Brussels, 2012

Organisation

Director

ChoreographerTheatre-maker

Actor Set designerCostume designerSound technicianPerformer

Production CommunicationManager

Perspective:

Artist

Since the early 1990s, the position of artists in the performing arts in Flanders has changed significantly. Organisations have transformed into flexible and interdisciplinary production centres with a semi-permanent relationship with artists. These artists go their separate ways in different organisations, often in various disciplines and in an international environment. The artistic results of these changes are remarkable. The last decades, international recognition has made Flanders and Brussels into an interesting hotspot for performing artists worldwide. Still, the position of theatre and dance makers is becoming more precarious. In order to survive in the ‘performing arts jungle’, they are forced to profile themselves as networkers and entrepreneurs.

In recent years, the research of VTi, the Institute for the Performing Arts in Flanders, has strongly focused on the position of artists in this changing landscape. Perspective: Artist brings together the most interesting results of this research.

The position of individual artists in the performing arts in Flanders

Light technician

Institute for the Performing Arts

Institute for the Performing Arts

Perspective: ArtistThe position of individual artists in the performing arts in Flanders

CONTENT

Perspective: Artist 5Delphine Hesters

‘Give me a Greek, and I will play a Doric column’ 11The theatre-maker as intangible worker Karel Vanhaesebrouck

The Facts and Fixions of B-Longing 27Delphine Hesters

Data-diary 49Femke Snelting and Michael Murtaugh (Constant)

The job of a lifetime? 65Careers in subsidised arts organisations 2008-2010 Maarten Bresseleers

Proteus, or the new career myth for actors 81Lien Van Steendam

Yes, but not like that! 97Geert Opsomer

5

Perspective: Artist

In 2007 VTi (Vlaams Theater Instituut or Flemish Theatre Institute) published Metamorphoses. Performing Arts in Flanders since 1993, the first ‘field analysis’ in which the most important developments in the organisation of performing arts practice in recent decades were revealed based on figures from the perform-ing arts database. Apart from the remarkable growth and internalisation of the sector, the highly developed networking of organisations and the hybridisation of the genres, the trend that stood out was that of individualisation: since the early 1990s the position of artists in the performing arts sector has changed dramatically. Many organisations have transformed into flexible and interdis-ciplinary production centres with a semi-permanent relationship with artists. These artists go their separate ways in different organisations, often in various disciplines and more and more as a matter of course in an international envi-ronment and usually by way of short-term contracts.

These changing relationships between performers and supporting or-ganisations in the current sector led VTi to review its own activities as a cen-tre for the sector. Whereas during the 1990s it was more or less sufficient to communicate with the organisations in the sector to reach the artists, this was no longer the case by 2000. Moreover, the expansion of the freelance artistic labour market has generated new needs among artists to which we, a service-providing organisation, wish to provide answers. An important tool in this context is First Aid @ VTi, a fortnightly session where novice creators can find tailor-made answers to their questions about grant applications, workspaces, contacts and contracts. Apart from this, we have developed a toolkit on vti.be, a clear guide with information about organisations in the field and subsidising bodies who supervise and support artists in their careers. In recent years, in the field of research VTi has also significantly focused on improving the position of the artist in this changing sector. This publication brings together the most interesting results of this project and makes them accessible to both our inter-national partners abroad and foreign artists working in the Flemish performing arts sector.

Delphine Hesters

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that cannot be bound within one employment context and which are driven by the values and interests of the flexible worker. The picture outlined previously, of the performing artist who has broken away from the organisations and puts together an independent career through various alliances, evokes associations of the artist as an enterprising and confident actor. However, the freedom of choice that characterises the protean careers of freelancers goes hand in hand with forced choice, uncertainty and many intensified demands for mobility, flexibility and networking skills. Van Steendam examines the applicability of the concept of flexicurity to the labour market and explores how artistic work or income can be achieved as an alternative to job security. In a similar way, Karel Vanhaesebrouck typifies the performing artist as an exemplary flexible worker, but finds, based on more critical literature, that the arts field has acted as a so-cial laboratory for the immaterial labour so typical of the post-Fordist system, in which a growing group of people are teetering on the brink of subsistence insecurity. In his article he also links the individualised career of performing art-ists to a changed professional profile. The all-round ‘theatre-maker’ pushes the player-actor into the background. Actors are no longer merely the performers of scripts by writers and stage versions by directors, but form the starting point of the content, form and dramaturgy of the performance.

Since 2000, the use of the term ‘individual artist’ has been very much in vogue to describe the changed position of artists in our eminently collective sector. The term keeps popping up in all sorts of discussions, however. In 2005, the then Minister of Culture Anciaux openly questioned whether it was really neces-sary to recognise new organisations that have been built up around the work of an ‘individual artist’. In this context it was about creators who for their artistic work expressly chose the stability of their own company over a career that ran from one organisation to another. In 2008, Flemish newspapers published an opinion piece by a group of actors – who mainly saw themselves as ‘players’ rather than as ‘theatre-makers’ – that sounded the alarm, trying to draw atten-tion to their plight on the freelance job market that the theatre world had also become for actors. This call led to a debate about the precarious position of many ‘individual artists’ and how policy might respond better to their needs. Furthermore, the term is also, and mainly, used for the all-round theatre and dance-maker who in recent decades has come more to the forefront and has developed an artistic career, collectively or individually, by way of residencies, workshops and art centres. The sociological term ‘individualisation’ heralds a strong diversification of careers. Previously existing career paths become less self-evident, thus opening a wider range of options that exist alongside one an-other. So when we talk about the changing position of the individual performing

In the Metamorphoses field analysis and its successor Ins & Outs. A field analysis of the performing arts in Flanders (2011), the thesis about the individuali-sation of the sector was statistically substantiated thanks to the years of con-scientious development of the performing arts database data.vti.be.1 For years VTi has proactively collected information about the productions realised by the Flemish sector. This primarily involves an inventory based on the title, the art-ist, genre(s), producers and co-producers for each individual production. This year Constant vzw, an Association for Art and Media, worked with the information about the artists from the database and presented it in a whole new way. In this publication, Constant’s Femke Snelting and Michael Murtaugh reveal the process that leads from the actual stage production via the data input by VTi staff to an interactive online tool for the visualisation and exploration of the networks of dance- and theatre-makers in Flanders.

Previous field analyses illustrated how major developments can be charted using simple information on performing arts production. However, much also remains unknown. We do know which artists collaborate on which productions, but the socio-economic conditions in which they work remain in-visible. To lay the missing pieces of the stage puzzle we are keen to consult with fellow organisations that have accumulated other data for their own purposes. The Sociaal Fonds voor de Podiumkunsten (Social Fund for the Performing Arts) has a rich source of employment data at its disposal from a large set of struc-turally subsidised arts organisations. In his article, Maarten Bresseleers trans-lates these data into some interesting snapshots of the sector with age and gender distributions, thus showing that we are not only a remarkably young sector, but also a male sector. His employment data also confirm the short-term contracts and also reveal how the total gross wage costs involved in structural subsidies are distributed amongst more and more artists year after year and therefore how the average wage per artist appears to be decreasing.

Figures give us an insight into broad trends. Two contributions from Lien Van Steendam and Karel Vanhaesebrouck are in-depth studies, with the neces-sary interpretations, of the established shifts and indications of problem areas and guidelines for the development of practice and policy. Lien Van Steendam interprets the current position of performing artists from the perspective of the economic literature on careers. Actors and dancers appear to be prototypi-cal 21st-century workers with so-called boundaryless or protean careers: careers

1 SincewehavealreadyrevealedthefiguresandinterpretationsofthesefieldanalysesinanEnglishbookletwewillnotreproducethesefiguresagaininthispublication.However,youcangotothedigitaladdressofthetextinquestion:vti.be/sites/default/files/Ins&Outs_booklet.pdf.

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which do not immediately bring any clear return on investment. Since the Arts Decree came into force in 2006, we have had organisations which, through the separate ‘workspace’ category, can count on Flemish subsidies to be used wholly for artistic research. Nevertheless, in his article Geert Opsomer makes critical comments regarding the room for artistic research that has developed in various branches of the sector and in the meantime has also been created in art colleges. In his piece he takes as a stepping stone the negative evaluations that some workshops (as well as other organisations committed to research-based work) have received from their assessment commissions in the most re-cent funding round. Here, also by virtue of his long and vigilant presence in the sector, he states that the arts have not automatically escaped the (self-) com-pulsion for clear categories, verifiable methods, growth and output-oriented thinking that we have taken for granted and accepted in many sectors of society today. He advocates care and transit zones, space and a gradual approach.

This booklet is laced with statements by artists which, in their concrete nature and from a singular perspective, make tangible the realities that general texts can only refer to. The interviews from which they are drawn came into being in the context of Open House, a three-day event in May 2012 in which 24 Brussels art laboratories and alternative management agencies opened their doors to inform professionals and the general public of their way of working and the practice of the artists who work for them. This involves twenty interviews with a diverse group of artists of different nationalities and ages who are active in vari-ous art disciplines. Each of them was asked about topics such as Brussels, work and time, income, collaboration, ideals and limitations, competition and the possible meanings of ‘slow art’. Together they give a fascinating and colourful insight into the position of the artist in today’s art world, from the bottom up.2

Delphine Hesters is a researcher for VTi.

2 Youcanwatchandlistentoalltheinterviewsviaactivearchives.org/openhouse.

artist, we must remember that we are actually faced with a set of different posi-tions, each with their own needs and concerns which we should not lose sight of by reducing them to common denominators.

As a denominator, the term ‘individual’ is also somewhat misleading. It suggests that dance and theatre are more individualistic and adopt a more soli-tary position, while the opposite seems more likely. Today, the artistic practices that are becoming more important are those in which artists take as their basis exchange and mutual learning in a horizontal model and in which the commu-nity of artists forms an important breeding ground or a mode of productivity. This is one of the findings in my paper The Facts and Fixions of B-longing, further on in this book, in which I explore why in times of rapid and international mobil-ity we paradoxically continue to speak of a ‘Brussels dance community’ – with local anchoring and the associations of strong and sustainable relationships that the term ‘community’ evokes.

Despite the growing attention to the above developments, it is still very dif-ficult to let go of the image of ‘the sector’ as the sum of its organisations; of art centres or groups, project organisations and workshops, with the artistic work that is created and displayed within it. In our research in the years to come we would like to break away from this image even more or supplement it and study the sector more from the perspective of the artist and his artistic practice. Indeed, the story of individualisation is not only the story of the artists them-selves, but of an entire sector that is undergoing change. The ‘line of research on the artist’ is not only responsible for more research on performing artists, but for research in which the themes and relevance of the research questions are primarily tested on their perspective. Several concrete questions which we, together with the whole sector, hope to find answers to in the future are the following: which strategies do artists develop (collectively or individually) to manage their practice? What does it mean to be an ‘established artist’ today, in a context where growth is no longer self-evident? How has the practice of co-producing developed over the years, considering that the number of co-pro-ducers needed to complete a project always seems to be increasing? Organisa-tions such as workspaces and management agencies have emerged relatively recently to provide tailor-made answers for the many artists who work without creating a private company. What advantage does this division between and move towards autonomy by research and management functions bring, and what are the disadvantages?

Geert Opsomer’s article is consistent with this bottom-up view of the sector. Abroad people admire the fact that the Flemish government makes funds available for research-based, experimental and small-scale initiatives

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Give me a Greek, and I will play a Doric column’1The theatre-maker as intangible worker2

‘Theatre has been taken over by the ‘theatre-maker’. I find this one-sided evolu-tion regrettable’.3 These are the words of actor Peter Van den Begin in a Knack interview recorded on the occasion of True West, an extremely spirited and intel-ligent interpretation of Sam Shepard’s play, which he put together with blood brother Stany Crets. Van den Begin seems to suggest that the theatre world is slowly and covertly being taken over by a new type of artist: an actor-creator who generates his own content. And, according to the underlying reasoning, this comes at the cost of a different type of artist: the actor, who, er, acts. It is a noteworthy quote, particularly for those who saw True West. In the credits to the show there is no director’s name. Only a ‘with’ gives an indication of who is taking part. In the absence of an actual director, only the actors – Crets and Van den Begin – can be responsible for the choices that shore up the performance. The ‘with’ is therefore also a ‘by’. And so Crets and Van den Begin are the actors in and the creators of this show; they are therefore the actor-creators, or, if you like, theatre-makers, creators who also act, or actors who also create. True West is a performance by two actor-creators who use their own acting profession as the basis for a show. Van den Begin seems to suggest in the above quote that a theatre-maker is not the same as a director: the first generates the content himself, the second interprets the meaning which is contained in the text of an-other artist, namely the author. He therefore seems to suggest that those who use existing material are not ‘creators’. That is also a noteworthy point of view, if you take True West as a starting point. As actors, Crets and Van den Begin steal Shepard’s text and as such create their own content using the writing of a third

1 WiththankstoPolDehert,whoentrustedmewiththeanecdotebehindthistitle.Ihavetakenthelibertyofparaphrasingthequotealittle.

2 Thistextappearedpreviouslyin:JorisJanssens(ed.),De ins & outs van podiumland. Een veldanalyse,Brussels:VTi,2011.

3 LivLaveyne,‘CretsenVandenBeginspelenopnieuwtheater’(‘CretsandVandenBeginperformonstageagain’),in: Knack,22October2009.

Karel Vanhaesebrouck

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But this is not just about nostalgia. That article is also evidence of a (legitimate) concern about job opportunities.5 The emphasis here is mainly on the fact that the everyday work and living conditions of actors (work insecurity, flexibility, lack of financial stability, etc.) are in stark contrast to the gradual profession-alisation of the arts field. That is open to question, although this problem is not restricted to the actor – it is of interest to the artist full stop. In recent decades this artist was surrounded by an extensive army of professional forces that fa-cilitated and contextualised his work without however being prepared to live in the same precarious existence. Later on in this text I will attempt to demon-strate that the artist himself has not always adopted a univocal position in this development: is the artist the victim of this far-reaching professionalisation, as artists sometimes claim, or is the artist also at the heart of this evolution, if only because he opted to outsource a number of secondary tasks? It is a complicated discussion that can’t be settled in one article. As a result of the many platitudes, presuppositions and positions yet to be thoroughly investigated, such discus-sions quickly descend into ‘yes it is, no it isn’t’ games. I too shall do no more than present a number of hypotheses or lines of approach. In what follows, I shall try and bring some order to a complex and important discussion. I admit it won’t be easy and I’ll also launch an appeal to really look at the essence of all future debates, in particular the existence of a new ‘precariat’, a class of institutionalised ‘poor people’ who try and survive on low artistic fees (the word itself is enough!), unemployment benefits, unstable work-ing conditions and ambiguous con-tracts. This debate goes well beyond the boundaries of the arts sector. Every year, as coordinator of a course in higher art education, I see artists struggling with their ambiguous guest professor status and with the impossibility of adequately combining education with their profes-sional activities. The fact that the Flemish

5 Thisobstacleisnotrestrictedtothesubsidisedsector:thereisalsogrowinguncertaintyintheprivatesector,whereagreatmanyofthesignatoriesofthemanifestoareactive,forexamplewiththedisappearanceofthepermanenttheatrecompanyinpublicservicebroadcasting.Thegrowingnumberofindependentproductionhousesisalsoincreasinglycallingonanarmyoffreelanceactorsandartists.Theretoo,continuityandsecurityareascarcecommodity.

party as a trampoline. Just as well, too, because otherwise every show would be limited to the sterile reconstruction of the eternal and reproducible idea of an author. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth: theatre is always articulated in the ‘here and now’. Therefore, acting is also about being creative. And True West is a beautiful illustration of that.

Stany Crets gives his ten cents’ worth in the same interview: ‘It’s a complaint you hear from a lot of actors these days: when in God’s name will we be allowed to act?’ Crets too seems to start from the principle that acting and creating are bet-ter kept apart and that ‘just acting’ is never ‘creating’. Or vice versa: that creating always interferes with the acting. Actors have a great desire to ‘just’ act, without (self-) reflection, without having to ask questions about every choice they make. Speak and I shall act. Or, to use a celebrated quote from my own work environ-ment: ‘Give me a Greek and I will play a Doric column’. Here too, True West is proof of the opposite: it is precisely because every choice is rooted in years of experience – and thus self-reflection – that this performance is intelligent, spir-ited and relevant. And there’s no reason why that should stand in the way of the acting pleasure, as Crets and Van den Begin demonstrate.

A similar complaint appeared on 6 August 2008 when Carry Goossens, Camilia Blereau, Herbert Flack, Koen De Bouw and others published their ‘Manifest voor een acteurs- en publiekstheater’ (Manifesto for an actors’ and public theatre) in De Standaard. ‘We maintain that in this successful theatre story [the authors are referring to the ‘hundred-fold increase in Flemish subsidies for the performing arts since the sixties’, KV] – the main character is increasingly left out in the cold’. The actor – or at least the actor’s model that the actors of this manifesto defend – is out in the cold, and ‘the public’ (there is no shortage of generalisa-tions in this sort of discussion) is left shivering outside the theatre feeling bewil-dered ‘because of the many years in which the range of performances on offer has diminished’. This ‘contraction’ is what the authors refer to as the absence of what was then described as ‘repertoire’.4 I’m not going to reproduce the discus-sion on repertoire, canonisation and identity here, because that’s not what this article is about. Much more interesting is the nostalgia that this text radiates, a feeling of homesickness for a certain type of actor who executes other people’s ideas and so is not a ‘creator’. In my eyes, this nostalgia is a gross underestima-tion of the public, as if it was driven solely by this same nostalgia. Repertoire too is a construction, not a fact.

4 Ileaveasidethecomplexityofthistermhere.Thosewhowouldliketoknowmorecanrefertothepublication‘Repertoirerevisited.Hetdebat,decijfers,depraktijk’(‘Repertoirerevisited.Thedebate,thenumbers,thepractice’), Courant 88,February-April2009(canbeconsultedatvti.be)

‘I have like 60 procent unemployment money and

40 procent project money. Now I got a subsidy for

2 years, which changes this relation again a little

bit, this trajectory or development subsidy. Which

is the first time in my life I get a subsidy, or maybe

the second time, but the first time was another

story … OK, this is for a period, and in two years

I will be back … And I try to get this relation 60/40,

because in the beginning it was like 70/30 and I

tried to somehow like swop it around, this relation.’

David Helbich

‘I get a proper salary most of the time. But I’m not

really representative. I know a lot of people who

were underpaid, or who only got half the salary,

while the other half was black money. And it’s

always been like that.’ Etienne Guilloteau

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continuous: a limited number of actors/creators come together, without any clear hierarchical structure (and thus without a director) and conclude a longer and permanent commitment with each other, even though this commitment does not exclude collaboration with other people at other times. These actors’ collectives offer a group of players a fixed context for making performances together. Together they must reinvent their premises each time. And that is an important difference with an actor who is part of the fixed core around a creator. The collectives turned the actor-creator into a clear professional profile that deliberately distanced itself from earlier models such as the permanent theatre company.

In the nineties and noughties, there were a great many individual the-atre-makers who were also engaged as actors. Creators such as Benjamin Verdonck, Bernard Van Eeghem, Marijs Boulogne, Manah Depauw and many others develop their own world in Flanders in the course of their acting work, often starting from an extremely idiosyncratic look at the actor’s craft. Here too, acting and creating form the yin and yang of a hybrid and complex practice in which a clear division of labour is missing. With the disappearance of that useful division of roles came the first questions. Is there room in the field for all these individual creators who feel such a need to act out their own artistic vi-sion? And is there a public ready to accept this huge diversity of vision? In other words, who’ll be ‘the fittest’ in this jungle? Isn’t this distinction between act-ing and creating, but also between actor and theatre-maker, very artificial? Many interesting theatre-makers often emerge as actors in other people’s productions (Johan Dehollander, Benjamin Verdonck, Jos Verbist, Marijke Pinoy and many oth-ers) and/or have developed their work as a director thanks to extensive acting experience (Luk Perceval, Ruud Gielens and others). According to some, this hy-bridisation lies at the heart of another ‘absence’: the extinction of the ‘big-venue director’. Because, ladies and gentlemen, there are no longer any directors who can direct a big group of actors on the big stage, as should be the case in real theatre. It’s a complaint that can often be heard wafting through the corridors, but they never get concrete foundations.

government and college boards effec-tively do nothing to change this situation is the writing on the wall.

In the first section, we will look more closely at the figures provided by the VTi research, then in the second part draw a rough sketch of this new professional category: the actor-creator. The third part of this article concerns the problem-atic distinction between actor and crea-tor in the neoliberal market logic within which every contemporary has to func-tion; a logic in which every performance must conform to market requirements. In the last section we try, from the per-spective of that portrait, to rethink the

concept of craftsmanship, a key concept in a great many discussions about contemporary art.

From actor to actor-creator: from intuition to statistics

Since the eighties a far-reaching autonomisation of the acting profession has taken place in Flemish theatre. The actor is no longer someone who performs someone else’s artistic ideas. Content, dramaturgy and form now start with him, he is the core of the theatrical world that is being created there and then on stage. This evolution resulted not only in a far-reaching individualisation of the profession – since that time, actors have had much looser ties with or-ganisations – it also made the practice more complex and layered. There are no longer any fixed frameworks, either on the production or on the reception side. Moreover, the audience is no longer provided with cut-and-dried inter-pretation schemes propped up by theatrical conventions. Actor and audience must constantly reinvent that framework (perhaps the absence of conventions has developed into a convention – but that is another discussion). The mod-els of collaboration that have emerged since then – in Flanders first tg STAN and de Roovers, and then later companies like SkaGeN and more recently FC Bergman – are not new (see for example the organisational model of political theatre in the seventies), but their professional structure is. This structure is

‘I still perform for others. I teach, I curate and I

make my own work. So I guess these are all different

positions. Recently I took part in organising a

conference. For me they’re all branches of the same

tree but I don’t feel them as different roles.’

Adva Zakai

‘So I use always whatever and I’m very often

working by myself, sometimes with people.

Very sometimes I perform for other people also.

