Supervisor: Dr Simon Bayly 

Dancing as work and dancing as leisure in works by professional artists performed in professional contexts by ‘non-professionals’

The field of British contemporary dance has a tradition of producing works created by professional artists presented in professional contexts created with and performed by ‘non-professional’ performers.

Performances such as these, in which participants work as performers as part of their recreational life, are vulnerable to accusations of exploitation, for their work is neither their own nor remunerated financially, just like many workers in the performing arts and beyond. Moreover, and particular to this kind of work, their work is not acknowledged as work, their activities remaining in the category of recreation or seen as a hobby. One person’s leisure is repackaged through the creation and presentation of a performance as another’s labour – a work of art.

This is, of course, an especially negative interpretation of this kind of practice. However, there is much to be explored within and near to these works; this type of practice has much to offer in terms of the muddling and complicating of understandings of work and recreation. This practice, with its overlapping or periodically shifting categories of labouring and leisuring, has the potential to radically destabilise binaries associated with types of human activity, disconnecting obligation, financial reward, and social status from work, and pleasure, ease and private living from recreation. Through practice-based research, the PhD project seeks to investigate this performance-making and its resultant productions in order to consider how they contribute to a remapping of long-established understandings of work and its related notions, offering potent alternative perspectives and performed resistance to dominant modes of living and working within and beyond dance and performance.