REBEL BODIES: Publication.

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During the 30s numerous workers’ dance groups emerged across the US and Europe and assembled under the “Workers Dance Leagueˮ, an umbrella organization of artists with the founding aim of putting an end to exploitation and inequity in the workplace by calling dance  a “weapon in the class struggleˮ. Left wing performers envisioned a revolutionary dance form that would allow blue-collar realities of oppression and marginalization to disappear. These early dance clubs were constitutive of the fractured politics of the depression, the economic crisis, and the influence of the fascist clime in Europe. The dance communities produced scores that everybody in the public audience could learn and repeat, in order to transform the physical experience of common movement into social agency and political consciousness. Simple movements aimed at evoking a sense of community in the group. Liberation and equality would not just occur during the revolution but through ongoing practice organising everyday life.

My working method is the practice of the actualization / update. I examine the potential agency that occurs when one affirms the historic practice in the present, newly reading and rewriting it. To actualize is to work into somehting (given) and to move it. This practice is bound to an addition. This addition is not an addition in the means of surplus production; but one based on translation: the aim / future is unknown. It is an addition without adding new material. This indefinite performance - the actualization - is an affirmation yet to come; an agency to be unfolded. Past and present investigations into the affective dimensions of (labor) struggles constitute starting points for transformations of established genres and linear narratives of life and survival.

My work is an attempt to question the paradoxes and potentialities of social cohesion in the dissolution of human agency today. Which forms of resistance emerge within the condition of the dissolution of labor? Which kinetic forms of practice could hold new labour organisations together? Based on research scripts, performances and videos will be produced.