This happens in this context where people ask each

other if you can help out and do things now and

then. For example for Mette Edvartsen I already

perform now for the second time. It’s actually very

nice to have this next to your own work, because

otherwise you die very lonely.’ David Helbich

‘I do have support. I had two years of support from

the Flemish Representation in Brussels [VGC], and

for one year I also have the support from the Flemish

Arts Agency [Agentschap Kunsten en Erfgoed] and

both times this is called trajectory or development

oriented subsidies. It’s fantastic that this exists.

It doesn’t require too much administration, and it’s

a very honest way of working. And if you do it in an

honest way and a committed way it’s a beautiful

tool for people like me where research is very

important …. This kind of income is very irregular

and depends on many things, so the main source of

income is the monthly support from our community,

the unemployment money, which is extremely

contradictory, but it’s like that.’ Bart Vandeput

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than refutes this trend. Furthermore, this shift in the credit lines also points to a changed self-awareness among creators themselves: ‘the figure not only means that theatre has changed dramatically. It points in particular to a change in the way in which theatre-makers see themselves and portray themselves to the outside world.’8

Portrait of a professional profile

This new theatre-maker (from now on I use that term in this text as a synonym for the actor-creator) functions in a different economic reality that is no longer the same context in which more traditional professional profiles of ‘the actor’ or ‘the director’ functioned. Permanent engagements in a company or troupe are most definitely a thing of the past. Flexibility is now the order of the day for the theatre-maker. The reality of a continuous career (one without any notable gaps) is only the lot of a happy few. The disbanding of major acting companies in Flanders has obviously played a crucial role in this evolution. In their place came an extensive facilitating apparatus that serves a continuously changing collec-tion of individual artists. Recent research by VTi shows that Flemish theatres employ a small percentage of artists (artistic staff) compared to the total oc-cupancy. One possible explanation for this reverse ratio is undoubtedly closely connected to the constantly diversifying package of tasks that these institu-tions acquire from the government: not only must theatre be made in these institutions, but audience development has to be expanded, attention has to be devoted to participation and the intercultural element, receptive development must be enlarged, the institution converses with the city, consideration is given to art and community, and then everything else on top. The days of the package of tasks consisting chiefly of artistic creation are long gone. A second important driving force is the fantasy of professionalisation which has gripped not only the art sector but the whole fabric of society. This professionalisation is becom-ing a goal rather than a means to achieve something different, outside of that evolution. Why professionalisation and for whom? This apparently straightfor-ward question is asked all too infrequently. What could have been a means, a driving motor, has become a dogma.

8 Janssens, op. cit.,p.17.

Recently VTi tried to bring a bit of clarity to this debate with figures and graphs. On the basis of the individual and performance database, the researchers found confirmation of their intuition that in practice too there is less and less of a distinction between clearly defined functions. It will be no surprise to any-one that the credit line ‘by and with’ in that database takes on an exponential importance. The practice itself therefore brings into question the division of roles, and actor and director are mutating together into a hybrid figure ‘with the body of a performer, but the mind of a director, writer or designer’.6 The precise figures that VTi provides place this in the clear light of day. Researcher and current director of VTi Joris Janssens carried out random surveys over three seasons and checked how many artistic performers worked on how many productions.7 This survey revealed the following information: during the 1993-1994 season 1,460 people worked on 290 theatre productions, in 2000-2001 this figure was 1,645 for 433 performances and in 2007-2008 2,467 artists contributed to 499 final productions. The spectacular rise in the number of people from the second to the third study is striking, but equally spectacular is the increase in the number of performances in the second half of the nineties. Then Janssens tried to get an idea of the division of roles within these groups. In absolute numbers more actors were working as the years progressed: there is a slight rise over the three periods. However, in relative terms the propor-tion of actors diminishes (because it has to gain a place within a greater total amount). So the actor sees his share shrink from 43% in the first period to 37% in 2000-2001 and to 31% in 2007-2008. A similar trend can be seen among writers and directors. In addition, it is worth noting that per actor there are fewer and fewer roles allocated – there is more cutting back. Therefore, there is less job security for the actor, but more experience is accumulated (televi-sion, adverts, teaching). In contrast with this evolution there is a spectacular rise in the actor-creator (from 10 to 15 to 23%) and the performer (from 5 to 7 to 10%). Both the relative and absolute proportions of this professional cat-egory are increasing. The figures show that there are more people on stage, that the interdisciplinisation of theatrical practice brings with it a greater vari-ety of professional profiles, and in particular that the actor-creator is engaged in an unstoppable ascent. This evolution leads to the somewhat surprising but justified conclusion that the actor is more central than ever in theatre. It’s just that this actor is different from the actor-executor. True West confirms rather

6 JorisJanssens,‘Fabeldierkomtopdekaart.“Spelen”en“maken”inhetVlaamsetheatersinds1993’(‘MappingtheMythicalCreature.“Acting”and“creating”inFlemishtheatresince1993’),inCourant92,February-March2010,14.

7 Theexercisewaslimitedtotexttheatre;danceandmusicaltheatrewerenotincluded.

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can continue working. Today they end up in a perverse mechanism that Hans Abbing astutely pinpointed in Why artists are poor (2002): a growing number of applicants adapt their (financial) demands to the available resources. Fur-thermore, this flexibility only applies to artists in the arts sector: they are often employed by non-artists or in any case surrounded or supported by non-artists whose working model is more permanent and secure than that of the artists. And even though there are a considerable number of organisations managed by an artist (Toneelhuis, NTGent, Antigone, Zuidpool, Compagnie Cecilia, the collectives), the number of intermediary organisations, where significant num-bers of artists earn their freelance bread, has risen dramatically. There too, the artist functions in a work environment that is much more stable than his own work model. The organisations in which an artist bears the final artistic and business responsibility (and thus where the business aspect is not outsourced) are the exception rather than the rule.

The government has quite a dual role in this story. It rightly places the emphasis on the importance of a healthy equilib-rium between support for artists on the one hand and support for organi-sations on the other. At the same time the somewhat one-sided focus that the government puts on professionalisation (they want, after all, an arts sector that can compete effectively and profession-ally with other economic fields) facilitates precisely that ‘flexibilisation’ with its good but also mostly less attractive as-pects. The result is a situation that lacks a clear financial framework and where the administrative set-up is often inefficient: organisations need more personnel to deal with the administrative complexity that arises. And above all: that same art-ist functions in a society that has increas-ing difficulty respecting artists. It’s all too easy to forget that an artist produces not only on the work floor, but that the true artist is constantly evolving. And yet usually only the visible part of the work

In most cases, the company structures that offered security and continuity have mutated into flexible production units that are separate and multidisciplinary: new alliances are sought for every new project. This mutation leads to more cuts, but also to more freedom and thus individualisation: personal choices and artistic ambitions take priority over structural security. Every artist gets the opportunity (or has the duty) to design his own career path. In any case, in 2011 the artist is part of a flexible labour mar-ket where engagements are short and temporary. Perhaps even more than in-dividualisation, the awful word ‘employ-ability’ has evolved into a key concept: the ability to get work, to keep it and to make progress, in order to be able to handle the flexibility required for a ca-

reer. I know the word from my university days, when lecturers and professors were warned to invest in their ‘employability’: to make yourself so multifunc-tional that you can develop and move up. It was not the development itself that was measured, but the extent to which you were able to create the individual conditions for that development. In the art sector too, artists are continually encouraged to invest in their own ‘employability’. Your personal network plays a key role in that story: your career has to develop into a history of interesting working relationships. The dangers of this evolution were already referred to in the VTi study Metamorfose in podiumland. Een veldanalyse (Metamorphosis in the Performing Arts Scene. A field analysis, 2007). The arts sector, which, as mentioned earlier, is only partly occupied by artists, is still too quick to view this ‘employability’ as the cessation of their responsibility towards this artist. There are many questions still to be asked with regard to this flexibilisation, which is demanded of the artist but not of his environment. It is precisely in this area that the challenge lies for the arts sector and in particular for the authorities: to find a new and better balance between flexibility on the one hand and secu-rity and continuity on the other. Career development should be stimulated (in which case as an artist you need more than just the occasional freelance job), without forgetting the dangers of sclerosis and immobility. This development is not going to work if artists have to ask themselves every month whether they

‘We are three choreographers in a vzw called Action

Scénique: Claire Croizé, Nada Gambier and myself.

We have an administrator who is helping us with

the dossiers and the finances. She takes care of the

contracts and contacts with the theatres. But the

initial work stays with the choreographers. The

administrator does the finalisation. If we would

get structural subsidy the biggest difference would

be that we would be able to pay the people for their

work. The administrator worked hours and hours

on the dossier. But if we don’t get the money, she

won’t get paid.’ Etienne Guilloteau

‘I have a tendency to accept and say “OK, these are

the conditions that we are in, what can we do with it?”

So this became also part of the creative process.

For example with Eskimo, a piece I did, we were like

6 people, we had a certain amount of money, so to get

people paid well, I said “OK, then this means that

I have to reduce the creative process to three weeks

because of the conditions, so we make something in

three weeks”.’ Marcos Simoes

‘I think I auto-censor myself. I first look at what is

possible, before I start with a project. Maybe I limit

myself a bit too much. Before I never wanted to do

a project with five or six dancers. But I guess it was

never impossible, just very hard to do. Until now

I never was able to raise the money to do it.’

Etienne Guilloteau

‘I don’t have a specific agent, but the last times

in my last projects, I always have somebody who

helps me in administration, helps me in the

dossier to make a budget or the contracts or in the

distribution. Sometimes it comes from one of the

theatres that coproduce me; they offer to do it for

you … And the last time, because I’m working in

collaboration, these artists were inside an agency.

Then automatically the work passes through that

agency.’ Marcos Simoes

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reers as promise or potential – and thus as murmur’.9 Much more than practice, there is murmur, the constant talking and networking, the communicating and endless agreements. This same murmuring mass shows a great internal diver-sity within which the members are constantly entering into new collaboration. Those who make up the creative class must continually redefine themselves. Collaboration therefore also implies individual freedom and unicity. If you want to be creative, you have to be unique, or at least pretend to be.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt emphasise the political potential of the multi-tude, the heterogeneous mass of individual identities as we find in the arts sec-tor.10 It is precisely this mass which forms the only possible counterweight to the open (as in a dictatorship) or unspoken (as in the Western neoliberal environ-ment) authority concept in which societies function (the recent changes in Egypt and Tunisia may have proved them right). The Marxist philosopher Paolo Virno thinks differently about it: he regards this same creative mass not as a potential force but as a by-product or side effect of the post-Fordist production process.11 In contrast to Fordism, where productivity can be measured quanti tatively and work is merely a question of serialisation and specialisation (a worker keeps on repeating the same action), the post-Fordist economy swears by flexibility, com-munication and an emotional relationship between employees. Under this re-gime, productivity is determined by the quality of those relationships and of the communication. A post-Fordist worker is mobile in the real and virtual sense; he is constantly on the road. Experiment, creativity, inventiveness and hybridisa-tion are his watchwords. This transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist econo-my has geopolitical as well as economic consequences. Firstly, national authori-ties no longer need to guard the borders, but instead regulate the continuous flow of emotions, information and ideas. The arts world is also part of that flow (the focus on internationalisation is obviously a result of it), with dance, visual art, pop music and new media in the vanguard, and bringing up the rear with a limp language-related theatre (although that doesn’t mean that this practice is not driven by a ‘will to internationalise’). The post-Fordist economy is driven by intangible labour: this labour has a symbolic rather than a practical value. Anyone who has plenty of money to spend on dining in an exquisite restaurant is not paying for the hours of labour that went into preparing the various dishes,

9 PascalGielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude. Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism,Rotterdam:Valiz,2010,14.Themostimportantinsightspresentedinthispartofthetextarebasedonthefirstchapterofthispublication.

10 See:MichaelHardt&AntonioNegri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, London:PenguinBooks,2004.

11 See:PaoloVirno, Grammar of the Multitude,LosAngeles:ColumbiaUniversity,2004.

is awarded any value. The artist must therefore work on his ‘employability’, but is usually developing most of the time without any income (that is quite differ-ent from other areas of work). Moreover, artists don’t organise themselves, either with regard to their employers or the authorities. The assertion that everyone except the (talented) artist has the right to job security and a reasonable status is not or rarely made, let alone expressed. Maybe, as Delphine Hesters remarked in her article in Metamorfose, there is a need for more solidarity, beyond the cosy chat down the pub, regarding a cultural policy that is less focused on productivity and measurability.

The theatre-maker as intangible worker

How should we understand this new pro-fessional category, which seems doomed to flexibility, within the current economic system? Cultural sociologist Pascal Gie-len postulates an interesting and chal-lenging hypothesis in his book The Mur-muring of the Artistic Multitude. The artist and not the manager is the basis of our current economic model, says Gielen: for years the arts field has functioned as a laboratory for neoliberal logic. The crea-tive class, Gielen claims provocatively, has become a heterogeneous mass in a world where practically everyone is ‘creative’ and therefore a potential art-ist: ‘At the lowest estimate, about ninety percent of the artists graduating from art schools today spend their entire ca-

‘I get very seldomly paid to develop my work. I have

very often discussions with curators of festivals.

I do theatre festivals, music festivals and dance

festivals, sometimes with the same work … And for

example in the music world you can never ask them

to develop the piece, I mean they would just pay

performances. It’s clear, because they just basically

pay musicians for a concert. Dance festivals, they

would much more think also that they kind of

produce the work a little bit. Together with the

theatre, and then they make these collaborations …

I would ask “Hey look, I’m doing one week of work

to come to this show, to arrive there, because I

very often change everything on the spot, very

site specific – that was a nice word, but it’s not hip

anymore, is it? – and then I would try to get paid for

the preparation. But for example at music festivals

it’s difficult.’ David Helbich

‘What is funny, is that there is an unmeasurable

line of work, that is always happening and so that

is hard to count. There are the hours that you

concretely put on production; I went into the studio

and produced this and it took this many hours, I

worked on the dossier and produced this and it took

that many hours. And then there is the stream of:

I am always writing, I am always thinking, I am

always working on my body, it is a way of life, it’s

not a job.’ David Hernandez

‘Within the field I belong, you work creatively and

you also work on your administration. There are

always things that need to be done. I would define

work as time that you have to spend in order to

make sure that you can keep doing what you’re

doing. You have to create the best conditions in

order for creativity to be generated.’ Adva Zakai

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22 23

on the margins but has established itself at the heart of a significant part of our

society. It is not just that society has been aestheticised, as a number of post-

modern philosophers and sociologists have claimed, but that the social logic of

the artistic world has reached the heart of society.’13

The gradual mutation from an uncomplicated professional profile to the hybrid theatre-maker is perhaps still the best example of this. Singularity is a basic value in the arts world. Those who adhere to the artistic rules of the game are epigones; those who don’t are (potential) artists. Unicity and personality are crucial values. The theatre-maker is looking for his own style and universe. The mainstay of his work is to affirm his own identity as an artist. An artist tries to register his work in a complex linguistic system and in so doing assume an identi-ty. In other words he is looking for a place for himself in the communication flow that is the arts world. According to Virno, this development is the fundamental basis of the cynicism so typical of the post-Fordist work regime. Excelling means knowing the rules, in absolute awareness of their emptiness.14 Virtuosity is no longer a question of craft or technique, but of linguistic skill and discursiveness.

In search of a new craftsmanship?

In the art world too, craft and technique have (apparently) lost their impor-tance. The theatre-maker is a producer of ideas and fantasy. Some think this much-discussed craftsmanship has been pushed into the background by the arriv-al of the actor-creator. However, nothing could be further from the truth. It is pre-cisely because of this emphasis on that individual language and fantasy that the theatre-maker has no choice but to look for his own craftsmanship, his technical tools. The new professional profile of the theatre-maker results therefore not in the disappearance or expulsion of craft knowledge, but in its reactivation. Crafts-manship is a culturally defined construc-tion, not an immanent fact. Theatre-mak-ers can use their own language to show the contingent status of those ideas, not

13 Gielen, op. cit.,p.31.

14 Gielen, op. cit.,p.31.

but the unique and one-off experience and the chance to be able to bear wit-ness to this experience at a later stage. The intangible worker excels in mobility, flexibility and playfulness, shares his knowledge, has outstanding interpersonal skills, functions perfectly in an informal setting and is willing to blur the distinc-tion between work and home life (because he can always be contacted, he is al-ways working). The continuous competition also makes him opportunistic, jeal-ous and cynical. These are all the social consequences of this labour model that every theatre-maker of the nouveau genre will recognise from his daily working life: flexibility, fluid working hours, insecurity, instability, exchange, communica-tion, informal contacts, etc.

‘The ideal dance- or theatre-maker in today’s performing arts sector is sociable

and loyal, enterprising and entertaining, doesn’t stick to a strict biorhythm and

likes to be away from home all the time; he is flexible and likes taking risks.

In other words, this self-assured m/f is young and single, has no children, is

healthy and has nerves of steel.’12

After all, intangible labour does not start or finish when you leave the rehearsal room, even though your fee usually only begins from the first day of rehearsals. Conversely, there is also a great deal of freedom in this work regime: your pro-ductivity is impossible to measure. In this regard, the theatre-maker is no dif-ferent from a designer or a university researcher. In their case too, productivity is hard to measure or quantify, although academic institutions have made all kinds of complex attempts to measure the quality of research. In other words, the theatre-maker is an intangible worker.

Pascal Gielen takes the argument a step further by stating that the arts sector acts as a social laboratory for this intangible labour and therefore for the post-Fordist system in which we now live and work. Artists were the first to actively strive for individualisation (emancipation, breaking down traditional religious and socio-political barriers). In so doing they immediately laid the foundations for the post-Fordist regime. The artist is not outside the current economic real-ity but a core part of it:

‘The often-heard judgment that contemporary art is decadent or alienated from

society has then found its toughest counter argument. A confirmation of the

hypothesis would in fact mean that the logic of the art world no longer belongs

12 DelphineHesters,‘Solo(Workingtitle).Individueletrajectenindepodiumkunsten’(‘Solo(WorkingTitle).Individualcareerpathsintheperformingarts’),in:JorisJanssens,DriesMoreels(eds.), Metamorfose in podiumland. Een veldanalyse (MetamorphosisinthePerformingArtScene.AFieldAnalysis),Brussels:VTi,2007,123.

‘We are seeing a radical shift in the way people are

working, in that many choreographers are actually

producers. You have people who are less crafting

themselves and more organisers of crafting.

Who put together very interesting groups and who

have a very different kind of talent than the more

artisanally-based workers. Which absolutely has

its place. But now we are seeing the artisan kind of

disappear and be usurped by the other thing which

is a very different way of working and breeds a very

different kind of work. Also valuable but not alone:

if the whole dance landscape is that, I am very

worried. If the whole cultural landscape is that,

I am worried.’ David Hernandez

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24 25

interest in technique and craft. This attention is also leading to new collabo-rations, whereby an artist like Craigie Horsfield teams up with a West Flemish tapestry weaver for his exhibition Confluence and Consequence in the M HKA in Antwerp. Here too, this renewed interest in craftsmanship leads not to the sterile reproduction of predefined schemes, but to innovation, experiment and personality. This return is a reaction to a practice that was chiefly based on pro-cess, where much attention was focused on research. It might also be an anti-intellectual reaction to too much theory, too much debate, too much ‘murmur’.

It seems that many artists are questioning the continuing debate about pro-gress and innovation and feel the need to go back to craft-like frameworks. This evolution is not surprising in a cultural system in which the core uses the debate of the avant-garde and whereby the arrière-garde emerges from the cultural periphery as the sternest critic of that core, for example through a manifesto for an actors’ theatre. This renewed emphasis on the ‘metier’ may well be a (forced?) attempt to wrench the practice of theatre away from the post-Fordist system, which was, by the way, facilitated by the laboratory that art has always been. So, back to a practice that requires endurance, rehearsal, continuity and thus slowness, to a practice that cannot develop properly in the current regime of flexibility and permanent innovation. You may well ask if a return to a clearer and more defined division of roles in theatre is the right response to this ambi-tion. On the contrary: perhaps we have to take this new, hybrid typology as a starting point, a typology in which the theatre-maker plays a central role, but in which the place and the interpretation of the actor’s profession has to be recon-sidered. As set out above, the actor is also no longer an executor of predefined technical parameters and codes. He too is faced with the immense challenge of giving form to his own craft, in the here and now, for an audience. The theatre-maker, like the actor, creates for himself the means to enable us to see that craftsmanship is not an empty box on which any old cultural fantasy can be pro-jected. Maybe this theatre-maker can once again make room for this demand for technique and metier, precisely by radically individualising these aspects of his work. And maybe he can thus redefine his own position within the logic of work, and demand the right to be left alone to be flexible. After all, dreaming is also working. So we have a surprising conclusion: craftsmanship is the ultimate protest against the constantly advancing train of innovation, flexibility and de-velopment of discourse, but it is also the real partner-in-crime in the individual quest and the theatre-maker’s (economic) fight for emancipation.

Karel Vanhaesebrouck lectures in theatre studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and is a lecturer in theatre and cultural history at the Rits in Brussels,

where he also coordinates the theatre department.

by suppressing them, but by employing them in their work. At the same time they must look for a common, inter-subjective language that goes beyond the hyper-individual and yet takes personal subjectivity as the starting point. And that is not easy.

Arts courses exist to tackle this sort of challenge: providing young people with the means and strategies to find or invent their own means. The painstaking search for personal technical skills has to be central to an arts education. A theatre-maker does not create his own universe from nothing; he does it by means of a gradual search for the means to enable him to articulate that universe. The actor is faced with the same challenge. After all, the rising importance of the theatre-maker does not mean the end of the actor, as is often wrongly asserted. Also in this completely altered area of work there is a need for actors ready to operate in other people’s work and who therefore do not strictly speaking come into the category of theatre-maker. But this actor too must redefine his own role. He too is an inventor and not an executor. He too generates meaning much more than simply transferring it. So yes, here too it is a matter of unicity and personality, not as a fetish concept but as humus for the development of personal craftsman-ship. Personality and individuality on the one hand, and technical skill and metier on the other, are not mutually exclusive and do not have to contradict each other. This return of craftsmanship is therefore not a reaction to the hegemony of this theatre-maker; it is a logical result of this development. The more individual and hybrid the practice, the greater the demand for craftsmanship, for resources.

