure experiences pressure arising from neoliberal political economy and the exacerbating effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic, dance-makers experience increasingly burdensome conditions as artists, citizens, and human beings. Choreography itself emerges as a zone of contested meaning as the word migrates from the studio to the boardroom, and shared precarity and common-ground politicized identities both constellate, and distinguish from each other, creative practitioners in the Global North and the Global South. The role of the West as bearer of the taxonomic gaze is foregrounded, not only as experienced, historically, by colonialized Others, but by citizens of liberal democracies. As a process of critical questioning, testing the elasticity of boundaries to thought and action, Dance practices may well constitute examples of human flourishing without which the enduring promises of democracy cannot be realized.