Danger! Precarity

Performance and Roundtable on Precarity and Artistic Labour, featuring The Dangerologists’ Work Songs

 

6 December 2013, 6:30 – 9:30 PM

Sallis Benney Theatre

58-67 Grand Parade, Brighton, BN2 0JY

Book via Eventbrite: http://dangerprecarity.eventbrite.co.uk/

 

From temporary agency work, zero hours contracts and outsourced public sector jobs to unpaid internships, workfare and compulsory ‘jobseeking’ activities, living and working in a constant state of precarity is now regarded as a normal state of affairs. Rising debt and welfare cuts, low wages and high housing costs lurk behind smiling corporate demands for infinite flexibility, and quasi-Olympic levels of competition are engineered between candidates for the most tenuous and degrading jobs. This environment, politicians and bosses tell us, is as inevitable as the weather. To question the construction of such conditions or attempt to change them risks jeopardising one’s future employability and being stigmatised, sacked, sanctioned.

The result is an overwhelming sense of living exclusively in the present. Fixed-term and flexible contracts mean that workers are unable to plan and to project themselves into the future. Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider sum up this state: ‘Precarity is life lived in relation to a future that cannot be propped securely upon the past’ (2012). Precarious labour means existing in a constant state of readiness, waiting for the next call, the next piece of temporary employment. 

Performance exists at an uneasy crossroads with precarity. On the one hand, working in an art form that trades in presence, perhaps the performing artist prefigures the ideal subject of precarious labour – versatile, flexible, able to respond in the moment. On the other hand, as an art form concerned with ‘appearance’, perhaps performance and theatre offer challenges to precarious labour and life and their designation of subjects who don’t appear, who don’t count (to paraphrase Judith Butler). This event brings together a performance and a roundtable discussion with an aim to nurture an oppositional discourse to precarity as a way of (not) thinking. It explores the way embodied, physical performance practices might create experiences (bodily or otherwise) that challenge the unrelenting presence of precarity.

The evening features Work Songs by The Dangerologists, a contemporary dance-theatre performance that looks at working life and labour. A duet for two male dancers, the piece plays with danger, risk and intimacy and in doing so serves as an embodied exploration of precarity in contemporary life and work. The performance will be followed by a roundtable discussion featuring researchers including Louise Owen (Birkbeck), Sophie Hope (Birkbeck, manuallabours.wordpress.com), Adam Alston (University of Surrey), Gigi Argyropoulou (Roehampton) and Katerina Paramana (Roehampton).

Tickets: £8 / £5 students and unwaged

Book via Eventbrite: http://dangerprecarity.eventbrite.co.uk/ 

 

Praise for Work Songs and The Dangerologists:

‘This slyly humorous and physically gung-ho two-hander punches well above its weight’ – Mary Brennan, The Herald

‘Broderick Chow and Tom Wells are consummate performers in the physical theatre style...’ – Sarah Davies, Total Theatre Review

‘This pair are amazing’ – Howard Loxton, British Theatre Guide

 

More about Work Songs: http://dangerology.wordpress.com/work-songs-a-physical-comedy-presented-by-the-dangerologists/