The discussion about craftsmanship and its possible return runs parallel with an interesting evolution in the visual arts. It is no coincidence that, after decades under the rule of conceptual art (in which the artefact is only an annoying resi-due of something else, something more essential), young artists at the begin-ning of this century are going back to painting and tangibility. ‘Artists again see the power of elementary creative work and their arsenal of techniques is bigger than ever’, writes Cornel Bierens in a fantastic article on the subject in De Groene Amsterdammer. ‘In contrast to what was often predicted, the expansion of their arsenal with new resources such as camera or computer has not led to the slow death of old media such as paint and canvas, but has surprisingly revitalised them’.15 Thus, in 2000 the Turner Prize was awarded to Michael Raedecker, an embroiderer-artist, and three years later the same prize was awarded to Gray-son Perry, who makes ceramic vases. In the visual arts too, we see an increasing

15 CornelBierens,‘Liederlijkgeklodder.Overambachtelijkheid’(‘Debaucheddaubing.Oncraftsmanship’),in: De Groene Amsterdammer,8April2010,36-39.Seealso:CornelBierens,‘Hoofdzoekthand.Overambachtelijkheid(2)’(‘Headseekshand.Oncraftsmanship(2)’),in: De Groene Amsterdammer,15April2010,36-39.

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27

The Facts and Fixions of B-Longing

In search of a community

The issue raised in this article follows on the issue raised in the B-Chronicles research project1 where it first came about: what is the meaning of ‘community’ in times of transnational mobility?

The international make-up of contemporary dance is above all the result of the ‘transnational mobility’ of dancers and dance-makers. Although these configu-rations are highly unstable, the term dance community has grown steadily more popular in the last decade, and it is a term which is generally compounded with a geographical location. The ‘Brussels dance community’ is the result of such a successful and widespread merging of belonging and geographical location. It is a concept that is used in the discourses of governments, but also of all sorts of dance professionals, here in Belgium and abroad.

Communities always have an imaginary dimension, as if they were fictive con-structions with reality effects.2 But more so than a fiction, it is a fixion which seems to be at work in the discourse on communities. It is as if the fantasies surrounding the boundless and fluid artistic existence of dance artists also re-quired some kind of fixation, as if so much instability needed to be mapped out and given fixed, concrete coordinates. Sarma has invited me to study this complex construction from a sociological perspective and so to position myself on the border between facts, fictions and fixations.3

1 ThistextwasfirstpublishedinDecember2006inthecontextofB-ChroniclesofSarma,laboratoryforcriticism,dramaturgy,researchandcreation,andwastakenupinthispublica-tionwiththekindpermissionofSarma.Formoreinformation,see:www.b-kronieken.be and www.sarma.be.Atcertainplaces,theinformationinthetextisupdated.

2 SeeBenedictAnderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,London:Verso,1991.

3 Initsshorthistory,sociologyhasrepeatedlytriedtoformulateanewresponsetothequestionofthemeaningof community. Thatthishasnotyetledtoaunanimousanswerislargelyduetoirreconcilablenotionsofwhat‘thesocialreality’consistsofandinwhatwayweshouldthenstudyit.Thishasitsadvantages.Sociology’sdiverseandco-existingsubdisciplinesalllookattheworldthroughadifferentlens,whichgivesustheopportunitytoplaywitharangeofperspectivesinordertostudythe community.Ihavechosennottolimitmyselftotheviewpointofonesociologicalbranch,buttomakeuseofvariousconceptsandmetaphorsasbuildingblockstoreconstructtheso-called Brusselsdancecommunity.

Delphine Hesters

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On the folds between the transnational and the local in the dance community

If one of the most frequently cited features of the dance community is that it is inter-national, then why do we call it the Brussels dance community?

On the international, transnational and local Let’s start at the beginning. When commentators of the Brussels dance scene use the term international, they usually do so in an everyday sense: the Brussels dance scene is international, because many dancers working in the city come ‘from elsewhere’, from abroad. Furthermore, a lot of them come from abroad and they mostly come from many different foreign countries. Ever since globali-sation has become a central research theme in the social sciences (among oth-ers), the related concept apparatus has been broadened and international now generally has a different and more specific meaning: it only designates the rela-tions between nation states (‘inter-nations’). For all other exchanges of capital, ideas, discussions, people, digits, etc. flowing across national boundaries and in which individuals, organisations or institutions are active – thus, everything except those states –, one now commonly uses the term transnational (not only in academic literature, for that matter, but also in essays written in, and on, the dance world, for instance). However, transnational risks becoming just as mean-ingless as international in everyday usage – as long as there are borders and these can be crossed, then one is satisfied. Unlike in the work of Ulf Hannerz,7 for instance, who uses this vague and rather general definition, transnational is generally defined more narrowly in research on (human) migration as the long-term processes whereby migrants establish and maintain relations with relatives in both their country of origin and in their land of residence. Whereas the figure of the migrant used to stand for the uprooted (‘déraciné’), multimedia applications and cheap transportation by air or by bus have ushered in the birth of the connected migrant: a man or woman who, besides the new relationships, manages to keep up the old ties.8 Alejandro Portes calls such long-term trans-national phenomena ‘globalisation from below’. They do not ‘soar’ to a higher level like the international, but remain fundamentally anchored in the local ‘at grassroots level’. Contemporary means of communication allow the traditional

7 SeeHannerz’sstandardworkfrom1996: Transnational Connections. Culture, People, Places (London/NewYork:Routledge).

8 Oneexampleofatransnationalphenomenonwithinthisframeworkistheactiveparticipa-tionoftheTurkishcommunitiesofWesternEuropeinTurkishpolitics,wherebythemi-grantsnotonlygototheballotboxduringtheelections,butalsocampaigninGreatBritain,theNetherlandsorGermanyand,throughstructurallobbying,evenhaveaninfluenceonthesettingoftheagendaintheTurkishpoliticalarena.

In 2006 I took part in a think-tank organised by Sarma in the framework of B-Chronicles. A key resource for my research on the Brussels dance community was the interview project for which choreographer Eleanor Bauer conducted some forty interviews.4 Together with boardgame-inventor Dimitry Masyn, I developed PROJECT, an interactive and participative ‘community game’ for 30 to 60 players in and around the Brussels dance community. Many voices in the present text, therefore, belong to the group of people around B-Chronicles. This text also bears traces of earlier research projects. From my research into the careers of contemporary dancers in Brussels,5 I have borrowed labour and art sociological insights, as well as what I learned about how the dance sector functions in Flanders and Brussels. Other parts owe much to my research into international (labour) migration and the way we conceive the identities and cul-ture of migrants and their families in discussions about their integration in our societies.6

My reading of the Brussels dance community will rest on three somewhat naive-sounding questions which came to the fore in the conversations with the B-Chroniclers, and which attempt to question the common assumptions around the Brussels dance community.

1. If one of the most frequently cited features of the dance community is that it is international, then why do we call it the Brussels dance community?

2. If we never talk about a ‘bakers’ community’ or a ‘theatre community’, then why do we talk about a dance community?

3. If the idea of a dance community seems so obvious, then why is it that those people who most seem to belong to it claim its existence the least?

4 Furtherinformationontheissuesandmethodologicalapproachofthisinterviewprojectisavailableonwww.b-kronieken.be,whereonecanalsofindareportontheinterviewsintheformofsummaries,audio-excerpts,keywords,and‘mappings’.

5 DelphineHesters, De choreografie van de danscarrière. Kwalitatief onderzoek naar de carrières van hedendaagse dansers in de Vlaams-Brusselse context (Thechoreographyofthedancecareer.QualitativeresearchintothecareersofcontemporarydancersintheFlemish-Brusselscontext),MAthesis,KULeuven,FacultyofSocialSciences,DepartmentofSociology,2004.

6 In2011thisresearchleadtothepublicationofmyPh.D.thesis: Identity, culture talk & culture. Bridging cultural sociology and integration research - a study on second generation Moroccan and native Belgian residents of Brussels and Antwerp.KULeuven,FacultyofSocialSciences,DepartmentofSociology,2011.

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This brings us back to the original question: whether in times of trans-national communities, it is legitimate to claim the existence of a Brussels dance community.

The gravitational force of a sectorI believe there is good reason to talk of something like a Brussels dance commu-nity.10 The network of contemporary dance that stretches ‘around the world’ is in some places more tightly woven and more solidly anchored in a local setting. Some cities clearly function as magnetic fields which can attract migratory birds and which frequently function as a base of operations for repeated flights. To give a few well-known examples, New York is or was such a place, just as Brus-sels and Berlin are today. The most obvious explanation for this phenomenon is the gravitational force or appeal of an existing artistic climate in these cities.

Hannerz mentions them as a distinct social group which plays an impor-tant role in the dynamics of world cities: the ‘expressivist specialists’ who – usu-ally at a young age – move to the cities, as if they were on a pilgrimage, in order to enjoy the unique opportunities of inspiration and self-development, or simply ‘to be in the right place’. It is probably no coincidence that Brussels is frequently called the Mecca of the dance world. ‘If you make it in Brussels you are a dancer,’ is something I heard in a number of interviews with foreign dancers based in Brussels.11 During these conversations I noticed that the initial attraction is still being strongly determined by the names of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas, Wim Vandekeybus/Ultima Vez, Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods and Alain Platel/les ballets C de la B. The first acquaintance with ‘Flemish dance’ often occurs by watching videos, online clips or attending performances during international tours. Since the mid-1990s, there has also been the school P.A.R.T.S. attracting dozens of young dancers from abroad. The more enmeshed within the dance world, the more one is gradually taken up by the buzz around Brussels as the place to be and the more the big names fade into the background and the Brus-sels scene as a whole takes over.

Whether we are dealing with the Turkish diaspora or with dancers on the road – from a specific key moment onward, migration engenders migration and the network fulfils its role as facilitator. This is not to say, however, that the ball will just start rolling by itself because of a random kick. This Brussels could not have

10 Thisfirstpartiswrittenfromanexternalmacro-perspective.InthethirdpartIwillbeworkingfromtheinsideofthesamerealityandwithaviewfrombelow.SoIwillbeabletothrowdifferentlighttothesamephenomenaandtoconstructaverydifferentstory.

11 VariousquotesinitalicsbelowaretakenfromtheinterviewswhichwerepartofmyMAthesisresearchintothecareersofcontemporarydancersintheBrusselscontext.

notion of community, with its accent on origin, roots and continuity, to live on in a new constellation, even if migration has unsettled the expectation of an unambiguous geographical location.

With this conceptualisation in mind, it no longer seems obvious to define the dance community as a transnational community of migrants. It is, rather, the result of labour migration, but its roots are lacking. The dance com-munity is an international group of people sharing a certain form of belonging, but one which has been constructed. It is in this construction that the original roots of the individuals have been retouched, and it is only the fact that they come ‘from elsewhere’ which is still explicitly in the picture. The dance commu-nity thus rather resembles a settled swarm of swallows which came together from different directions and is not the result of a diaspora from one specific place. The dominant movement is centripetal and not centrifugal.

And yet. Because contemporary research on migration inside Europe is primarily focused on the former guest workers from North Africa and Turkey and the more recent influx of Eastern Europeans, ethnicity has unnecessarily been brought to the fore in studies on transnational communities. The commu-nities being studied thus acquire a somewhat restricted and even static charac-ter, even though their roots lie in migration, in mobility. In my opinion, however, there is no pressing reason why the (ethnic) origin should be included in the definition of such transnational phenomena. Nowadays, the term community has lost its exclusive claim to tradition and ‘natural relations’ and can also re-fer to new social constellations in which people play roles which they have ac-quired themselves and which they were not necessarily born into or raised up in, whether through status or class. The dance community is a community of re-lations which are first entered into on the grounds of the roles which members fulfil within the artistic world of dance and for which one usually has to fight hard – a position in the dance world is achieved and not ascribed9.

It is not the mobility itself which is transnational, but the ensuing social phe-nomena. The emergence of well-worn paths within the dance world, where connections are constantly being actualised and which start to draw clear pat-terns, points to a lasting social phenomenon which is no longer dependent on individual movements. The fact that artists always manage during their global travels along artistic stations to find cheap accommodation with an acquaint-ance (of an acquaintance of …), or that Brussels and Berlin now only seem to be a stone’s throw away from one another, points to a transnational community (or communities) in the dance world.

9 Thisdistinctionbetween ascribed and achieved positionsorrolesisasociologicalclassic,developedbyanthropologistRalphLinton.

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choreo graphers who are starting out can take the time to prove themselves be-fore having to ask the Flemish authorities for subsidies. Dancers can also pro-long periods of inactivity and remain available for touring so that productions can have a longer life.

On top of that, for the on-average not-so-well-off stage artist, Brussels is also quite simply a relatively inexpensive (capital) city – this point also seems crucial for the bloom of the Berlin scene – and the city is also at the junction of busy routes between important European cities. In a transnational community, Brussels is in this sense also a suitable place to be based – it offers not only an artistic and socio-economic base, but also a practical base of operations.

The structural, financial and political logics in which dance functions as a subsidised stage-arts sector provide the boundary-crossing dance world with clear magnetic fields which are primarily determined by geographical location. The Brussels component of the Brussels dance community can, I believe, best be interpreted in this sense.

On guest workers and non-existent responsibilitiesIn the above I called the members of the dance community migrants, but this label is not quite appropriate. Dancers are in fact guest workers: their mobility is driven by job opportunities and their stay is initially temporary. Even those who appear to be migrants after the fact, with a permanent stay in Brussels, did not generally plan it like that in advance. This distinction is not as insignificant as it may seem. Because they only expect to stay temporarily, dancers invest very lit-tle in a broader embedding in the diverse social circles in their city of residence. Their geographical world may be very broad, but their social one is not neces-sarily so. Understandably too, since ideally a guest worker is always ready to pack his bags and go where the job will take him, without looking back. Flexibil-ity is their motto and integration is not an issue. As a result, some of them come to the bewildering conclusion that they have been in Brussels for ten years al-ready, but still consider themselves to be on the road and, for instance, have no idea of what makes the headlines in Belgian newspapers.

However, guest workers are always invested in in an ambiguous manner. Welcomed because of the ‘surplus value’ which they can bring – in this case, to the development of the Flemish international dance – the present work con-text is steered as much as possible in the right direction, but no one is will-ing to take responsibility for the uncertain future. It is remarkable how little discussion there is, not only in Brussels but in the very broad residence of the transnational dance community, on the issue of a career in dance, as well as on the consequences of job-hopping in a system where freelancing is the rule, and on the issue of the end of one’s career which in dance, and in contempo-rary dance too, generally comes quite early. In 2005, VTi organised an enquiry

been located just anywhere. The ‘Flemish wave’ of the 1980s may have been the mythical kickoff, but the tidal wave which it started cannot be explained on the grounds of an artistic climate alone. In order to understand this, we need better insight into the structural embedding.

Brussels, and Flanders by extension, is one of the rare places in the world where a dancer or choreographer can cherish the illusion that it is pos-sible to make a living out of art and art alone.

‘You are actually an employee. Actually, your job is real, not just like some arty

farty hobby that you do on the side, that nobody expects you to live from.’

This has a lot, if not everything, to do with the fact that the Flemish government subsidises contemporary dance and that there are numerous structures which support production and performance. The sector of the stage arts does in fact rely for the most part on government support, whether directly or indirectly through coproductions and buy-out amounts. Moreover – and this is remark-able – the Flemish Community also subsidises non-Flemish (and non-Belgian) artists. Some examples: in 2010, 12 out of the 20 artists to have received project subsidies or grants were foreigners, in 2011, 8 out of 17 were foreigners and in 2012 14 out of 23. Among the dance companies to benefit from structural subsidies in the period following 2013, 5 out of 12 are lead by foreign artists (it should also be noticed that the juridical structures and entourage surrounding these artists are indeed officially Belgian).

A somewhat less frequently dis-cussed but certainly no less important factor which brings some relief to the artistic scene is the safety net for art-ists which is built into the Belgian social security system, ensuring that dancers with acquired rights can receive unem-ployment benefits in times of unemploy-ment. Not only is a hard-earned status a strong incentive to choose Brussels as a base of operations, but the unemploy-ment benefits also contribute to the ar-tistic production of the sector. It often happens that no salaries are paid for periods during the creation of a show, and that one decides to fall back on an allowance. Thanks to these allowances,

‘I was always amazed at how Belgium could be

such a gracious host and then I also realised, which

also maybe connects in some way to the conceptual

wave sprouting from here, I always thought: “What

an amazing place, it gives so many possibilities to

work for dancers”, which is true. And then I flipped

the coin in my head on dead and went “Ah, but we

create jobs for the intellectuals that are interested

in culture here and that is the actual business”.

And I suddenly went “Oh OK, I am a cog in a

machine of something of a nature very different

than I had interpreted it to be originally.” And

there is nothing wrong with that, I just think I was

a bit naive about that before.’ David Hernandez

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backing and employees move within a single company from New York to New Delhi and thus change location at most. Or they can rely on a transnational cir-cuit of intermediaries specialising as ‘international temping-agencies’, a circuit which thrives on the world wide web, its natural, boundless habitat.13 These agencies study the legislation and legal procedures of migration, negotiate with immigration authorities and potential employers, and guarantee job security and the transferability of qualifications. Moreover, they often also act as an ‘as-similation office’ for the expat world, en-suring its clients that they will be able to immerse themselves safely in the culture and will not be forced into cosmopolitan-ism, but that they will be able to keep their status of metropolitan locals.

Vertovec quotes Iredale’s descrip-tion of the IT sector, which could easily be taken for a portrayal of the dance world-as-job-market: ‘The following charac-teristics prevail within the industry: it is highly fluid in terms of skill requirements; international and with little impact of particular cultural contexts; dominated by English language as the basis; on-the-job experience as the most important means of acquiring human capital or be-coming multiskilled; a high level of intra- and inter-company and inter-region/country mobility; potential for return mi-gration and investment, and a profession that is largely unregulated by unions or other mechanisms.’ A bit further on, however, he adds that the recent proliferation in international work intermedi-aries proves that such job markets for the highly qualified cannot exist without massive investments in (formal) networks.14 The job market for dance, however, does seem to exist without these ‘massive investments’ and proves itself to be the unlucky exception to this rule. The logic of the capitalist market does not ap-ply to this primarily subsidised circuit where there are no guarantees of profit, and no one is willing to fill in the gaps on the transnational job market of sup-

13 Thisisaninvitationforyoutogoogle:typein‘expats’andyouwillseewhatImean.

14 StevenVertovec, Transnational Networks and Skilled Labour Migration. Working paper 02-02 of the ESRC Research Programme on Transnational Communities,2002 (www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk)

into and a conference on careers and career perspectives. In the end, however, only actors and directors from theatre were on the agenda. Raising this theme within dance could well mean opening Pandora’s box. In effect, the dance world is caught up like no other in the ‘anachronism’ of globalisation: individuals act at an international level on the transnational artistic scene, but in their concrete, everyday lives, they each time have to land in a modern world which is run by nation states which, though not quite sovereign, still spell out the rules with which citizens and non-citizens within their territory need to comply. Border-crossing thus also means a transition from one system to another, without any guarantees of continuity or understanding. Belgian law does not recognise Spaniards or Australians, only Belgians and non-Belgians as well as, for the past few decades, Europeans and non-Europeans. In practice, this situation means that dancers who today are paying taxes and social security in Belgium will not simply benefit from that in Germany tomorrow, or that six years spent working in Portugal will not necessarily be recognised as six years worth of experience in a Belgian contract, which, in the long run, is harmful to the prospect of a mini-mal comfort of living. Whoever is aware of this situation can, however, often allow himself some measure of self-deceit and try to live in the here and now.

‘It is something that I think about often. But on the other side, there is some-

thing I want to do and that is keep on dancing, whatever it takes, for the

moment. What I don’t want to do is start thinking about it and come to the

conclusion that I should stop.’

It seems that the younger one is, the less one worries about it. The older one gets, the more one feels the consequences of this carelessness.

The issue is one of as yet non-existent responsibilities. Saskia Sassen has shown how processes of economic globalisation and denationalisation create gaps in the framing of new realities and practices, but also how specific organi-sations and institutions take up the challenge and fill the spaces left empty by this legal void – not with national laws, but with institutionalised norms dictated by non-territorial structures of authority. In the course of the last twenty years, for instance, international trade arbitration has grown into the leading contrac-tual method for the solving of boundary-crossing business disputes.12 New re-alities require new answers and new responsibilities.

For the prototype of the highly qualified and well-earning expats such as engineers, lawyers, financial experts and researchers, the market has devised its own solutions: either their employer guarantees complete legal and financial

12 SaskiaSassen,Globalisering. Over mobiliteit van geld, mensen en informatie(Globalisation.Onthemobilityofmoney,peopleandinformation),Amsterdam:VanGennep,1999.

‘Already before I moved to Brussels, I worked with a

dance company from here. So I kept coming over to

do projects with them once a year for a few months.

But it took me a really long time to realise what

a great place it is. That’s something I hear often.

It takes some time before the city reveals itself to

you. It’s a city which is very busy with itself, and

not investing a lot in opening itself up to visitors.

Maybe people in Brussels aren’t looking for more

influences. But when I started discovering the city

I realised how vibrant it was. I never moved to

Brussels for professional reasons. There was just

something in the mentality that made me feel good.

I was attracted to the place. I had the feeling that

the place mattered to me and vice versa. It became

part of my life and influences me. In Amsterdam it

was difficult to build up a social life, if I had any it

was with the people I worked with.’ Adva Zakai

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to keep artists out of financial marginal-ity with their policies on arts and artists, more subsidies do not necessarily mean increased levels of income for individual dancers. More subsidies mean that one can pay for more hours of artistic work, but because of the lack of formal barri-ers17 and the fragmentation of company structures, the result is not that the art-ists are less poor, but that there are more poor artists. The number of candidates adapts itself to the means available, as Hans Abbing18 informs us. Many foreign dancers who are attracted by stories about the dance land of milk and honey are, in other words, being somewhat cheated as regards the financial reality.

