Identity, difference, and translation are important theoretical concepts in the field of translation studies and postcolonial studies. It is a basic assumption of this text that aesthetic and cultural translation is exposed to the paradox of identity and difference and that this paradox is particularly evident in artistic performance practices such as dance and choreography. Focusing on the artistic work of choreographer and dancer Germaine Acogny (Senegal), the text addresses artistic translation practices under postcolonial conditions in the global art market of so-called “contemporary dance.” The aim is to illustrate how contradictory, hybrid, and fragmented the cultural and aesthetic translation process is, how the global art market shapes the artistic strategies of translation, and how aesthetic productivity lies in the impossibility of translating cultural experience artistically.

At the dawn of the European refugee crisis, and in the middle of the ongoing sociopolitical and financial crisis in Greece, Greek choreographers started creating dance works that engaged immigrants and refugees. In most such initiatives, improvisation became the tool for bridging the disparity between the professional dancers and the “untrained” participants, who were often the vulnerable populations of refugees and asylum seekers. In this essay, I question the ethics and aesthetics of these methodological approaches utilized for staging encounters between natives and migrants through dance. In particular, I consider the significance of improvisation as potentially perpetuating hierarchical inequalities in the framework of Western concert dance, while I also highlight the ways that such artistic endeavors end up presenting immigrants and refugees as “Others.”

This article analyzes three artistic acts of the subversion of precariousness in the contemporary dance community in Buenos Aires. It explores the participation of dancers in political groups that demand improvement of their working conditions. It examines how Marina Sarmiento's investigation of dance history stages a precarious body as an archive that deals with aesthetic colonialism. And lastly, it discusses the emergence of an aesthetics of precariousness in Fabian Gandini's work, which brings artistic ethics to the fore. The argument proposed in this article asserts that working conditions, history, and aesthetics represent three dimensions of contemporary dance practice that operate simultaneously and determine the precariousness in the Argentinian dance community.

This article analyzes ways in which dance as labor and artist as a specific subjectivity relate to the material conditions of their production within contexts shaped by neoliberal notions of freedom, ideologies of liberal democracy, and the logic of global capitalism. The discussion focuses on contemporary dance practices that embody some of these values by striving to be more egalitarian, thus giving performers more agency in how they participate in creative processes that lead to a collectively created performance work. This analysis emphasizes the tension between these collaborative practices and modes of producing and distributing financial and symbolic, as well as cultural forms of capital in ways that resist and/or reproduce exploitative aspects of capitalism. Examining some works by Yvonne Rainer, Xavier Le Roy, and Tino Sehgal enables the theorization of the entrepreneurial artistic archive as well as practices of crediting creative labor in relation to notions of capital, ownership, collaboration, and consequently who dance-art makers and performers become as politically progressive artists.

Project-based work is common within “precarious” working contexts. Within contemporary dance, short-term funding opportunities often result in the production of “sharings,” works in progress, and one-off performance events. This paper considers the relationship between the outputs of projects and the ontology of choreographic “works.” Drawing on Frédéric Pouillaude's conception of choreographic works as both public and resistant, I examine entities produced through projects, which, borrowing a term from choreographer Hamish MacPherson, I label “work-sketches.” Furthermore, I reflect on the correlation between “immaterial labor” and the concept of the choreographic work, thinking through the commodity form of work-sketches and probing the relationship between socioeconomic contexts and dance work ontology.

Personal Performance Practice (PPP) refers to a regular activity—differentiated from training and production—popular among contemporary dance artists. Against the backdrop of contemporary neoliberal working conditions, this article analyzes PPP by applying the ambivalent notion of “support” in order to show how PPP makes the daily work of dance visible, encouraging a discussion on the sustaining systems of dance. Framing this argument is the notion that in the long run, practice brings about shifts in style and in the aesthetics of dancing. The article thus calls for an acknowledgment of dance artists’ everyday work.

This essay investigates dance's “conditions of possibility” to argue that while dance and dancing is, in some ways unique, it many other ways it is similar to other types of labor. These types of labor function not simply as a job, or even career, but also as a “calling,” in the sense that they provide a core part of an individual's identity in the world and organize their life practices. Key dimensions of dance's labor which influence its precarity include the status of the arts in a particular social formation, the role of the state, the functioning of an informal economy, and the tension between art's marginalization and its simultaneous valuation as “priceless” cultural commodity.