Dance and the re-articulation of value: Embodied pathways to sustainability

Dance and economics both depend on movement, of bodies and resources. This commonality sets the stage for interdisciplinary practice-as-research that creates new ways of thinking - and living - sustainable development. Specifically, the project develops a dialogue between dance, new economics and political philosophy to ask how embodied knowledge might help us rearticulate and practise value in ways that support a sustainable society. It troubles the link between economic growth and value, recognising that growth is increasingly unlikely to be decoupled from material resource use, given current trajectories of production and lack of meaningful governmental action (Jackson 2021). The research builds on ontological qualities of dance to develop embodied actions that experiment with dance's potential as a tool for economic degrowth (Kallis 2017; Hickel 2020) and for re-claiming the commons (Federici 2018), exploring how it might be possible to counter capitalism's unique ability to reproduce itself and engender compliance (Mau 2019). In arguing for the possibility of a danced economics, in which economic problems are actualised and visualised in movement, the project aligns with Martin's (1998: 3) claim that dance can address gaps between theory and action because its normative condition is movement.
The research operates in the 'breach' between disciplines (Massumi and Manning 2014), employing movement improvisation and interdisciplinary dialogue as key components of a cyclical methodology: solo practice engages with concepts to develop questions and tasks which feed into group movement explorations, dialogue with theorists, and public workshops including movement and dialogue, which in turn progress the research. The project proposes artistic-political practice and performance outputs, spearheading an interdisciplinary field between dance and political economy. Hence the research has the potential to create new, sustainable directions for the field of dance as well, arguing for the relevance of embodied knowledge for economic, political and philosophical discourses on value.