Compared to Marx and Engels’s factory workers-proletarians, however, this cosmoproletariat has significantly more glamour. As Hafez says: ‘They may worry if they will be able to pay next month’s rent, but it does not prevent them from being dressed in the latest fashion trends. (…) Their G4’s are equipped with the latest software, their iPods offer the apt soundtracks to their neo-bohemian existence.’ In his book Vertoog over verzet (Treatise on Resistance), Dieter Lesage19 distinguishes between the globeoisie of the transnational (economic) elite and the digitariat which is defined as the class which owns little more than a com-puter and an internet connection. Both groups find themselves, however, in the glamourisation of cosmopolitism, ‘seen as the naive, since selective, glamourisa-tion of the dazzling city life.’20 That the digitariat is wanting in defining power does not seem to bother it – as long as it can take part in the life style of the elite and can share in the glamorous aura of the simili-exclusive opportunities

17 Unlikeinmanyotherjobsorprofessions,therearenostrictprofessionalbarrierssuchasdegrees,forinstance,inthefieldofdance.Whoeverbelieveshimselftobeanartistcanhaveashotatit.Thefinalselectionsonlytakeplaceonthejobmarketitself.

18 HansAbbing, Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, Amsterdam:AmsterdamUniversityPress,2002.

19 DieterLesage,Vertoog over verzet. Politiek in tijden van globalisering (TreatiseonResistance.Politicsinanageofglobalisation),Antwerpen:Meulenhoff/Manteau,2004.

20 Iamherefollowingthisdefinitionofcosmopolitismforargument’ssake,eventhoughIpreferHannerz’sversion(1996).Heconsiders cosmopolitism tobeanorientation,awillingnesstoengagewiththeOther.Itincludesanintellectualandaestheticopennesstodifferentculturalexperiencesandrepresentsasearchforcontrastsratherthanuniformity.WhatLesageisheredescribingisthus ‘metropolitanism’ rather than a cosmopolitanorientation.

ply and demand regulations. The most important actors in the local sectors are subsidised institutions and national or regional authorities which lose their ne-gotiating power outside their national or regional boundaries. As a result, within this hyperflexible transnational job market, individual dancers themselves have to run their boundaryless career15 like small companies, and that is where things so often go so wrong. Though each government may well have spelt out living and working conditions, not everyone masters the language of the country or knows his way through the legal jargon. In Brussels especially, the administra-tive jungle seems to be very dense and inhospitable. The complexity of the heavy legal and labour systems silences the dancers who have to wrestle their way through it, and as a result, the temporariness of their stay and the quick pace of mobility are soon called on as excuses to close one’s eyes again.

‘I wonder sometimes how people would know how long I have been in different

places. Generally I go outside the EU every three months anyway, so it is OK.

It is really … I don’t know, if anyone decided to check up my record, I don’t

know how that would go and whether I was doing it right or not.’

This hot potato has been on the table for quite some time already and someone is going to have to eat it. Who that might be has not yet been deter-mined, and that is precisely why it is so important for actors in the dance sector itself to stand up and take on the responsibility of taking an initiative, since no one else is going to be spelling things out. In this fold between the transnational and the national, creative solutions need to come from below.

From cosmos to backroomNasr Hafez16 calls the transnational community of highly mobile dancers the cosmoproletariat: proletarians who contribute their body as capital and rent it out for a living, project by project, in ever-changing work constellations. Not only does the connotation of bodily labour make this a striking metaphor, but it also reveals the low levels of income in dance. Despite government wishes

15 Ina‘boundarylesscareer’,anemployeemovesfromoneprojecttothenext,thuseachtimecontributinghisacquiredknowledgeandexperiencewhilealsodevelopingthemfurther.Thiscareerprofilecontrastswiththetypeoftheclassicororganisationalcareer,whichdevelopsentirelywithinasingleorganisation.Withthisevolutionfromtheclassictotheboundarylesscareer,responsibilityforthecareerhasshiftedfromtheorganisationtotheindividual.SeeMichaelB.Arthur&DeniseM.Rousseau, The Boundaryless Career. A New Employment Principle for a New Organisational Era,Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress,1996.

16 NasrHafez,‘Welcometothecosmoproletariat’,in: Janus, n° 21 (December2006).HafezwrotethistextintheframeworkofB-Chronicles.Itisalsoavailableonwww.b-kronieken.be.

I’m in contact with Brussels already since 2000.

It was the time Les Bains was just starting and we

had like some rehearsals there. I started to enjoy

this kind of field where you, well, places opened

their doors and you could just start working with

friends. I didn’t know that. Not from Amsterdam,

and not from Freiburg for sure. Berlin, yeah, space,

yes, but really no material and no money and

nothing. So maybe like Les Bains was one of my

first contacts, or no, maybe Nadine, or Les Bains.

And I hoped to integrate in this context of art,

actually, and artists. And get a piece of the cake.’

David Helbich

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which in the modern era risked becoming eroded through the rise of the ‘cold’, mechanical structures of mass society (Gesellschaft)21 – is that a community can emerge on the basis of cooperation and thus through action and communica-tion. Community can thus be a more or less deliberate construction and is – within this mode of reasoning – the product of ‘practices’ rather than ‘struc-tures’ or ‘cultures.’22

The collective mental image of the dance community has been crystal-lised in and through the practices of the dance world. In other words, what takes place in theatre halls, studios, workshops, foyers and cafés must have such power that a collectivity or a source of belonging emerges in these daily practices, which is so strong that it is presented as being so primary that it can be called a community. No other professional or artistic sector has managed to develop the image of a community. So what makes the contemporary dance world so special?

In what follows, I shall argue that the dance world shows itself to be a greedy institution and that this forms the façon d’être of the dance community.

The mechanisms of absolute dedicationAccording to sociologist Georg Simmel, modern man lives in numerous overlap-ping social sectors, but where the distinct sectors of ‘sleeping’, ‘working’ and ‘playing’ remain separate. Your relatives are neither your colleagues nor your friends; there is thus a functional differentiation at a micro-level. However, Coser has revealed the existence of organisations and groups in the modern world which make total demands on their members, which strive for exclusive and undivided loyalty, and which attempt to take over the member’s person-ality in its totality: he calls them greedy institutions. Unlike Goffman’s total in-stitutions, their greedy equivalents draw up barriers between society and the institution itself, barriers which are not physical but symbolic and which rely on its members’s voluntary submission. Classic examples of total institutions are prisons and institutes for the mentally deranged. Prototypical greedy insti-tutions are monasteries and sects.23 The following summary lists a combina-tion of the elements – both structures and practices – which lead me to call the dance world greedy. Considering the way dance functions today, dancers voluntarily condemn themselves to each other.

21 Thisclassicdistinctionbetween Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft isascribedtoTönnies.Heconsideredthemtobedifferentexpressionsofsocialrelationswithaccompanyingsocialconstellations.Inthemodernera,thedominanceof Gemeinschaft tieswouldbeshatteredbythoseofthe Gesellschaft type.

22 GerardDelanty, Community,London:Routledge,2003.

23 LewisA.Coser, Greedy Institutions; Patterns of Undivided Commitment,NewYork:TheFreePress,1974.

of big-city night-life. However, euphoria and despair are often found on either side, respectively, of the restaurant kitchen’s swing doors, according to Lesage. Besides cultural cosmopolitans, big cities also always attract desperate and/or hopeful as well as legal and/or illegal people looking for work. But even within this scheme of things, dancers refuse to simply let themselves be caught in a sin-gle conceptual trap. They seem to play quite easily with the rules of the system of which they are themselves the victims. Dancers play along like highly qualified expats in the regions of the privileged professionals whose salaries increase sig-nificantly and quickly, but they lack the big money since, within their subsidised stage-arts sector, they fall completely à côté de la plaque capitaliste. As a result, they are just like impotent digitarians who, true enough, also control the thea-tre of the dazzling city. However, the speed and ‘ease’ with which the positions on either side of the above swing doors can sometimes be reversed generate in some dancers both frustration and existential anxiety which should not be underestimated. Trying to strike a balance between being alert and present on the one hand and shutting one’s eyes on time on the other is very dangerous.

The dance world as greedy institution, or voluntary condemnation to one another

If we never talk about a ‘bakers’ community’ or a ‘theatre community’, then why do we talk about a ‘dance community’?

As Durkheim wrote in his 1893 classic De la division du travail social, a forced divi-sion of labour leads to organic solidarity and lasting dependence. Organic soli-darity is grounded in collaboration and pluralism – each individual in the social

body has his own speciality and contrib-utes a unique contribution to the whole, whereby everyone becomes dependent on everyone and a community can exist which is more than the sum of its individ-uals. This societal principle, as Durkheim formulated it on an abstract macro-level, is equally valid at a meso-level within or-ganisations and institutions.

What Durkheim’s thesis already anticipated at the end of the 19th centu-ry – when community (Gemeinschaft) still stood mainly for the natural, unques-tioned ‘warm’ bonds of shared traditions

‘I thought in the city where dance is kind of

an important art, the field around should be

experimental for performance art. Because that

was what I was missing in music very much. Like

the experiment in the setups, performative setups

and stuff like this. So and, yeah, I think I was

right. I mean Brussels was really definitely very

good in this whole in between field … I mean I was

not so busy with real dance, more like with what

the dance community was busy with. Fluxus, all

the punk stuff, appears in this context much easier.’

David Helbich

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5. The more advanced the break-up of company structures, the more impor-tant becomes the regulating function of personal contacts.24 In a freelance sector where the creation of job opportunities is a never-ending process, maintaining a personal network is of crucial importance. As indicated above, job opportunities are not distributed through agencies, but informa-tion travels quickly from one individual to another – by word of mouth or via voice mail and mailboxes. Whoever is looking for work needs to be both pre-sent and visible. This form of networking is certainly not always intentional, but that does not make it any less functional and it is, from an organisational point of view, particularly effective in a sector with little money and (thus) little time: each project requires a new team, which, without the pre-existing connections in the network, would be an expensive and laborious affair.

6. Together with the above, it is especially the international nature of the dance community which ensures the tight bonds between members (and distin-guishes it from the theatre world). For guest workers, social networks of relatives are not only crucial for finding work and accommodation, but also for the social and psychological support in their particular situation.25 The foreign members of the Brussels dance community came to the city for the sake of dance. At first, a layer of work relations is formed, which then forms the basis for a layer of friendly and intimate relations. In turn, this circle of primary relations determines the following circle, whereby an expanding circle of relations takes shape between dance and art relatives.

Greedy institutions put pressure on individuals to loosen their ties with other institutions or with people whose claims are in conflict with their own, or even to give up entirely all relations with such institutions or people. Greedy institu-tions focus the devotion of their members on a single, total status and the main role relations which are related to it. Thus, a total status is created around the role of ‘dancer’ and the web of relations surrounding it. Anna Aalten hits the nail on the head when she says: ‘Dancing is not something you do. Dancers are not

24 Pierre-MichelMenger, La profession de comédien. Formations, activités et carrières dans la démultiplication de soi (Theactingprofession.Training,activitiesandcareersinself-multiplication),Paris:Ministèredelacultureetdelacommunication,DAG,Départementdesétudesetdelaprospective,1997.

25 Vertovec–seealsoabove.

1. Contemporary dance is heavily dependent on government subsidies and a network of work and performance spaces which because of that common source clearly reveal a clustering. This cluster of formally recognised struc-tures and the life that blooms within it is what we usually call ‘the sector’. There is therefore a clearly localised circuit which guarantees visibility, stimu-lates mutual positioning and thus generates important crossing points with-in the transnational field of dance.

2. However, the location and physical presence of the community’s members come first of all from the collective, traditional character of the performance arts. Unlike the stereotypical visual artist, for instance, a stage artist never works alone and is thus always in direct contact with colleagues on the work floor. Moreover, the essence of the stage arts consists of in-real-time-service and thus requires the physical presence of actors or dancers in front of or among the audience, which is, again, often at least in part made up of actors and dancers. The ‘product’ of dance can only exist through the collective appearance of its members and so has to be re-actualised again and again. As regards both production and presentation, dance, just like theatre, is a social, ‘communal’ enterprise.

3. The physical presence of fellow dancers involves a lot more than just being in each others presence - watching and listening to one another face to face. Both in the studio and on stage, this physical presence also involves bodily contact and thus feeling and smelling one another. Whoever works with his body touches on a human vulnerability which needs to be handled carefully with a delicate mix of respect and trust. Moreover, people who use their bodies in their profession can never lay down their ‘tool’ and work-related aspects also enter all aspects of their everyday lives.

4. One-hundred-percent involvement is the norm in the world of dance. Work-ing with very few means often requires such an investment of time and ef-fort that having and managing a hobby, a second job or a family becomes problematic. The random sequence of various jobs and the practice of resi-dencies in more or less distant places make investing in long-term engage-ments outside dance problematic. In the larger companies with, relatively speaking, more comfort and where time and space are more clearly defined (or can be), it is the long tours abroad which take up the life of the dancer around the clock.

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The fixions and paradoxes of the dance community

If the idea of a dance community seems so obvious, then why is it that those people who most seem to belong to it claim its existence the least?

So far I have merely confirmed the existence of the Brussels dance com-munity – I have played the devil’s advocate and raised questions, but I have always started out from the reality of the community: ‘one talks about it, there-fore it exists’. There can be no facts without fictions, however, and what is more: facts create fictions which create facts. One of the aims of the B-Chronicles inter-views was that, together with the interviewees, Eleanor Bauer would go beyond the vague statements and unproblematic everyday language and would look for the (im)possibility of more telling definitions. ‘Do you consider yourself a part of a community?’, ‘What community?’, ‘Do you consider yourself a part of a dance community?’, ‘Who else is in that community?’, ‘What makes it a community?’, ‘What do you share/what brings you together?’, ‘When, where, and how do you feel a sense of belonging?’, ‘When, where and how did you recently feel alone?’, ‘Does Brussels feel like home? Does anywhere feel like home? What is the longest period you have stayed in an apartment since your first job?’27 With this type of questions, we can go deeper into the Brussels dance community and explore it from the inside instead of making observations from a distant point of view. The first and most important claim which we can make thanks to this change of perspective is that the ‘members’ of the Brussels dance community do not simply claim its exist-ence. There is talk of something like a dance sector, a dance field or a dance world which is populated by people – and they are often referred to in conversation – but questions on the existence of and belonging to the dance community all re-ceive very ambiguous answers. In what follows I wish to show that this ambigu-ity goes back to a number of ‘classic’ connotations of the concept of community, with which the so-called dance community cannot be associated.

A community of communities – on borders and identityCommunity is essentially a matter of inclusion and exclusion, and thus of be-longing and border work – this time in a figurative sense. In mainstream classic sociology, but also in society in general, the concept of community is associated with tradition and inclusion is a matter of creating homogeneous groups. The primary community is thus the community into which we are born and which can be defined by such categories as ethnicity and nationality, which are not

27 Anexpandedlistoftheinterviewquestionscanbefoundonwww.b-kronieken.be,intheresearchsection.

people who dance, dancers are dancers.’26 Sleeping, working and playing often take place within a single social circle – colleagues are friends are lovers. When dancers go ‘home’ or have some ‘time off’, they often land in other regions of the same dance world. It is as if only having a family or having children can break the kaleidoscope of dance.

The dance world is, strictly speaking, not an ‘institution’ and does not have a central intelligence which aims at isolating members, as in a sect. The greediness of the dance world is not an aim in itself, but it is a consequence of the above circumstances. Dancers are stuck in a thin but greedy, transnational layer of the metropolitan cultural scene which creates a near-physical disconnection of the community from the rest of society, but one which they enter into eagerly.

‘And you isolate yourself from the world. Sometimes I have this feeling that one

day I’ll wake up and I’ll be eighty and I’ll realise that I missed the whole real

reality of life. I am living in this world which is so different from other people …

and I don’t know which one is more real. I don’t know what is real and what is

not … it is like The Matrix.’

Once one is encapsulated in this layer, one enters an autopoietic system of recognition which repeatedly confirms and reinforces reciprocal solidarity. The question of recognition is an existential claim which none of us ignore and which makes of us all social animals, and is thus not particular to dancers or artists. What is particular is the tendency to create a total status within greedy institutions, whereby the striving for recognition becomes quite risky – a matter of all or nothing – and where emotional dependency can become very strong. Moreover, this also applies a fortiori within the arts today. In contemporary arts, degrees and other formal symbols do not suffice to be able to claim artistic identity and one is forced into continuous action and interaction within the ar-tistic community to get confirmation that you and your work ‘matter’. These mechanisms form a strong potential basis for the pursuit of a sense of belonging which in itself then becomes constitutive of the tightening of the community within a shared environment.

26 AnnaAalten, De bovenbenen van Olga de Haas. Achter de schermen van de Nederlandse balletwereld (OlgadeHaas’thighs.BehindthescenesintheDutchballetworld),Amsterdam:VanGennep,2002.Theworldofclassicalballetdoesindeedhaveitsownspecificitieswhicharedifferentfromthoseofcontemporarydance.Themeaningofthissentenceisthussomewhatmodified,butitisstilltelling.

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44 45

A second reason why interviewees seemed unwilling to claim the exist-ence of ‘the Brussels Dance Community’ – in the singular and in capital letters – is a fear of identity closure. To recognise one’s belonging to a certain commu-nity is the same as putting forward and also essentialising a number of fea-tures which from then on fixate our identity. ‘The problem with community is that it places too much weight on identity,’ Delanty claims.30 For contemporary dancers suffering from a mild form of schizophrenia brought on by the need for flexibility, this is indeed a problem. To be locked up discursively as a mobile dancer/ choreographer/ video artist/ essayist in a Brussels dance community can seem terribly oppressing and can jeopardise future opportunities for other aspects of one’s identity.

A community of foreigners – home versus/and on the roadThe term community not only evokes associations with tradition but also with roots and the land in which they are anchored. Belonging means putting down roots somewhere, feeling at home somewhere. Also, belonging is always a long-ing for.

However, Brussels does not often evoke these associations for the (foreign) dancers who told us their stories. Brus-sels is first of all a practical residence and crossing point, a social-political en-vironment where opportunities can be created for artists and a city which lies at the junction of interesting artistic and geographical routes. Brussels is a city where one can reside without having to stop being on the road: a residency. One can feel welcome without having to feel at home. This is the ambiguous side of the city which fits the realities and illusions of being a guest worker: everyone belongs in Brussels because everyone is a stranger.

‘I don’t feel at home in Brussels, but more than in any other place.’

Brussels is a good mistress, a here-and-now affair, without making any prom-ises but with a tinge of nostalgia for a place one can no longer return to, even if it is apparently within reach. Mistresses rarely become good spouses for their loved ones.

30 Delanty–seealsoabove.

easily achievable, if at all, to outsiders. New realities, however, such as the in-creased mobility of individuals in our modern society (see also ‘globalisation’) are creating openings for new forms of community.

Outlining a non-traditional community built on practices and various forms of communication is, however, an impossible task. Community borders are indeed very flexible, since less weighed down by the past, and can con-stantly be redefined on the grounds of changing practices and composition. ‘Communication communities are not shaped only by relations between insid-ers and outsiders, but by expansion in the community of reference and the construction of discourses of meaning. Thus rather than being sustained by symbolic boundaries and a stable community of reference, communication communities are open horizons,’ according to Delanty.28 It is difficult to explain that you belong somewhere if you do not quite know where exactly you should belong. The bewildering result of this is that almost all of the dancers who were interviewed feel that they do not belong to ‘the centre’ and thus would position themselves in the margins.

This leads to the emergence of two contradictory movements of expan-sion and contraction, which put at risk the idea of the dance community as a single entity.

If we wish to capture the dance community as an artistic community in its broadest sense and make a complete list of all circles in which mem-bers’s belongings and affinities take shape, then, besides dancers and choreo-graphers, we also get: programmers, musicians, directors, composers, film di-rectors, writers, theoreticians, critics, graphic designers, etc. The diversity of practices gathered roughly under the ‘contemporary dance’ heading results in a multidimensional and expanding sequence of overlapping circles of which no overview is possible. In this sense, the dance world has at most an imaginary centre around the construct of ‘contemporary dance’ but especially undefined margins. Because of the impossibility of describing the whole, each member creates his own little sub-dance community with which he or she associates. Focus is thus on the multiplicity of individuals rather than on the community as an entity. The so-called dance community thus consists primarily of diverse sub- or mini-communities, bubbles of affinities and relations which together form a head of foam.29

The conclusion to all this is that a communication-based community al-ways takes the form of a network. Networks do not have borders, nor, as a re-sult, do they have either a centre or margins, and they consist of a multiplicity of individual points which are interconnected through communication paths.

28 Delanty–seealsoabove.

29 IamhereborrowingsomeimagesfromtheB-Chroniclesinterviews.

‘Each time I go home [France], it’s like I can’t work

anymore. It’s very strange and I don’t know exactly

why that is. I went to P.A.R.T.S., I’ve been living

in Belgium for 13 years so I know the dance scene

quite well. 90% of the people I know aren’t Belgian.

We’re from everywhere. That’s also what we share:

we’re not from here, the place doesn’t belong to us,

but I wouldn’t want to live elsewhere. There’s this

sort of streaming.’ Etienne Guilloteau

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46 47

Community as a mode of productivity

Following my theses on communicative communities as networks and on the existence of numerous mini-communities and the indeterminacy of the broad-er one, we can ask ourselves whether it still makes sense to talk of the dance community. More recent sociological conceptualisations of community seem to suit the so-called dance community of Brussels, but this does not take away from the fact that its so-called members find it hard identifying with it. And why should we hold on to the notion of community when the mechanisms of identification as well as those of inclusion and exclusion are being questioned from within? After all, without these, we are left with little more than a group of people with frequent interaction and less with a ‘community’.

Maybe it would be better to conclude that in Brussels we find a sector of structures and organisations, which sector functions as residence for an ever- changing part of a network of individual dancers. Within that network there are clusters around ‘strong individuals’ and collectives who make identification possible with smaller circles which can be defined as small communities. They make it possible to position oneself within the network of contemporary dance, which shows itself to be more like a constellation in which the quality of the connections and the meaning and positions of the ties are more important than the quantitative parameters of a thinly-layered and uniform yet expansive net in which the weight and number of names in one’s address book matter most of all. ‘Network’ does not have to be a ‘dirty’ little word.

