Articulations of the political in Argentine contemporary dance

VALLEJOS, JUAN IGNACIO

Nueva York

Conferencia; Dance Studies Colloquium 2017-2018; 2018

Boyer College of Music and Dance - Temple University

Lives of contemporary dancers and choreographers in Argentina are currently marked by the undeniable circumstance of precarity. This condition is not just limited to the modes of production in the dance industry, or the low esteem in which artistic work is held by most of society. Precariousness is a constitutive element of Argentine contemporary dance from a historical and aesthetic point of view. It represents another aspect of an unfinished process of modernization as the product of an uncompleted acculturation to European and American artistic models. However, even if precarity represents a constraint for artistic practice, it can also be subverted. The purpose of this presentation will be to explore its potential as an empirically situated concept. I will do this by analyzing three artistic acts of resistance by the contemporary dance community in Buenos Aires and Argentine choreographers. I explore the participation of dancers in political groups like the Foro Danza en Acción (Dance in Action Forum), which have petitioned the state for an improvement of the working conditions for dance artists. I discuss the emergence of a poetics of precarity in Fabian Gandini?s work, which exposes precarious modes of production in dance, and brings to the fore the importance of artistic ethics. And lastly, I offer how Marina Sarmiento?s artistic research related to dance history deals with disappearance by accentuating the material and symbolic precarity of the archives.