Having said this, the question regarding the emergence of the dance community as a notion becomes rather pressing. In conclusion, I would suggest a possible answer and an open end.

‘I remember the last five or six years [second half of the 1990s, DH], that for

the first time, there is really a “dance community”. It is very young. When I

first got here, there were the big companies and we were all in these companies.

We almost never saw each other, we were always on tour. But we were the only

dancers in the city. There weren’t really big training programs. There were some

people doing small things, I don’t say that, but in terms of what it is now, of

people coming in, this kind of dance tourism, that exists here at the moment …

In terms of all the students that leave and decide to stay and make their own

work or work with somebody else … For the first time there really is a dance

community, in Belgium, in Brussels.’

The number of dancers in Brussels, and especially of dance-makers, grew sig-nificantly in the 1990s. Various former members of the large companies stayed

Changing the significance of a place is particularly difficult and requires a lot of time and symbolic work. Because of the initial short-lived nature of the dancers’ stay, they have built up a transparent but solid wall of involved remoteness which ensures that they can become engaged in the here-and-now but that they can also leave without too much rending of clothes. This wall can only be broken down by a small earthquake (such as having children) or will wear down over the years, when the mobile existence starts to weigh down on them and when flexibility and openness are not necessarily a virtue any longer. But even then, home remains for many the place and primary community one comes from and which one still holds onto as an option for ‘later’.

A community of the eternal present – continuity versus fragmentationIf the Brussels dance community exists, then it exists in an eternal present. Because of the ephemeral nature of this art form and the great mobility of its members, its make-up changes with each actualisation and it only has a short-term memory. Today’s community is not the same as tomorrow’s. This per-petual-present is at right angles to another classic connotation of community: the guarantee of continuity and the connectedness of past, present and future. Today’s dance community after all has neither a past nor a future. The bonds which are forged are intense (see ‘greedy institutions’) but perhaps more fleet-ing than one might wish.

‘There is very strong affective links, it is very difficult when someone or a group

of people leave. That is very hard. Because you loose … it is like you are a bit

amputated somehow. I mean afterwards, you recover, but you feel a bit ampu-

tated. Because you share a lot.’

This explains why from an individual point of view the idea of a commu-nity is sometimes quite relative and is discussed with irony in interviews.

The series of ‘sociological’ photographs which we can take from a dis-tance gives us a relatively stable picture: we can see a colourful gathering of individuals swarming along and through the cultural structures of Brussels. One can observe a high degree of mobility and ongoing exchanges with the other regions of the transnational community, but for those individuals who leave, there are others who arrive with similar characteristics and activities. Those on the inside, however, are required to be ready to give meaning to a new constellation with every push on the refresh button. On the one hand this guarantees adventure and ever-renewed impulses, a life on the edge. But on the other hand, they are forced to be on the alert and to keep the psychological and physical risks outside the danger zone. The vanishing point of rapidity and flexibility is dissolution.

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48 49

on in Brussels and started working either on their own or with others in smaller constellations. They were able to benefit from the recognition which contempo-rary dance had got in our country at the time. There were arts centres on hand looking for new names; there was the Flemish Community’s arts budget; and there was something like an ‘artistic climate’ due to the artists (and arts) which were already present. However, parallel to the growth of the community, the models for organising and producing work within the dance field have changed. The vast majority of dancers and choreographers do not work in a company structure with a choreographer in charge and a rather stable troop of dancers. During the 1990s the freelancers clearly outnumbered the dancers with long-er term contracts in companies. At the one hand, the present subsidy system cannot guarantee a sustainable future for many dance companies with a large number of long term artistic employees. At the other hand it also seems that the aspirations of many choreographers and dancers lead to different kinds of artistic trajectories. This led to the emergence of a network of people who had already worked together or would work together and who need one another to create job opportunities. The only dance community which I would still speak of as such is a community based on the reciprocal recognition of potential ‘col-leagues’: a community as a mode of productivity. It enables individuals to work in, with and even outside the established structures, individuals who find it difficult to adapt their hybrid work methods to the official and imposed categories.

If we turn back to the concepts and reflect on a more abstract level, we can see more clearly what this work mode means in practice for the dancers’ work-ing and living conditions: within the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesell schaft31 Gemeinschaft is again introduced on the side of Gesellschaft. The community enters on the production side, like an element that lies enclosed within the work area. The distinction between private and public life becomes vague. Community as a mode of productivity creates promising horizons for artistic production, but it is perhaps at precisely this moment that the greedy institution kicks into action.

Delphine Hesters is a researcher at VTi.

31 Asalreadymentioned,thisclassicdistinctionbetween Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft isascribedtoTönnies.Heconsideredthemtobedifferentexpressionsofsocialrelationswithaccompanyingsocialconstellations.Theideal-typical Gemeinschaft tiesstandforwarm,natural,traditionalbonds. Gesellschaftbondsarecold,mechanicalandconstructed.

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ces

can

befo

und

at:

www.activearchives.org/who

swho

52 53Whe

nw

eask

Wes

sela

bout

Testm

ans,

hest

arts

tola

ugh.

‘Whe

redi

dyo

ufin

dhi

m?

He

was

inve

nted

byon

eof

the

deve

lope

rsth

atm

igra

ted

the

data

base

from

Mic

roso

ftA

cces

sin

1998

.H

eal

way

sus

edth

atna

me

whe

nhe

need

edan

acco

unt

tote

st.’

Workfl

ow

So,

how

did

56.844

peop

le,20.700

prod

uctio

ns,12.427

orga

nisa

tions

that

are

linke

dth

roug

h253.986

rela

tion-

ship

send

upin

this

data

base

?Fl

oris

tour

sus

thro

ugh

each

step

inth

epr

oces

s:

InSe

ptem

ber,

Flor

isco

mpi

lesa

docu

-m

entoctober_2011.doc

cont

aini

ngal

lpre

mier

esfo

rth

efo

llowi

ngm

onth

.Th

elis

tin

clude

sth

eirda

te,

loca

tion

and

relev

ant

webs

ite.

On

aver

age

heco

llect

s30

prem

ieres

per

mon

thfro

mpr

inte

dse

ason

broc

hure

san

dne

wslet

-te

rspr

ovid

edby

thea

tre

and

danc

eco

mpa

nies

them

selv

es.

This

list

isco

mpl

eted

with

addi

tiona

linf

orm

atio

n

9‘In

2003

-200

4(p

rem

ière

17m

ay20

03)

and

2004

-200

5w

epl

ayed

the

perf

orm

ance

Met

deki

kker

alle

ski

ts?

of:

een

kabo

uter

opee

nkl

ein

rood

brom

mer

ke(E

very

thin

gal

right

with

the

frog

?or

:a

gnom

eon

asm

allr

edm

otor

cycl

e)’

‘for

genr

e,“t

heat

re”

suffi

ces’

‘Arn

eLi

even

sis

not

anac

tor!

He

did

the

light

-in

gde

sign’

onco

mpa

nywe

bsite

s,pu

blici

typu

shed

via

socia

lmed

iaan

dch

ecke

dag

ains

thi

sow

nex

perie

nce

with

the

ebb

and

flow

ofac

tiviti

esin

the

field

.By

the

end

ofth

em

onth

,Flo

ristr

ansla

test

hedo

cum

ent

into

HTM

Lan

dpu

blish

esth

ein

form

atio

non

vti.b

e.

2012

seas

onbr

ochu

res,

read

yto

bere

gist

ered

InO

ctob

er,

Flor

ispr

oduc

esa

seco

ndfil

eca

lled

20110916.doc

.Th

isfil

eco

ntai

nsth

eup

date

dlis

tof

prod

uc-

tions

that

prem

iered

inSe

ptem

ber

plus

links

tosp

ecifi

cwe

b-pa

ges

wher

ecr

edits

for

that

part

icular

prod

uctio

nca

nbe

foun

d.H

ecr

eate

sa

reco

rdfo

rea

chpr

oduc

tion

into

the

data

base

and

Mar

tine

star

tsto

com

plet

eth

eircr

edits

one

byon

e.Ba

sed

onth

ein

-fo

rmat

ion

com

mun

icate

dby

perfo

rm-

ing

arts

orga

nisa

tions

’ow

nwe

bsite

s,pe

ople

are

linke

dto

prod

uctio

ns,

ac-

cord

ing

toth

eirfu

nctio

n.If

nece

s-

sary

thes

efu

nctio

nsar

e‘n

orm

alise

d’wi

thth

ehe

lpof

afu

nctio

n-re

fere

nce

shee

tpr

epar

edby

Bart

.Th

eoff

-sea

-so

nsu

mm

erpe

riod

isus

edfo

raye

arly

‘dat

a-ch

eck’

.M

embe

rsof

the

com

-m

unica

tion

depa

rtm

ents

ofre

levan

tor-

gani

satio

nsre

ceiv

ean

e-m

ailt

hat

in-

vite

sth

emto

log

into

the

data

base

and

repo

rtm

istak

esor

prop

ose

corre

c-tio

ns.

Alth

ough

this

‘dat

a-ch

eck’

has

not

yet

trig

gere

da

mas

sive

resp

onse

,we

find

som

eco

mm

ents

inth

eta

bleer-

ror_

reports

:

‘In

2003-2004

(première

17mei

2003)

en2004-2005

speelden

wij

devo

orstellin

gMet

dekikk

eralles

kits?of:eenka

bou

terop

eenklein

rood

brom

merke’

‘als

genre

is“theater”

wel

vol-

doende’

‘ArneLievens

isgeen

acteur!

Hij

deed

hetlichton

twerp’

9

Perspective

As

isev

iden

tfr

oma

wel

lest

ablis

hed

wor

kflow

,th

efe

edba

cklo

opbe

-tw

een

prac

tice

and

data

isex

trem

ely

tight

;it

mirr

ors

the

way

info

rmat

ion

isus

ually

orga

nise

dan

dco

mm

uni-

cate

dby

perf

orm

ing

arts

orga

nisa

-tio

nsth

emse

lves

(pos

ters

,bro

chur

es,

flyer

san

dw

eb-p

ages

are

arra

nged

arou

ndth

eun

itof

ase

ason

,fol

low

edby

the

unit

ofa

prod

uctio

nth

atea

chha

vea

list

ofcr

edits

).T

hepe

rti-

nent

choi

cefo

ran

even

t-ba

sed

per-

spec

tive

cont

inue

sth

eda

tam

odel

that

was

esta

blish

edin

the

The

-at

erja

arbo

eken

Vla

ande

ren

(The

atre

Year

book

sFl

ande

rs),

apr

ojec

tth

atda

ta.vti.be

inso

me

way

has

re-

plac

ed.

Inth

ese

year

lypu

blic

a-tio

ns,

prod

uctio

nsan

dth

eir

cred

itsar

em

etic

ulou

slyre

cord

edas

ofse

a-so

n19

65-1

966:

List

ing

ofpr

oduc

-tio

nsan

dth

eir

cred

itsin

The

ater

-ja

arbo

ekV

laan

-de

ren

1992

-199

3

Ape

rson

will

appe

arin

theV

Ti-d

ata-

base

once

she

iscr

edite

din

asp

ecifi

c

rela

tion

toa

part

icul

arpr

oduc

tion.

Wha

thap

pens

tow

ork

that

does

not

resu

ltin

a‘p

rodu

ct’?

May

beif

we

proj

ecte

dth

issa

me

appr

oach

onto

anot

her

field

,arc

hite

ctur

efo

rex

am-

ple:

coul

dw

eim

agin

eho

wsu

cha

‘nat

ural

’ap

proa

chm

ight

com

eat

apr

ice?

Not

man

yin

fluen

tial

‘pap

erar

chite

cts’

wou

ldbe

pres

ent

insu

cha

data

base

?H

owm

any

peop

lear

epr

esen

tth

atar

eno

tdi

rect

lylin

ked

toa

prod

uctio

n?

Pape

rarc

hite

cts?

Peop

lean

dth

eirr

elat

ions

hip

toot

her

data

obje

cts

Surp

risin

gly,

alm

ost

half

ofth

epe

o-pl

erep

rese

nted

inth

isda

taba

se,h

ave

10‘A

quaB

row

seri

nth

eV

Ti-L

ibra

ryw

illbr

ing

the

colle

ctio

nto

life

with

inst

anta

neou

sse

arch

re-

sults

,wor

das

soci

atio

nsan

dan

arra

yof

choi

ces

and

path

sus

ing

the

‘Sea

rch,

Disc

over

,R

efine

’de

sign

feat

ures

that

take

the

user

onan

in-

form

atio

njo

urne

ylik

ene

ver

imag

ined

befo

re.’

Pres

sre

leas

eM

edia

lab

Solu

tions

www.library-

techno

logy.org

(200

5)

nodi

rect

rela

tion

toan

ypr

oduc

-tio

n.In

alm

ost

ever

yca

seth

eyar

ein

clud

edbe

caus

eth

eyau

thor

eda

book

,an

artic

leor

phot

ogra

phth

atis

avai

labl

efr

omth

eV

Ti-l

i-br

ary.

Whe

nw

etr

yto

expl

ain

orco

ncer

ns,B

artr

emin

dsus

dryl

yth

atm

ost

peop

lein

the

pink

cate

gory

‘are

prob

ably

dull

thea

tre

scie

ntist

s’,m

eani

ng:

not

pape

rar

chite

cts.

We

won

der

ifw

eco

uld

use

this

popu

la-

tion

tosh

owho

wpe

ople

that

are

not

dire

ctly

linke

dto

aph

ysic

alev

ent,

mig

htha

vean

influ

ence

onth

eim

age

ofth

efie

ldof

the

perf

orm

ing

arts

,as

itis

cons

truc

ted

thro

ugh

data

.

Datab

asetimeline

Not

esfr

oma

phon

eco

nver

satio

nw

ithW

esse

l

Entr

ies

inth

ecu

rren

tda

taba

sedo

not

occu

rea

rlier

than

1998

,bu

ta

first

vers

ion

was

built

in19

93.

Itco

mbi

ned

office

man

agem

ent,

ali-

brar

yca

talo

gue

and

data

colle

ctio

n.

Itw

ascu

stom

built

and

cons

tant

lyex

tend

ed,

upda

ted

and

patc

hed

up.

Five

year

sla

ter

the

tech

nica

lco

n-te

xtha

dal

read

yra

dica

llych

ange

d,an

dw

ithit

also

the

unde

rsta

ndin

gof

wha

tthi

sdat

abas

eco

uld

beus

edfo

r.T

hepr

ojec

tst

arte

dto

take

cent

rest

agea

sato

olfo

rres

earc

han

dan

aly-

sis,a

ndfu

nctio

nsw

eres

epar

ated

into

diffe

rent

appl

icat

ions

.Fr

om20

03on

war

ds,

VT

ipu

blish

esth

eir

data

abou

tpe

ople

,in

stitu

tions

and

pro-

duct

ions

onlin

evi

aa

Dru

pal

fron

ten

d.T

helib

rary

cata

logu

eco

uld

bebr

owse

dvi

aa

sepa

rate

page

with

the

help

ofA

quaB

row

ser,

‘the

mar

-ke

t-le

adin

glib

rary

sear

chso

lutio

n’10.

In20

08,p

repa

ratio

nsw

ere

mad

efo

ra

larg

eup

date

ofth

eda

taen

viro

n-m

ents

.A

tth

ispo

int,

itw

asde

cide

dto

mer

geth

epr

oduc

tion

data

base

with

the

libra

ryca

talo

gue

agai

nso

that

cata

logu

ein

form

atio

nw

asno

wre

-inte

grat

edw

ithpe

ople

,fu

nctio

nsan

dor

gani

satio

ns.

All

data

was

mig

rate

dto

Post

-gr

eSQ

L,an

open

sour

ceob

ject

-rel

a-tio

nald

atab

ase

syst

em.

VT

ista

rted

toex

perim

ent

with

Res

earc

hD

e-sc

riptio

nFr

amew

orks

(RD

F)an

dSe

-m

antic

Web

stan

dard

s(Li

nked

Ope

nD

ata)

and

allp

ublic

cont

entr

elea

sed

unde

ra

Cre

ativ

eC

omm

ons

Att

ribu-

tion-

Non

com

mer

cial

-Sha

reA

like

2.0

Bel

gium

Lice

nse.

Overlap

Link

edO

pen

Dat

ais

base

don

the

idea

that

ifev

eryo

new

ould

mak

e‘ra

wda

ta’a

vaila

blei

na

stan

dard

for-

mat

that

expr

esse

show

one

thin

gre

-la

tes

toan

othe

r,w

eco

uld

then

con-

nect

all

thes

edi

sper

sed

data

-col

lec-

tions

and

prod

uce

mor

ein

telli

gent

,co

ntex

tual

sear

chen

gine

sfo

rex

am-

ple.

Com

bine

dw

ithpe

rmiss

ive

li-ce

nsin

g,bo

thhu

man

and

mac

hini

cus

ers

can

anal

yse,

proc

ess

and

scrip

tda

taw

ithou

tha

ving

toas

kpe

rmis-

sion,

aslo

ngas

resu

ltsar

em

ade

avai

labl

eun

der

the

sam

eco

nditi

on.

Link

edD

ata:

Isyo

urda

tafiv

est

ar?

We

unde

rsta

ndth

ein

vest

men

tof

VT

iin

Link

edD

ata

plus

Ope

nC

on-

tent

asa

mea

ning

fuls

trat

egic

choi

ce.

The

qual

ityof

the

mat

eria

lth

atda

ta.vti.be

has

colle

cted

,de

rives

from

itssp

ecifi

city

and

dept

h.B

utif

the

boun

darie

sof

this

colle

ctio

nca

nnot

best

ruct

ural

lyin

terr

ogat

ed,

thei

rst

reng

thqu

ickl

ytu

rns

into

alim

itatio

n.

54 55Bia

sco

uld

beco

me

pote

ntia

llyle

gi-

ble

ifus

ers

coul

dm

ore

easil

yco

m-

pare

diffe

renc

esan

dom

issio

nsbe

-tw

een

over

lapp

ing

data

colle

ctio

ns.11

Tim

Ber

ners

Lee

twee

tsT

HIS

ISFO

REV

ERY

-O

NE

atth

eLo

ndon

Oly

mpi

csop

enin

g,20

12

11Fe

mke

Snel

ting:

Do

you

feel

that

info

rmat

ion

isbe

ing

flatt

ened

out

byth

eus

eof

Link

edD

ata?

Drie

sM

oree

ls:T

here

isof

cour

sea

risk,

that

you

need

tono

rmal

isea

num

bero

fthi

ngs.

Wel

l,it

does

not

have

tobe

like

that

.T

hebe

auty

ofLi

nked

Ope

nD

ata

isth

atit

does

not

need

tole

vel.

Soyo

uca

nju

stsa

y:th

isis

my

vo-

cabu

lary

,an

dth

isis

my

data

.A

ndI

dono

tco

mfo

rmto

any

othe

rvo

cabu

lary

than

the

one

Ide

clar

ehe

re.

You

can

keep

itas

criti

cal

asyo

uw

ant.

You

can

still

link

the

data

,bu

tit

ofco

urse

mak

esit

hard

erfo

rus

ers

todo

som

ethi

ngw

ithit.

The

ym

ust

mak

ean

effor

tto

unde

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cabu

lary

.(I

nter

view

for

Jonc

tions

/Ver

bind

inge

n12

:By

Dat

aW

eMea

n,20

09)

12‘R

ealn

ame

Chr

istia

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agm

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own

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uwel

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me

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De

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Wim

De

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ter’

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ame

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esbe

t’

We

too

find

the

prom

iseof

afle

xibl

ean

dm

ulti-

dim

ensio

nal

data

-mod

elha

rdto

resis

tan

ddi

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ew

orld

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man

ticte

chno

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es,

eage

rto

find

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san

dte

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ques

that

we

can

appl

yin

proj

ects

that

we

are

deve

lopi

ngw

ithan

dfo

rV

Ti.

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nwhi

le,

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elog

ue:

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ping

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orm

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Art

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obili

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des

with

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rete

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tions

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linki

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taof

Euro

pean

perf

orm

ing

arts

inst

itutio

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ndcl

oser

toho

me

prep

arat

ions

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mad

eto

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lycr

oss-

conn

ect

artis

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ogra

phie

sat

bamart.be,

even

tin

form

atio

npu

b-lis

hed

oncultuu

rnet.be

and

per-

form

ing

arts

data

atda

ta.vti.be.

But

itis

not

easy

tom

ake

our

daily

data

real

ities

live

upto

the

pass

ion-

ate

optim

ismof

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antic

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irT

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erne

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e.

#go

away

User-agent:

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data.vti.be/robots.txt

(Oct

ober

2012

)

Tech

nolo

gies

for

proc

essin

g,pu

blish

-in

gan

dvi

sual

ising

Link

edD

ata

are

still

rela

tivel

yim

mat

ure

and

sem

an-

ticse

rver

tech

nolo

gies

cost

lyan

dslo

w.

For

perf

orm

ance

reas

ons,

Wes

sel

has

tem

pora

rily

disa

llow

edin

dexi

ngby

auto

mat

iccr

awle

rs.

Thi

sm

eans

that

curr

ently

none

ofth

ehi

ghqu

ality

info

rmat

ion

avai

labl

eat

VT

isho

ws

upin

sear

chre

sults

.

At

this

poin

tin

time

VT

ido

esno

tpu

blish

thei

rda

tain

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ely

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rest

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sw

ill,j

ust

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eed

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ork

thei

rw

ayth

roug

ha

hefty

data

base

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pin

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enjo

yth

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turn

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toou

rPo

stgr

eSQ

Lex

port

and

cont

inue

brow

sing

the

post

-its-

tabl

etha

tdoc

umen

tsa

livel

ypr

oces

sof

cont

inuo

usda

ta-g

arde

n-in

g:

2009-05-25

17:08:38.903

‘Echte

naam

Christian

eSlagmulder’

2009-05-25

17:08:38.903

‘Ook

bekendalsJoha

nnes

Pau

wels’

2009-05-25

17:08:38.903

‘Isnu

vrou

w’

2009-05-25

17:08:38.903

‘Was

vroegerman

’2009-05-25

17:08:38.903

‘nietdezelfde

alsSo

fieDeSm

et!’

2009-05-25

17:08:38.903

‘nietdezelfde

alsSo

phie

DeSm

et!’

2009-05-25

17:08:38.903

‘=Wim

DeCoster’

2009-05-25

17:08:38.903

‘officële

naam

isLiesbet’12

Pulse

Each

data

base

entr

yha

sa

time-

stam

pth

atre

cord

sex

actly

whe

na

user

has

clic

ked

‘save

’.W

est

art

tofa

ntas

iseab

out

how

we

coul

dm

apth

e‘p

ulse

’of

this

data

base

;ho

ww

eco

uld

show

adi

alog

uebe

twee

nhu

-m

anan

dm

achi

neac

tivity

over

time.

Wou

ldit

bein

tere

stin

gto

para

l-le

lth

etim

elin

eof

the

data

base

toch

ange

sin

the

field

that

the

data

re-

late

sto

?

All

data

base

entr

ies

acco

rdin

gto

date

ofen

try

Sam

egra

ph,f

ocus

edon

ase

lect

ion

ofta

bles

(relationships

,people,postits

,boo

ktitles,prod

uction

san

derror_

reports

)

56 57Function

san

droles

The

notio

nof

‘func

tion’

inda

ta.vti.be

has

fasc

inat

edus

from

the

star

t.It

mak

esse

nse

inre

latio

nto

the

actu

alsu

bjec

tof

the

data

base

(rec

ordi

ngcr

edits

ofpe

ople

and

orga

nisa

tions

inre

latio

nto

thea

tera

ndda

ncep

rodu

c-tio

ns)

but

also

map

squ

itena

tura

llyto

the

conc

ept

ofLi

nked

Ope

nD

ata

that

VT

ihas

deci

ded

tom

odel

thei

rda

taaf

ter.

Cen

tral

toth

isis

that

you

orga

nise

data

intr

iple

s,sm

all

clus

-te

rsto

expr

ess

how

one

data

-obj

ect

rela

tes

toan

othe

r:

Ann

eTeresa

De

Keersmaeker→

choreograp

hy→

Elena

’sAria

Ann

eTeresa

De

Keersmaeker→

dance→

Elena

’sAria

Cyn

thiaLoemij→

dance→

Elena

’sAria

Elena

’sAria

→co-produ

ction

→Rosas

13‘In

addi

tion,

we

need

tota

kein

toac

coun

tth

atso

-cal

led

func

tion

desc

riptio

nsar

eno

tst

able

.T

hey

are

also

hist

oric

ally

dete

rmin

ed.

The

yar

epa

rtof

acr

eativ

epr

oces

s,su

bjec

tto

fads

,an

dso

met

imes

resp

ond

slow

lyto

ach

angi

ngpr

actic

e.’J

oris

Jans

sens

,‘Fa

beld

ier

kom

top

deka

art.

“Spe

len”

en“m

aken

”in

het

Vla

amse

thea

ter

sinds

1993

’(‘M

appi

ngth

eM

ythi

cal

Cre

atur

e.“A

ctin

g”an

d“c

reat

ing”

inFl

em-

ishth

eatr

esin

ce19

93’),

in:

Cou

rant

92,

Feb-

ruar

y-M

arch

2010

.

The

refo

re,

each

piec

eof

data

atda

ta.vti.be

isco

ntex

tual

ised

bylin

ksto

othe

rda

ta,a

ndth

ese

links

them

-se

lves

are

‘qua

lified

’th

roug

hth

eir

func

tion

orro

le.

Apr

oduc

tion

islin

ked

toa

pers

on(in

this

case

:Li

eve

Pyno

ofo

rco

stum

ede

sign

ofth

epr

o-du

ctio

nB

erna

detj

e)by

pick

ing

afu

nctio

nfr

oma

list

ofsu

gges

tions

.

Itno

ton

lym

akes

for

anin

cred

ibly

rich

web

ofco

nnec

tions

,but

also

al-

low

sus

topo

tent

ially

look

atth

esh

ifts

and

chan

ges

that

occu

rin

how

peop

lequ

alify

thei

rre

latio

nshi

pto

thei

rw

ork

and

itsou

tcom

e:pr

oduc

-tio

ns.

Func

tion

sin

time

Sinc

eth

eco

llect

ion

ofro

les

ism

ostly

‘har

vest

ed’

from

web

sites

and

sea-

son

broc

hure

spr

oduc

edby

perf

orm

-in

gar

tsor

gani

satio

nsth

emse

lves

,we

expe

ctch

ange

san

din

cons

isten

cies

.Id

eas

abou

tw

hoto

cred

itan

dho

wha

vech

ange

dov

ertim

e.13

But

whe

nw

eas

kFl

oris

abou

tth

eir

proc

edur

efo

rcre

atin

gne

wfu

nctio

ns,

we

are

surp

rised

tofin

dou

tth

athe

has

not

crea

ted

ane

wfu

nctio

nsin

cehe

star

ted

wor

king

atV

Tit

hree

year

sag

o.W

hen

we

look

atth

ecr

eatio

nda

tes

offu

nctio

ns,

we

see

that

the

last

entr

yha

sin

deed

been

mad

e2009-05-25

17:08:38.903

and

that

the

crea

tion

ofne

wfu

nctio

nsha

sst

abili

sed

over

time:

Am

ount

ofne

wfu

nctio

nscr

eate

dpe

rye

ar.

In19

9841

2ex

istin

gfu

nctio

nsw

ere

impo

rted

from

Mic

roso

ftA

cces

sin

toth

ecu

rren

tPo

stgr

eSQ

Lda

taba

se

Inst

ead

oflo

okin

gat

whe

nne

wfu

nc-

tions

wer

ead

ded,

we

need

tolo

okat

the

popu

larit

yof

func

tions

over

time.

At

wha

tpo

int

wer

ew

hich

func

tions

atta

ched

tope

ople

and

prod

uctio

ns?

We

pick

thre

eof

the

mos

tpo

pula

ron

esan

dco

mpa

reth

eir

usag

e:

Func

tions

ente

red

byV

Ti:

acto

r,da

ncer

and

byan

dw

ith

acco

rdin

gto

date

ofen

try

(tim

e-st

amp)

The

grap

hab

ove

star

tsat

1998

(whe

nfir

sten

trie

sw

ere

reco

rded

)an

den

dsin

Sept

embe

r20

12,

whe

nw

ere

ceiv

edth

eda

tadu

mp.

Hal

fway

2007

and

agai

nby

the

begi

nnin

gof

2012

,th

efu

nctio

nsac

tor

and

danc

erw

ere

ente

red

man

ytim

es.

We

prod

uce

ase

cond

grap

h,sh

ow-

ing

the

sam

efu

nctio

nsbu

tno

wpl

ot-

ted

acco

rdin

gto

the

date

ofth

epr

o-du

ctio

nth

eyw

ere

rela

ted

to.

Even

whe

nw

eha

veno

tta

ken

into

ac-

coun

tw

heth

erth

eam

ount

ofpr

o-du

ctio

nsch

ange

dfo

rcer

tain

seas

ons,

this

grap

hse

emst

ore

flect

thed

iscus

-

sion

onm

akin

gan

dac

ting

that

we

refe

rred

toea

rlier

.B

utw

ear

em

ost

ofal

lint

rigue

dby

the

fact

that

ther

ear

elitt

lesim

ilarit

iesb

etw

een

ourfi

rst

and

seco

ndex

erci

se.

Whi

leth

ew

ork-

flow

for

data

colle

ctio

nat

VT

isee

ms

tight

lylin

ked

toth

eac

tual

rhyt

hmof

prem

iere

s,th

ese

two

grap

hssp

eak

abou

tve

rydi

ffere

ntte

mpo

ralit

ies:

Func

tions

reco

rded

inth

efie

ld:

acto

r,da

ncer

and

byan

dw

ith

acco

rdin

gto

date

ofpr

oduc

-tio

n

Artisticvs.no

n-artistic

Sinc

e19

93,

the

list

ofav

aila

ble

func

tions

has

expa

nded

to641

en-

trie

s.So

me

over

lapp

edan

dot

hers

wer

eco

nsid

ered

conf

usin

g.M

any

had

neve

rbe

enus

edbe

caus

eth

eyw

ere

inhe

rited

from

apa

stin

carn

a-tio

nas

cont

act

data

base

:M

inis

ter

14M

inis

ter

ofC

ultu

re,R

espo

nsib

lefo

rpe

r-so

nnel

,May

or.

van

Cul

tuur

,P

erso

neel

sver

ant-

woo

rdel

ijke,

Bur

gem

eest

er14.

In20

10,a

roun

dth

etim

eth

atth

eris

-in

gpo

pula

rity

ofin

clus

ive

func

tion

desc

riptio

nssu

chas

byan

dw

ith

isbe

ing

anal

ysed

inC

oura

nt92

:O

ver

‘Spe

len’

en‘M

aken

’,B

art

star

tsto

upda

teth

elis

t.

20m

ost

used

role

san

dth

eir

chan

ges.

Red

un-

dant

cate

gorie

sm

arke

din

pink

(201

0)

The

upda

tein

clud

esa

‘nor

mal

isa-

tion’

ofde

scrip

tions

.D

ance

rno

wis

liste

das

danc

e;ch

oreo

gra-

pher

beco

mes

chor

eogr

aphy

.T

hetr

ansla

tion

ofa

prof

essio

n(m

usi-

cian

,dr

amat

urge

,de

sign

er)

into

afu

nctio

n(m

usic

,dr

amat

urgy

,de

sign

)im

plie

sa

subt

lebu

tsig

nifi-

cant

lingu

istic

shift

:A

nna

Tere

saD

eK

eers

mae

ker

isno

ta

danc

er,

but

her

rela

tions

hip

toa

part

icul

arpr

o-du

ctio

nis

danc

e.

Ano

ther

deci

sion

isto

incl

ude

only

thos

efu

nctio

nsth

atar

eco

nsid

ered

‘art

istic

’.It

mea

nsth

atas

of20

10ne

ither

soun

dte

chni

que

nor

cate

ring

islo

gged

inth

eda

taba

se.

Inth

epr

oces

s,th

elis

toff

unct

ions

isre

duce

dfr

om641

to162.

How

tode

alw

ithan

ambi

guou

scr

edit

such

asso

und?

Ade

cisio

ntr

eefo

rdec

idin

gw

heth

eran

unsp

ecifi

edro

lesh

ould

beco

nsid

ered

‘art

istic

’or

not

(bas

edon

conv

ersa

tion

with

Flor

is).

We

cont

inue

tobe

puzz

led

byth

isdi

visio

n.To

deci

debe

twee

n‘a

rtis-

tic’a

nd‘n

on-a

rtist

ic’w

ork

seem

sun-

char

acte

ristic

ally

pres

umpt

uous

but

from

disc

ussio

nsw

ithV

Ti-s

taff

we

unde

rsta

ndth

atin

the

perf

orm

ing

arts

,th

efa

ult-

line

mus

tfo

llow

ara

ther

wel

les

tabl

ished

divi

sion

ofla

bour

.B

art

expl

ains

:‘S

omeb

ody

that

ison

stag

e,or

conc

eptu

ally

influ

ence

sth

ear

tistic

resu

ltis

in-

clud

ed.

Ifit

isju

stab

out

tech

nica

lex

ecut

ion,

it’s

not’.

Inorde

rof

appearanc

e

We

won

der

how

the

orde

rth

atcr

edits

appe

aron

web

sites

and

inbr

ochu

res

refle

cts

this

divi

sion

be-

twee

n‘a

rtist

ic’a

nd‘n

on-a

rtist

ic’.

Ifw

eas

sum

eth

ata

func

tion

plac

edhi

gher

upin

the

hier

arch

yof

cred

its,

isco

nsid

ered

asof

mor

eim

port

ance

toth

eac

tual

prod

uctio

nth

anon

eth

atw

aspl

aced

low

er,w

emig

htge

tase

nse

ofw

here

the

field

ofpe

rfor

min

gar

tsw

ould

draw

the

line.

58 59Ove

rvie

wan

dde

tail

ofcr

edit

listin

gsfo

ral

l39

prod

uctio

nsth

atpr

emie

red

inFl

ande

rsin

Oct

ober

2011

.Pr

oduc

tions

with

now

ebac

ces-

sible

arch

ive

are

mar

ked

ingr

ey.

15co

mpa

nype

rfor

man

cete

xtdi

rect

ion

mus

icso

unds

cape

film

imag

elig

htin

gde

sign

cost

umes

Toge

ta

sens

eof

the

way

cred

itlis

tings

mig

htdi

ffer

and

conv

erge

,w

est

art

repl

ayin

gth

ew

orkfl

owth

atFl

oris

desc

ribed

tous

earli

er.

Usin

gth

elin

kshe

prep

ared

for

Mar

tine

in20110916.doc

,w

em

ake

anat

tem

ptto

harv

estc

redi

tlist

ings

asth

eyw

ere

orig

inal

lyfo

rmat

ted.

The

irvo

cab-

ular

yva

ries

even

mor

ew

ildly

than

imag

ined

(we

find159

diffe

rent

func

-tio

ns),

but

only

then

we

real

iseho

wlit

tlein

form

atio

nab

out

the

past

issa

ved

byth

eate

ran

dda

nce

com

pa-

nies

them

selv

es.

On

each

web

site

we

find

deta

iled

in-

form

atio

nab

out

curr

ent

and

upco

m-

ing

prod

uctio

ns,

incl

udin

gde

scrip

-tio

ns,

cred

itsan

dim

ages

.B

uton

ceth

ese

ason

isov

er,

muc

hof

itgo

esm

issin

g.

The

re’s

notim

elik

eth

epr

esen

t:w

eb-p

ages

with

info

rmat

ion

abou

tA

chte

rde

Wol

ken

(’tA

RSE

NA

AL)

and

Turn

ing

Turn

ing

(CA

MPO

),on

eye

arla

ter

We

retu

rnto

the

VT

i-dat

abas

e.T

here

isno

reco

rdke

ptof

the

or-

der

that

func

tions

wer

eor

igin

ally

com

mun

icat

edbu

tsin

ceM

artin

een

-te

rscr

edits

usua

llyon

eby

one,

us-

ing

the

actu

allis

tings

aspu

blish

edby

the

com

pani

es,

we

mig

htbe

able

toge

tso

me

idea

ofth

ehi

-er

arch

yof

cred

itsth

roug

hpr

oces

s-in

gtim

esta

mps

.Jo

risis

skep

tical

abou

tou

rm

etho

d;w

eca

non

lyho

peth

atM

artin

e’sw

orkfl

owis

cons

isten

ten

ough

topr

oduc

eda

tath

atw

eca

nus

e,ev

enw

hen

our

purp

ose

issp

ec-

ulat

ive.

We

star

tpr

oces

sing

the

func

tion

ta-

ble

acco

rdin

gto

times

tam

ps.

On

2007-06-11

betw

een

16:36:23

and17:05:58,11

cred

itsw

ere

ente

red

for

the

prod

uctio

nW

issel

tijd:

440663

Wisseltijd

2007-06-11

16:36:23

1gezelschap

2007-06-11

16:36:34

2spel

2007-06-11

16:36:52

3tekst

2007-06-11

16:36:58

4regie

2007-06-11

16:37:11

5muziek

2007-06-11

16:37:18

6soun

dscape

2007-06-11

16:37:25

7film

2007-06-11

17:05:32

8beeld

2007-06-11

17:05:40

9belichting

2007-06-11

17:05:44

10vorm

geving

2007-06-11

17:05:58

11kostum

er-

ing1

5

For

each

prod

uctio

n,w

epr

oduc

ea

simila

rlis

tan

dra

nkfu

nctio

nsin

or-

der

ofap

pear

ance

.T

his

isw

hat

we

end

upw

ith:

Func

tions

that

wer

em

ost

ofte

nen

tere

dfir

st,

are

onto

p;ba

rle

ngth

repr

esen

tsam

ount

ofen

-tr

ies

Gez

elsc

hap

(com

pany

),is

both

popu

lar

and

usua

llyen

tere

dfir

st.

Thi

sm

akes

sens

e,sin

ceth

atin

for-

mat

ion

can

not

beco

pied

from

the

cred

itlis

tits

elfb

utim

plie

dth

roug

hth

eso

urce

ofth

ecr

edit-

listin

g.A

f-te

rpr

oduc

erfo

llow

sau

thor

,con

-ce

ptan

dpe

rfor

man

cean

dby

and

wit

h.Su

ppor

tfu

nctio

nssu

chas

desi

gnan

ddr

amat

urgy

have

all

ende

dup

onth

ebo

ttom

half

ofth

elis

t.

The

resu

ltsar

em

essy

and

we

are

not

real

lysu

reho

wto

use

them

but

som

ehow

we

are

relie

ved

tose

eth

eco

mpl

expa

tter

nof

hum

ans

atw

ork

com

eth

roug

h.It

poin

tsat

the

com

-pl

exity

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practical/who

65

The job of a lifetime? Careers in subsidised arts organisations 2008-2010

While the European financial crisis does not yet seem to have followed its course to the end and our economy is still in convulsions, the demographic transition on our labour market seems to be approaching unperturbed. In the next few years the generation born after 1945 will increasingly be leaving the labour market. This will be especially felt in Flanders. Forecasts speak of a to-tal of 300,000 replacements needed between 2010 and 2015, without taking into account any possible further growth in the economy. It will come as no surprise that the coming generations may not be sufficient in number to pro-vide for these replacements. Since the number of births continued to steadily grow until 1965, the so-called replacement rate on the labour market (the ra-tio between over-55s and under-25s) will continue to drop for several years to come. Consequently, in 2020 there will be only 80 potential ‘entrants’ available for every 100 potential ‘leavers’. Some believe this will unleash a war for talents on the labour market, in which employers will try to trump each other to con-tinue to fill the vacancies that have become available. In the meantime the list of problem professions will continue to grow. An important effect of the demo-graphic transition, in which the proportion of ‘non-employed’ or ‘dependants’ compared to the number of ‘working/contributors’ will continue to rise, is that the financing of social security will come under extra pressure1. It is therefore for good reason that the policy-makers continue to hammer on about keeping everyone working (longer). Against this background of the labour market as a whole, this article takes a brief look at employment in the subsidised arts sec-tor, and mainly from three angles of approach: age, gender and the mobility of employees between employers. Apart from a general picture of employment in various arts organisations that are subsidised under the Arts Decree, we will also take a closer look at the employment of artists in this field.

1 FortheconcreteprognosisseetheannualreportsoftheHogeRaadvoorFinanciëns(HighCouncilofFinances’)StudyCommissiononAging.

Maarten Bresseleers

go to content page

66 67

For each organisation shown in Table 1 we see all the individuals who have been employed here in the specified period. In 2008 this involves 3,671 people who worked as an employee for at least one day for at least one of these organisations. In 2009 this was 3,801 and in 2010 4,340. For each of these em-ployees we also have the number of working days they worked per employer, as well as some personal information such as age and gender. Based on these data we can make further analyses. It should be noted, however, that here we are only dealing with the work done by individuals who were active as employees. People who have worked in another status on behalf of these organisations, such as self-employed people and temporary staff (in the service of a Social Bureau for Artists for example) are not included in the analysis. Work for which no social security benefits are payable, such as volunteer work or activities paid by way of the small payment scheme are not included either.

Employment in arts organisations

Age and gender in structurally subsidised arts organisationsIn Chart 1 we present the relative numbers of employees of structurally subsi-dised arts organisations per age group and compare the data of the arts sector with those of the Flemish labour market as a whole. This allows us to see how age distribution in the arts sector relates to age distribution in the whole work-ing population of the Flemish Region.

Chart 1. Age ratios in structurally subsidised organisations in PC 304 and on the Flemish labour market (2008-2010)

Structurally subsidised organisations in PC 304 from 2008 to 2010

As an organiser of sector pensions for the joint committee (PC or ‘paritair comi-té’) 304, known as the ‘entertainment business’, the Sociaal Fonds voor de Podi-umkunsten (Social Fund for the Performing Arts, abbreviated here SFP) has the employment data of employers who are members of this joint committee and are either located in the Flemish Region, or registered as a Dutch-speaking em-ployer in the Brussels Capital Region. This was a total of more than 439 employ-ers in 2010, 45% of whom received subsidies from the Ministry of the Flemish Community, per project or structurally, on the basis of the Arts Decree or other policy sectors. For several organisations (11) in the sector who have their own pension schemes we only have incomplete data.2

In this article we will discuss only the employment data of organisations that were structurally subsidised under the Arts Decree for the period from 2008 to 2010. This period includes the start of the global economic crisis and the transition between the structural funding rounds of 2006-2009 and 2010-2012. Since the area of application of the PC 304 is the performing arts, this involves methods from the following domains or disciplines: multidisciplinary arts cen-tres, workshops and festivals, theatre, dance, music theatre, music, audiovisual arts, art education and social art. It involves the following figures, divided up by type of work (as defined under the Arts Decree) and their respective share in the total number of subsidised organisations.

2 Wereceivedonlytheemploymentdataforworkerswhohaveperformedartisticworkfromtheseemployers,necessaryforthecalculationoftheadditionalpremiumsforartists,asprovidedinthesectorpensionplan.

2008 2009 2010 Percentage of total number of organisations per type of work (2010)

Concert organisations 5 6 8 73%Dance companies 8 8 10 91%Festivals 19 20 18 62%Larger institutions 2 2 2 40%Art education organisations 1 1 8%Arts centres 14 14 14 64%Music clubs 8 8 10 63%Music ensembles 24 24 26 93%Music theatre companies 8 8 9 100%Audiovisual art organisations 1 6%Socio-artistic activities 5 5 7 58%Theatre companies 35 35 43 98%Workshops 9 9 14 58%Total 137 140 163

Table 1. Number of structurally subsidised organisations in PC 304 included in the analysis

-24 25-29 30-34 35-39 40-44 45-49 50-54 55-59 60-64 65+

2008 arts 7,8% 19,7% 20,8% 15,1% 13,1% 10,7% 6,6% 4,1% 1,4% 0,7%

2009 arts 8,3% 19,2% 20,7% 14,9% 12,5% 10,6% 7,1% 4,3% 1,6% 0,8%

2010 arts 8,8% 18,4% 20,5% 14,6% 12,6% 10,2% 6,9% 5,0% 2,0% 0,9%

2008 Flemish Community 10,1% 13,3% 12,6% 13,7% 14,8% 14,2% 11,7% 7,4% 1,8% 0,4%

2009 Flemish Community 9,4% 13,1% 12,7% 13,4% 14,4% 14,5% 12,2% 7,9% 2,0% 0,5%

2010 Flemish Community 9,2% 12,9% 12,8% 13,0% 14,1% 14,6% 12,5% 8,3% 2,1% 0,5%

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the grey area, this means that there are proportionately fewer women working in the sector than their share of the over-all labour market. In the youngest age group (30 years), it is striking that rela-tively more women than men are em-ployed, and that there are more females in the sector than in the labour market as a whole. From 30 years onwards how-ever the proportion is reversed: the pro-portion then falls to below 40% in the age group 45-49 years. Completely in contrast to the social trend, the presence of women increases once again from the age of 50 years onwards, even though they remain under-represented across the board in relation to men. In the age group 60-64 years, there are even rela-tively more women employed than their overall share of the Flemish labour market. Later on we shall examine whether this also applies to the artistic staff in the sector.

There are two ways we can interpret the above findings. On the one hand it may be that the large proportion of young people in the industry is a so-called cohort effect that is specific to the sector at this time. A possible expla-nation for such a pattern may be found in the growth of the sector over the last ten to fifteen years, and we assume that new organisations mainly hired young people. However, we find this implausible. Alternatively, we can assume that this age and gender pattern is specific to the arts sector and recurs cohort after cohort. This hypothesis seems more plausible. Presumably many people leave the sector after a time because of the rather low wages, often limited growth opportunities, the large amount of work that has to be done in the evening and weekends, the incompatibility of the job with family, or the failure of the job to meet expectations. The limited presence of women aged 30 years compared to the overall percentage of women on the labour market may indicate that working in this sector is probably hard to combine with a (young) family life, if we assume that having children is more onerous for women than for men in the first few years after birth. An inquiry into what motivates people to leave the sector (definitively or temporarily) would explain a lot. To get a definite answer as to whether we have established a cohort effect or a sector phenomenon we would have to consult data covering a longer period of time.

Chart 1 shows some clear deviations in the arts labour market compared to the overall labour market in Flanders. The green lines indicate the distribu-tion of workers in the arts organisations for the three years. The grey and black lines show the distribution of the Flemish working population. The arts sector is clearly a young industry. More than half of the employees in the structurally sub-sidised organisations are between 25 and 39 years old. That is almost 40% more than the overall percentage of this age group on the labour market. If we look more closely however, we see a marked decline after the age of 30 to 34 years. In men, the age group of 35-40 years declined by more than a quarter in 2010, in women it is as much as a third. From the age of 40 to 45 years the arts sector clearly drops below the line of the Flemish labour market. The proportion of the 50 + group indeed increased slightly to 14.9% in 2010, but remains significantly under-represented (one third less than their share of the general labour market).

In the following chart we examine the gender distribution of the rel-evant workers. Here we look at the situation in 2010.

Chart 2. Number of women in structurally subsidised arts organisations and on the Flemish labour market (2010).

The grey area in Chart 2 is the percentage of women per age group in the overall/global labour market in Flanders. Here we see that the percentage of working women is still slightly lower than the percentage of working men, and this in every age group.3 The green bars indicate the percentage of women in structurally subsidised arts organisations in 2010. If these bars are lower than

3 In2010theemploymentpercentageformeninthefourthquarterwas71.1%,forwomen61.3%(seewww.werk.be)

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‘The issue of being a woman in contemporary music

is often something people talk about, compared to

other artistic disciplines, certainly in written score

music. Women exist in the smallest percentage let’s

say. I think it’s probably about 10 or 15 percent,

maybe 20, if we’re lucky. And of course we get

played, we get commissioned, but there is a strange

kind of tokenism going on with women. We feel

that there is a limited amount of space for us to

be in this world and there is people who think “oh,

we should put a woman on this concert” and then

there is an available slot for women. So I feel in

this manner I might be in certain circumstances

competing with other female composers,

specifically. And it’s not very interesting because

there may not be anything tying us together apart

from being women …’ Joana Bailhie

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Employment of staff doing artistic work

In this section we will take a closer look at the employment of staff doing artistic work. Since this work is eligible for a social security reduction, it is also registered separately in wage tables, namely under employee code ‘46’. For the analyses that follow, apart from our own data we can also rely on the data of the Kruistpuntbank voor de Sociale Zekerheid (Central Databank for Social Security, abbreviated here KSZ). With this information we can first look at the evolution in artistic work at a national level and then, on the basis of the PC 304 data, further highlight the three professional groups in our sector: artists in dance, theatre and music.

Tendency towards freelancing increases even further In previous VTi studies and publications it was stated that the employment of artists increasingly takes place on a freelance basis, with an ever larger group being paid for their work through temporary contracts and third-party pay-ment schemes. To find solid evidence for this finding on the basis of wider em-ployment data, we asked the Central Databank for Social Security for data on all employees who perform artistic work registered under employee code ‘46’. This involves all forms of artistic activities4 in which temporary work and third-party payment schemes are included in the analysis. Work that was paid for by remu-neration for which no social security contributions are payable, such as volun-tary work or through the small payment scheme for artists, is not included, but can also hardly be regarded as being a part of the professional artistic sector. Let us look at the data from the three Belgian regions together.

The green dots in the diagram below show the evolution in the number of artists, i.e. the number of individuals who provide artistic services under the employee scheme. In 2010 there were slightly more than 20,000 artists in Bel-gium (according to this definition), an increase of over 40% compared to 2006. The number of artists is indicated in the scale on the right-hand side of the chart. The left-hand vertical axis shows the scale in relation to the job descrip-tion (FTE or full-time employees). If, for 2010, we divide up the tasks that the aforementioned artists have carried out, according to the joint committee of employers for whom they mainly worked, the PC 304 (entertainment business)

4 Initsinstructions,theRSZ(RijksdienstvoorArbeidsvoorzieningorNationalSocialSecurityOffice)statesthat‘performingartisticworkand/orproducingartisticworks’meansthecreationand/orimplementationorinterpretationofartisticworksintheaudiovisualandvisualarts,music,literature,entertainment,theatreandchoreography.

There is substantial evidence that careers in the sector are a kind of elimination race. The fact that the representation of women increases as they get older is therefore indeed remarkable. It is difficult to estimate how this situ-ation will evolve in an increasingly tight labour market, but if the industry wants to continue to attract young talent and especially retain it, it might perhaps be a good idea to take a look at the benefits that we as a sector are willing and able to offer. It’s about more than just salary. We can ask ourselves how we as a sector can provide a better guarantee for sustainable employment than is current-ly the case. Are employees given real opportunities to continue in the sector for their entire career, until their retirement? Of course the subsidy policy also plays a role here: if ‘older’ organisations are eliminated and/or ‘young’ organisa-tions are called into the field, this also changes the demographics in the sector.

Mobility of employees in structurally subsidised arts organisations (2008-2010) In the next step we examined the mobility of employees within the set of struc-turally subsidised organisations over the three years for which we have data. In arts sectors much of the work is in the form of projects. This translates into high inflow and outflow rates. More than 1 in 5 employees in the whole of PC 304, with both subsidised and non-subsidised employers, no longer works for the same employer in the sector within one year, while more than 8% go to work for another employer in the sector. This makes the ‘entertainment business’ one of the more dynamic sectors on the labour market, after the catering and temporary employment industry. Not only is there a large turnover of workers, but the proportion of permanent workers is also relatively limited compared to the group of flexible or part-time workers. To give you an idea: in 2010 only 20% of the employees of subsidised arts organisations worked full-time for a whole year (261 days).

In many cases, employees have also worked for various employers in our dataset within one year. This is especially true for the artistic profiles. They comprise more than 80% of the group of workers who worked for several sub-sidised arts organisations in the same year. Of the other groups of workers, in 2010 only office staff had worked for various employers but this group com-prises only 5% of the total number of office staff.

To find out whether there are more notable differences between artis-tic and non-artistic staff in the sector, we will focus on the artistic profiles em-ployed in the sector.

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Chart 4: Evolution of the employment of staff doing artistic work, Belgium (2006-2010)

As already stated, the number of artists under the social security em-ployee scheme is steadily rising. Between 2006 and 2010 this was an increase of 44%. The gross wage cost and the job description (number of FTE) that rep-resents their employment, do not keep pace with this. Here the respective in-crease is 34% and 30%. The cake, which is indeed growing, is therefore divided proportionally among more artists, so that the average income has dropped. Although there is a noticeable slowing down of the overall increase in 2009, all three aspects continued to grow steadily in 2010. Unfortunately, based on the data of the Central Databank we have no further profile information on the relevant performing and visual artists and so for now we can say nothing about the age groups within which these increases occur or the gender ratios.

With regard to this growth it should be noted that in 2012 the question has been asked whether the increase in the number of artists who have worked and fall under the Employee Statute is actually related to real growth in the arts sector and not to a broadening interpretation of what constitutes ‘artistic work’ so as to be eligible for the benefit schemes relating to unemployment which was specially created for artists.

represents 37.1% of employment followed by PC 337 (non-profit)5 with 29.5% and PC 322 (temporary employment sector) with 17%.6 The latter two represent freelance employment, and in particular, the third-party payment scheme and temporary employment.

Chart 3. Evolution number of employees engaged in artistic work, classified according to the relevant joint committee, Belgium (2006-2010)

In Chart 4 we present, based on the same Belgian data, parallel evolu-tions in the number of individual artists, the full-time equivalent of the work of all these artists and the total gross salary cost spread over the artists. We take the data from 2006 as a starting point (index=100) and show the evolution of these three parameters.

5 PC337isthejointcommitteeinwhichtheSecretariatforTemporaryWorkForces,oneofthesub-activitiesofSMartBe,registerstheworkofitsmembers,whichincludesworkingunderArticle1aoftheLawonemploymentcontracts(non-standardemploymentcontract).Before2009,thishappenedunderPC218,ascanclearlybeseeninthediagram.

6 Theremaining26.4%of2010fallsunderPC218andsomeotherPCsnotshown,suchasfilmandfederalinstitutionssuchasDeMunt/LaMonnaieandBOZAR.

150145140135130125120115110105100

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The grey area represents the percentage per age group on the Flemish labour market. The lines represent the distribution of dancers, musicians and theatre-makers. If the lines are above the grey zone, this age group is over- represented from the perspective of the Flemish labour market, if they fall within the grey zone it is under-represented.

We have already stated that the arts sector is a young sector, i.e. that younger employees are more heavily represented among the employees in the arts organisations on the Flemish labour market. In these artistic profiles we see the same tendency. However, there are clear differences between the vari-ous sub-sectors, where the dance sector is noticeably younger than the music sector. Theatre falls between the two. 80% of the dancers are under the age of 40. Given the physical demands of this profession, this is perhaps not sur-prising. In ballet (represented by the Royal Flanders Ballet) the curve shifts up a little more: approximately 90% are younger than 35 years old. Most of the em-ployees in the artistic profiles in theatres are also young, with the age group 30 to 35 years being the largest group. Finally, musicians come closest to the general Flemish distribution, although here too the age group 25 to 35 years is clearly over-represented. In each group we notice a clear decline between the age groups of 30-34 years and 35-39 years, just as was also noticeable in the en-tire population employed in the sector. This difference is greatest in the dancers (-50%), however in actors and actresses there is also a decline of almost 30%. It is striking that contrary to this trend, among musicians a recovery occurs from 40 years onwards. It is possible that a cohort effect plays a role here but this needs further study.

If we compare the figures for the three years, it seems that the crisis and the cuts in subsidies have put a slight brake (in employee status) on the hiring of young artists. The proportion of 30-year olds in the theatre in 2010 decreased by more than 10% compared to 2008, while the proportion of people over 50 increased by one third. The first group is admittedly still three times larger than the latter. In absolute numbers, this is a decrease of 15 people in the under 30-year-olds and an increase of 22 people older than 50 compared to the situ-ation in 2008. As a hypothesis one could argue that theatre companies tend to use their existing structure to continue working while they become relatively older. In any case, we see a similar trend in music and dance.

If we add the aspect of gender to the age distribution for the year 2010, we can still add a few conclusions. Chart 6 shows the following distribution.

Age and gender of dancers, musicians and actors of structurally subsidised arts organisationsIn the next step we would like to take a closer look at three artistic professional groups in our sector to make the differences between sectors more visible. Here we examine the workers who are registered under employee code ‘46’ with the structurally subsidised organisations in PC 304, and once again limit ourselves to one joint committee and to Flemish organisations. We then divide these workers into three groups, namely ‘dance’, ‘music’ and ‘theatre’, depending on the respective discipline-based evaluation commission to which their employer organisations were assigned. In 2010 this involved 276 artistic profiles in dance organisations (10 dance companies, 2 workshops and 1 large institution), 983 in music organisations (22 music ensembles, 2 large institutions, 1 workshop and 1 festival) and 651 in theatre organisations (44 theatre companies, 1 work-shop and 1 festival). For the most part this will involve performing artists, so for convenience’s sake from now on we will refer to dancers, musicians and actors.

Just as we previously did in the analysis for all employees together, in the following chart we will divide the three occupational groups according to age and compare them with the general data of the Flemish labour market in 2010.

Chart 5. Age distribution of artists in structurally subsidised organisations (2010)

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the artists are employed by just one subsidised arts organisation in their own domain. What we also notice here is that in 98% of the cases dancers worked for only one dance organisation. Relatively speaking, under this joint committee, musicians are most active for several employers, but the difference is generally limited. In the following chart we show the percentages of musicians and actors who worked for more than one employer. If we also add the ages we arrive at the following chart. As the number of dancers with multiple employers is too small, we do not include them here.

Chart 7. Proportion of artists with multiple structurally subsidised employers in music and theatre (2010)

It is difficult to reach any conclusion based on the above chart: the musi-cians who are employed in several organisations appear to be younger. This var-ies greatly in the theatre, with a peak in the older actors from 55 to 59 years old. If we look at the data from 2008 and 2009, we see that new patterns always ap-pear. It therefore seems that age does not play a specific role in the mobility of actors and musicians, seen in terms of employment in a single year for multiple structurally subsidised organisations within their subsector. Obviously, to get an accurate picture of the whole mobility of artists between different organisa-tions and different statutes and the practice of multiple jobs, we need a broader set of data than those available to us within PC 304.

Chart 6. Proportion of female artists in music, dance and theatre (2010)

The grey area represents the percentage of women in the overall labour market in Flanders. The green, blue and orange columns indicate the percent-age of women in dance, music and theatre, per age group. If the columns in the grey area drop, this means that women are under-represented in the sector; if the peaks rise above the grey area women are over-represented.

The most general statement we can make based on the above chart is that significantly more male than female artists are employed in the three arts sectors and that in the light of the data of the overall labour market, women are under-represented. Roughly 60% of musicians (as employees in structurally subsidised organisations) appear to consist of men. From the age of 45 years onwards, even more than three quarters of the artistic employees are men. In the theatre we see a similar proportion. Only in the age group 25-29 years are more women than men active, but there is a notable decline between the ages of 30 to 39 years. Dance shows some remarkable peaks in the age groups of under 24s and 50-54 years, but this is mainly due to the fact that in these age groups the number of employees involved is very limited. Generally speaking, the gender distribution here, as in theatre and music, is notable.

Mobility of dancers, actors and musicians in structurally subsidised arts organisationsEarlier on in this article we indicated that artist-employees in the overall struc-turally subsidised sector work more for different employers than their col-leagues in non-artistic professions. Nevertheless, in our data more than 80% of

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musicians and theatre-makers and on average they have to make do with few days of paid labour in employee status. Although this is a true representation of employees in structurally subsidised organisations, the picture would be more complete if we could also include employment in other statuses and sectors. It is possible that relatively more young people are reimbursed through third party payment schemes or temporary employment agencies, so that the differ-ences between the true number of days worked between young and old may be less significant.

ConclusionsTo finish, we highlight some of the main conclusions and link them to a series of questions related to career development in the arts sector. More than half of the employees in structurally subsidised arts organisations in PC 304 are be-tween 25 and 39 years old. That is almost 40% more than the overall percentage of this age group on the labour market. There is a marked decline from the age of 35 years onwards. In men the age group 35 to 40 years was in 2010 more than a quarter smaller, in women it was even a third. This same pattern is found if we only take employees in the artistic professions into consideration. The group of over-50s in the sector has increased slightly in recent years, to 14.9% in 2010, but remains significantly under-represented in comparison with the Flemish la-bour market as a whole. This age group is a third smaller in our sector than on the labour market.

The arts sector is a young and dynamic sector. On the other hand, many employees appear to leave the sector after a time. Possible reasons are: rather low wages, often limited growth opportunities, the large amount of evening and weekend work, the incompatibility of the job with a family etc. The limited pres-ence of women over the age of 30 years compared to the overall proportion of women in the labour market may indicate that working in this sector is probably hard to combine with a (young) family. Even more specifically with regard to the artistic profiles, it seems that many young artists (have to) give up their dream before they have turned 40. For young artists, working in the arts sector in the early years means amassing relatively short assignments with many different employers, often for relatively little money. We also found that over the last few years the total gross salary costs paid to workers in artistic professions is spread over more and more artists and that average incomes are decreasing.

In the light of an aging population, among other things, employees in the artistic sector are also expected to work until they turn 65 and/or build up careers of at least 45 years. In this article several indicators have suggested that this is no easy matter within the sector itself.

Here we should of course mention that we have only made an analysis of employees in structurally subsidised organisations under PC 304 and con-

Average number of working days of musicians and in theatreEarlier we noted that younger artists more often work for multiple employers. In the following chart we look at the average number of working days that art-ists are employed in music and theatre, divided by age. Because the numbers are more limited in dance and are therefore subject to more random fluctua-tions, we have not included them in this chart.

Chart 8. Average number of working days of artists in music and theatre (2010)

First we see that the average number of working days for actors and ac-tresses is a third or more higher than for musicians, which could indicate longer production periods in theatres. Far more striking is the fact that in both music and theatre we see an increase in the average number of working days per age group – the older working artists are, the more working days they can, on aver-age, add to their credit. This pattern may be the result of different trends or underlying reasons.

The higher numbers for the older artists may mean that they are re-markably successful in extracting a high number of working days from their em-ployers. On the other hand, however, we can also say that older artists simply continue to work if they can earn their living sufficiently well with their artistic job. Based on Chart 1 we stated that careers in the arts are an elimination race. In the older age groups relatively few artists continue to work as employees in the sector. In Chart 8, we can therefore see that compared to his younger counterparts, the person who continues working can on average amass a large number of working days. There are a large number of twenty-year-olds among

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Proteus, or the new career myth for actors

‘Work, and joy will follow naturally.’ Indeed, Goethe stated that work is a basic need. A need that we happily meet with a job that allows us to ‘earn our living’ and do what we enjoy doing most. A pity about those economic laws that prefer to express this labour in terms of money and so place a higher value on one job than another. So it is a question of choosing between having the cake and eating it.

We quickly assume that actors will opt to eat the cake, but this choice is not as self-evident as it may seem. In early 2010 this theme was also addressed here and there in ominous headlines. On 13th February, De Standaard wrote: ‘Uncer-tainty is part of the job. Flemish actors and actresses are struggling to survive’. In the Netherlands Het Parool asked readers to ‘support the underpaid actor’ and in Britain the best advice offered to actors was: ‘Don’t give up the day job!’.

There is nothing new about the subject. Remember the upset between actress Antje De Boeck and the RVA (Department of Employment) about a va-cancy in the Daens-cloakroom (De Boeck played one of the main roles in the film the musical was made after, which was by the way nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1994 and a landmark in Belgian film history). Or the voices yelling bloody mur-der when, at the end of 2006, Toneelhuis in Antwerp decided no longer to keep a permanent troupe of actors. VTi also ad-dressed the topic in Metamorfose in podi-umland. Een veldanalyse (Metamorpho-sis in the Performing Arts Scene. A field analysis), in an English language booklet version entitled Metamorphoses. The Per-forming Arts in Flanders since 1993 (2007) and also in Survival in de Podiumjungle (Survival in the Jungle of Performing Arts, 2008), pointing out that the position of the individual artist in the performing arts landscape has changed dramatical-ly. Although it is precisely these perform-ers who determine the core activities of

sequently cannot ascertain the full picture of the arts sector or the – broader – creative sector as a whole. The picture is certainly incomplete for the popu-lation of artists. Nevertheless, there are sufficient indications that force us to ask questions about the sustainability of careers in our sector. We hope these observations will prove to be an extra incentive for greater reflection on the careers of employees in the sector, both of artists and other function groups.

For artists we could investigate whether there is a need for services to assist them in developing their career or, in extreme cases, with a career switch to another sector and/or job. Does their training provide them with sufficient skills to develop their career in a sustainable way? And why not simply stop and take a look at the artistic work itself? Is there a context present that allows the artist to continue working in the sector? Do writers, artists or artistic managers focus on age and/or gender in the selection of an orchestra? When writing a play? In casting? In the composition of a dance company? In answering these questions, we must always bear in mind that many artists make combinations of employers, statuses and sectors. This means they need additional compe-tences to finally be able to develop a sustainable career, but ultimately they must still be offered the opportunities.

Maarten Bresseleers is coordinator of the Social Fund for the Performing Arts.

Lien Van Steendam

‘It is not so easy to work in black anymore …

That was a big practice for a really long time and

it was not seen as a bad thing. It was seen as part

of how you got your work made. With the EU and

the kind of laws that are made that are supposed

to span all of the countries and these kinds of

things, it has become harder and harder to do this

and people look negatively towards it, which I can

understand. But it was the way things went. And

what is clear is that even now most of us have that

difference between the things we must do because

it is our artistic need and the things we must do to

make a living. So I am still not being paid for some

work, but I have jobs that pay me correctly in order

to do that.’ David Hernandez

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The actor as a twenty-first-century worker

Career literature reveals that the sort of career most Flemish actors have today is no longer exceptional. In fact academic study reveals that fewer and fewer workers, also in other sectors besides the performing arts, follow the tradition-al career pattern and no longer devote their working lives to one employer and one particular job.

Labour sociology has developed various models to identify and describe new types of career and study their effect. We can bring these new types to-gether under the term hybrid career, or a career in which a worker repeatedly changes jobs, employer and/or post. Another type that can be applied to many acting careers is the transitional or atypical career, a full-time but erratic career interrupted by periods of unemployment and unpaid or part-time work. The actor’s career therefore certainly has a place in academic literature.

However, many acting careers appear to correspond most closely with two more recent concepts in career literature, these being the boundaryless ca-reer and the protean career.

The boundaryless career is one that is not tied to one employment con-text. In other words, these are workers ‘without boundaries’. However, this gen-erally involves only one specific boundary: the working environment, mobility between organisations. Do actors in Flanders have a boundaryless career? If we answer the question purely from the criterion of ‘permanent contract or free-lance’, then the answer is ‘yes’. The free-lance actor has a de facto boundaryless career when it comes to the business side of labour relations (short contracts with different employers), but often lurk-ing below this are more loyal connections with people and production houses.

The protean (or transformational) career is closer to the actors. In this con-cept the ideal type is the employee who manages his career like Proteus, the man in Greek mythology who, like a chame-leon, could change his shape at will. Un-like the boundaryless career, which has a strong focus on organisations, this involves personal values and crossing various kinds of boundaries. The protean

the performing arts, economically speaking this group appears to be mainly too heavy an expense. Increasingly, the permanent group has made way for alter-natives, and permanent employment contracts replaced by semi-permanent ones that freelancers string together to create a career for themselves. In her contribution to Metamorfose, Anneleen Forrier correctly remarked that the tug of war between the supporters and opponents of this evolution never goes be-yond simply listing the arguments for and against. It would be far more useful to try and find possible answers to the question of what direction an actor’s ca-reer should now take. Are our actors emancipated and enterprising adventur-ers exploring the free labour market? Or should we believe the headlines about insecurity and social limitations?

As a home base for a very diversified performing arts sector, VTi wants to map out as many biotopes and inhabitants of the Flemish theatre landscape as possible. Survival was the first time the focus was explicitly on the individual per-spective of performing artists. The data on productions in the subsidised field clearly showed how difficult it is to build a career on the subsidised circuit and that many performing artists also work in other environments. This information proved to be very relevant to my culture management practice project in the VTi. Indeed, the best thing to do is to let the people behind the numbers talk about their own career practice.

To define the study we decided to focus on actors’ careers: what became of the actors who had performed in the 2004-2005 season – the last season in which the data were examined in Survival – especially those who had ‘careers with gaps’ (in other words, those who did not perform in a subsidised produc-tion every season)? Apart from this we made a selection based on sex, date of birth, where they had graduated, diploma and the number of employers for whom they had worked during that season. From the selected group we were able to interview ten actors between February and May 2010, resulting in ten career stories.

Apart from collecting and studying qualitative data from the interviews we also did an extensive study of the literature to place the topic in the broader social context of the flexibilisation and individualisation of labour. Finally, Anne leen Forrier of Lessius University College also agreed to be interviewed.

At times, the course of the study was as bumpy as the average actor’s ca-reer and we came across new areas such as labour sociology, labour law, social dialogue and career literature. We also encountered as many useful concepts as dead-ends. In the thesis Proteus, een nieuwe acteursmythe? (Proteus, a new actor’s myth?) we tried to use all these different perspectives to paint a picture of the ac-tor as a worker. In this article we would like to compare several themes from the academic concepts with the findings and experiences of actors.

‘I didn’t realise that being a freelancer was such a

terrible position. I think it’s probably the European

country where it is very very hard and not very nice

to be a freelancer. In the country where I come from

[UK] … if I was a composer I would be a freelancer

and you don’t have these enormous côtisations every

trimester to pay. In fact, you don’t pay very much

for being a freelancer. They accept that the flow

of work is difficult. And they don’t try to penalise

you for being an independent worker. Whereas here

… I think that freelancers are kind of penalised

somehow in this country. I think it would be better

if Belgium had a system where people could work

freelance cheaply. Rather than getting them into an

unemployment system, which is really not what you

want. Actually, it’s not good for peoples’ pride in a

way.’ Joana Bailhie

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‘If you have done certain things, you are no longer accepted in other areas. This

was much worse in the past and there was a sort of idea about the pure artist, for

example that you ‘did not do any advertisements, did not appear in magazines

and did not appear in soaps’. Personally I sometimes find myself in a great deal

of trouble here because I am someone who does a lot of things and I don’t always

have an artistic project or a sort of business plan for my artistic career in mind.’

The paradox of the theatre company

Over the past few years labour flexibility has received a great deal of attention in the academic world. Theatre in Flanders may be a suitable test-bed for studying an evolution towards more flexibility, as only a minority of artists still work on the basis of a permanent contract. The need to ‘create’ often clashes with the need to manage the creative process. Flexibilising labour relations is a step in the search for a reconciliation between the two. Flexibility is therefore not a unilateral choice based on the interests of the employer, but is also the wish of the employee who wants to hop from job to job on the labour market. At least this is what we are told in the academic literature. In the past many artists felt cornered when a theatre company was disbanded. For many years the discussion was brought to a stand-still with the slogan: ‘We want to go back to the time of permanent companies.’

But I did not hear this slogan during the interviews. It seems that in the case of the interviewees the permanent company as the ultimate production form has given way to a more nuanced picture of pros and cons. Most actors are not seeking permanent employment, but need a loyal bond with ‘their own place’ in the field. It is especially with regard to the latter that a nostalgic refer-ence is sometimes made to ‘the age of permanent companies’ as well as regard-ing the guidance of a sort of mentor who teaches you about the profession.

The actors I spoke to do not really experience in their career practice the advantages and disadvantages of flexibilisation as listed in the academic litera-ture. In their view, one supposed advantage, that of an easy take-off as a result of high mobility on the labour market, does not apply in this sector. ‘High mobility’ is sometimes experienced as false mobility. Permanent contracts are gradually disappearing from the theatre world, but this doesn’t mean that actors can now find work more easily than in the past. On the contrary, the overriding view is that the labour market is now running at two speeds: a small group that has a degree of security blocks the mobility for the other actors. The expected ‘disadvantage’ that freelancers are less committed than actors with a permanent contract is also invalidated. Freelancers are also loyal to their employer and believe that ‘your word is your bond’. Mobility therefore does not always lead to less commitment.

worker has two characteristics: he manages his career on the basis of his own values and is able to adopt a flexible approach to the performance expected from him. Artists are known as strong, value-driven people. The interviews show that actors are no different. But what about flexibility? Is this also high or do actors tend to be inflexible workers?

To answer these questions we found we needed to know the views of the actors themselves. Consequently, we asked several actors about their own findings and experiences, and whether they would characterise their careers as ‘boundaryless’ or ‘protean’.

‘You have to know what you want in your career – and many actors do, this

identity is very strong – but at the same time you have to be sufficiently adaptable.

For example you might say: ‘I want to be an astronaut’. The identity is very strong

but if you are unable to adjust your image because there are simply not many jobs

available for astronauts, then you have a problem.’ - Anneleen Forrier

During the interviews all the actors indicated how important it is to have a certain flexibility when you are managing your own career. An actor really has to know in which direction he wants to go, what the essence of the matter is and at what level they are willing to make concessions to achieve that goal: work environment or range of job responsibilities, working conditions or the social and economic situation. All the interviewees indicated they were willing to be flexible on at least one of these levels.

As an actor however, you have to go up a notch; in our society we all have to do this. If you are an actor because you think ‘I am an actor and need this to survive and this is all I can do’, then you also have to bear the social repercussions.

Strongly value-driven and flexible. The actor as Proteus or career archi-tect. Is what we are doing here simply replacing the old myth of the inflexible worker with a new myth? It is certainly an ideal image, but in practice we can-not always do what we want. The context in which someone builds up a career sometimes forces them to wander around aimlessly. Actors are not only ‘people who take on work’, but often also ‘people who scrabble around for work’ (which clearly doesn’t apply only to artists). Of course they may try to develop their career with the greatest possible freedom, but in reality there is often little time for reflection and (re)orientation during the course of their career. All the inter-viewees monitor the consistency of their own careers as best as they can, but in doing so attach more importance to partnerships, identity and brand name than to a real career plan. More than anything it is the value judgement of peers that determines consistency in one’s career path and this value judgement is often dominated by small-mindedness.

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responsibility for a family plays a role. With or without children, a partner with a steady income does wonders. The pri-mary concern, however, is not financial but of a personal nature: can I continue to work as an actor and if things go quiet is that my fault? But even if the work con-tinues, the work you have done never guarantees a sequel, so even established names have no security. The freelance network model is not totally positive or negative for anyone. Maximum flexibility and the high insecurity it generates are two sides of the same coin.

The actor as a knowledge worker

‘What I find revolutionary is the fact that the individual and the artistic core

have gone. They no longer play a central role in the profession. Formerly they

were too much so. You used to think: “That is an actor” and revolving around

him is a company. And now the landscape is completely reversed: everything is

running and there is no artistic project. All the offices are running, the thea-

tres are heated, the lights are on, the copy machines are ready, season tickets

have been arranged, everything is organised and there is no performance. And

to make matters worse, if the artistic and the individual are hired, it is in the

cheapest possible way: the preference is for trainees and students rather than

famous actors because they come cheap.’

Positive or negative, flexibilisation has made the position of the actor in the theatre somewhat problematic. His central role on stage is no longer au-tomatically translated into a central role in the organisation. If we read what has been written about flexible labour relations, we learn that actors seem to fit into an organisational strategy of numerical flexibility: they are temporary employees who are hired to perform a clearly defined task and for a specified period of time. Of course what is not taken into account here at all is the essence of an artistic process. After all, the actor is not a supplementary worker who is called up to support the permanent team, as is the case in production sectors. To give you an exaggerated example: the part of Hamlet is not played by a sixty-year-old Polish fruit-picker who happens to have some free time on his agenda. Unless of course our Polish fruit-picker is chosen for the content of his artistic vision, but then we can hardly call this coincidence. In any case, it is clear that choosing an actor is not only based on his availability.

However, we must make a dis-tinction between the commitment to a production – which is high in any self-respecting actor – and commitment to the organisation. Freelance actors will often identify less with the organisation for which they work. Indeed, a lot de-pends on the history the employer and employee share. A valuable shared path between an actor and an organisation increases loyalty. Ironically, this bond sometimes prevents an actor from ex-ploring other contexts. Three quotations show how differently commitment can be interpreted and that this commitment can often be perceived as a one-way commitment from employee to employ-er. The first quote is from an actor with a permanent contract; the second de-scribes the semi-permanent relationship and the third interviewee explains the

difference between doing different jobs but working for the same organisation.

‘And then we performed for a while again, and then it stopped and then we

performed for a while again. So then in between these periods you have nothing

to do and you can’t take on other work either because you have to be free for the

periods in which you have to perform.’

‘In a semi-permanent relationship like this it is assumed that you will be there

and in this sense the planning is quite vague. So you can’t really go somewhere

else because you feel this would undermine your loyalty. So you can’t really look

beyond the circle you’re in. This makes it really difficult for my planning.’

‘So I was registered there as an artist and then you really see, for example at a

festival, that an actor arrives, is given food and then has to perform. That’s it,

that’s your job for that day. But this is something I haven’t been used to for so

long now, that when I was with company X and there were all sorts of other jobs

that needed to be done, I would always lend a helping hand. But that is another

kind of commitment. It is different from a purely creative commitment.’

Mobility creates more job insecurity. Most people do not realise this when they embark on an acting career, but this soon changes when financial

‘I think an established artist is an artist that doesn’t

have to deal with administration at all, that doesn’t

have to deal with communication at all and doesn’t

have to think too much about how to get enough food

on the table or about his housing situation, I think

that’s quite an established artist, yeah.’

Bart Vandeput

‘At the moment I feel I can pursue any interest I

have, and above all, that there are others who share

similar interests. Some years ago I felt that some

doors were just closed and there was no way to get

them open and for people to listen. This is prob-

ably due to many factors, mainly to do with me not

daring to go far with ideas, but it blocked my way of

thinking. But now things start to roll, just like my

thoughts are rolling. And there is a lot of communi-

cation and dialogue with a wide range of people and

institutions in Brussels and outside.I don’t invest

trying to sell my performances. It used to insult

me each time it didn’t work, until I realised this is

not the reality I would like to create for myself. Not

being busy with it improved the quality of my life.

If I work on something that I think fits in a certain

context, I just contact them and I just tell them that

and I explain why. It’s on that level, it’s very specific,

there is no strategy behind it.’ Adva Zakai

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pensating flexibilisation in actors’ labour relations with enough other forms of security. Giving up job security is certainly not the same as giving up security as a whole, but seeking it beyond the boundaries of one organisation or job.

In acting careers we see three alternatives: intersectoral job security, job security and income security.

Alternative guarantees for actors

In the actor’s context we can translate intersectoral job security as working as an actor outside the subsidised theatre sector. What is so striking here is that none of the ten interviewees were opposed to acting outside the theatre. However, most of them regard this as mainly a learning experience and do not necessarily do this for financial reasons. The actors are not actively seeking work in film or television for example, and the acceptance of an offer largely depends on their current agenda. The transition between the subsidised theatre world and other circuits is smooth, but there is no automatic onward movement after the first step. Moreover, they often have to face non-professional competition. A large influx of ‘day flies’, especially in the television industry, hampers the flow for professional actors who aspire to this. This reduces the safety net for actors who try to bridge a period of unemployment in this way.

There is a slight change in attitude towards this ‘moonlighting’ in other sectors. A few years ago it was absolutely not done to act in a soap, but now most actors no longer look down on it. Of course the crisis has affected every-one. Although nobody absolutely turns down a guest role in a soap, everyone is still aware that the performance in a medium like television is reviewed (and sometimes condemned) by the inhabitants of theatre land. Having job security as an actor – in the various sectors – is of course possible if one does not turn up one’s nose at the wide range of possible jobs, such as radio work, presentation, guest roles on television and business theatre. Job security means: the security of continuing work even if it means moving from one job to another (i.e. tran-sition security). The key notion here is employability, in other words the actor works as much as possible on developing a broader employability for himself on the labour market. To this end the actor should rely on the three paramount competences: knowing how (skills, knowledge and expertise), knowing whom (so-cial network) and knowing why (identity).

Apart from traditional interpretations of these competences we see that for actors, knowing why can also mean changing their former ideas about career and therefore abandoning a solid career prospect. For actors, knowing whom, meaning actively networking, often evokes an association with the business

More than in the repertory theatre of yesteryear, in the current produc-tion mode the actor functions as a knowledge worker. He has an intangible ba-sic knowledge that cannot be replaced. In other words: like a researcher, an IT consultant or a composer, an actor performs creative work to increase his stock of knowledge for himself, culture and society. In fact he belongs in the performing arts’ Department of Research and Development. Many productions no longer start from an existing play or fixed concept, but are ‘created’. The con-sequence of this work process is that through his participation in this ‘creating’, the actor immediately becomes less replaceable. The research phase and the work process are rightly regarded as two ‘stem cells’ of the theatrical creative process, but they clash violently with economic thinking. As efficiency and profit maximisation are not compatible with the artistic work process, the result is a strange impasse where the actor/performer/creator is responsible for content, but in the meantime is no longer at the heart of the organisation.

A pertinent detail: acting is non-qualified work. No diploma or certificate is needed for a job on the boards. The large numbers of ‘one-off passers-by’ on subsidised stages indicate that the inflow into this profession is basically almost unlimited. Some of the actors interviewed point out that this often hampers the flow of actors, making it difficult to fill in the ‘gaps’ in their career with, for example, a role in television. Consequently, they are anything but free work-ers: there is no increased consumer demand for their work and they are very dependent on their employer (who in turn generally has to develop activities using government subsidies). You do not ask but are asked. Moreover – and this is already what Anneleen Forrier mentions in her contribution to Metamor-fose – their jobs have to conform with legal regulations (Labour Law) and wage structures (based on scales and seniority) which are still in line with traditional, long-term labour relations.

First Aid for Insecurity: flexicurity for actors

In that same article Anneleen Forrier referred to the so-called flexicurity model as a way out of the impasse. The concept of flexicurity – newspeak for a combina-tion of ‘flexibility’ and ‘security’ – has now become almost commonplace when it comes to European labour models and where flexibility on the labour market will lead. This originally Danish model attempts to find a balance between the flex-ibility that companies need to allow labour costs to fluctuate with production, and sufficient security for employees. This is a departure from the traditional no-tion of ‘job security’ as the only and ultimate form of security for the employee. From this perspective it therefore appears to be a very suitable model for com-

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it as a back-up for difficult times, most of them try to fall back on it as little as pos-sible. Consequently, actors are generally afraid to make the transition to freelance status. A sore point in the social status of artists is that in the case of actors the only way to achieve this status is through artis-tic performance. For example, coaching or doing voice-overs for documentaries is not considered an artistic achievement. Actors who are seeking a more commer-cial direction find little encouragement in this provision. And then there’s the ‘small fee’, which is also a social benefit for art-ists that has not brought about much of an improvement for actors because it is not always used appropriately. Moreover, it does not play a role in the accumulation of entitlements.

Finally, there is combination securi-ty. Strictly speaking, combination security is the security of being able to combine paid work with other social responsibili-ties and obligations. In practice, however, our actors have to combine a wide range of things. In the interviews it is about three kinds of combination security: the work-life balance, the practical combina-tion of various jobs and career security. In the case of work-life balance, actors do not believe their situation is more difficult than that of most other workers. More specific for the actor’s context however, is the fact that more space and time is needed for artistic ‘creation’. None of the respondents feels the financial need to constantly work, but many actors indicate that the pace in the work periods is much higher than the contract specifies. It should also be mentioned that ac-tors cannot rely on all sorts of schemes such as time credit. Moreover, in the life of the ‘multiple job holder’, the practical planning of various jobs and short-term contracts appears to be no easy matter. In theatres and organisations this is not

world. Nevertheless, they themselves also acknowledge the importance of vis-ibility, identity and perhaps even a kind of ‘brand recognition’. Finally, there is know-ing how: the actor who develops these conceptual skills in his artistic practice in other sectors and, where appropriate, transposes them to other working envi-ronments. Even during periods of unem-ployment, actors often opt to hone cer-tain skills. One thing is clear: responsibility for employability does not lie with the or-ganisations as compensation for the lack of job security, but entirely with the actor.

In the actor’s career, income secu-rity comes down to a multifacetted con-cept including such notions as: multiple job holding, remuneration model, artist’s status and combination security. Let us take a closer look at each of these aspects.

The actor today is definitely a multiple job holder by choice. It is difficult to distinguish between main and supplementary income because many con-sciously opt for a hybrid career from which they get satisfaction. This increases ‘employability’ so that they no longer have to rely on benefits, or to a lesser extent. The motivation does not have to be primarily financial, as extra jobs are simply another form of expressing that you are an actor. As far as the current Flemish remuneration model is concerned – the CAO (‘collectieve arbeidsover-eenkomst’ or collective labour agreement) with scales based on seniority – we can be brief: despite the adjusted scheme for short-term contracts, the system is not sufficiently adapted to current flexible labour relations. It has little benefit for older actors and its effect is mainly to stimulate entry into the profession. However, developing an alternative model remains very complex: the use of a peak wage, not rewarding seniority, or pay according to performance? In the interviews many people who are over 40 indicate their willingness to exchange the higher scale for more job security.

In Flanders there is also the benefit scheme for performing artists, a com-mon source of income security, indeed, so much so that actors are sometimes obliged to avoid long-term contracts so the benefit arrangement is not compro-mised. Is this scheme an acquired right or a luxury? This is still very much a moot point. Although actors do not easily give up the benefit scheme because they use

‘I have an artist status, since almost 4 years, and it

changed my life radically. I used to live on 8 m2 for 6

years, quite a shitty situation. I could still work, but

it was hard. I also worked at home, so I had really a

bed and nothing else. And now I can pay more rent

for example. I can pay a place where I can work and

sleep and where I very much like living. I’m also

much more flexible in deciding to travel somewhere,

to see something, to speak to someone and all these

things. All this stuff which is not fixed to a project

but something … Your life as an artist, networking

on a social but also half professional level. This half

professional life got much easier, let’s say. And once

you are easier with this and you are less dependent

on the money, suddenly money comes also easier

from projects, I have the feeling. I’m much more

calm, I’m much better psychologically also, I feel bet-

ter. I was very worried.’ David Helbich

‘As a dancer I can make a living due to the artist

status I got in Belgium. Otherwise it wouldn’t be

possible. This is what helps on the long term to pay

the bills. I noticed that all the taxes I pay correspond

to the money from my unemployment fee. So it’s

levelled out. That was symbolic to me. But if the

status wouldn’t exist, I would have to do another

kind of work. In a way the artist status is a disguised

subvention. I can raise enough money to create a

performance in three months. But everybody knows

it takes longer to create the performance. You have

to make dossiers, you have to think about what

you want to do, you have to do a lot of research, you

need to contact programmers, you have to do all this

administrative work … All this takes a lot of time

and energy, time and energy you can’t invest in the

actual artistic process. For people who don’t have

the artistic status it’s much more difficult. Most of

them have to do another kind of job, but then it’s very

hard to maintain the quality of and involvement in

your work. It’s a vicious circle because once you start

doing another kind of work, it’s more difficult to get

back in the circuit.’ Etienne Guilloteau

‘I just have the status very recently. I think it’s not

easy either. I mean when I got it I felt a relief be-

cause suddenly I didn’t have to work anymore in the

bars so I had time to do what I do. But then there

is also this pressure of organising myself all the

time to find work and to be productive, all the time,

contact people …’ Marcos Simoes

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The actor as a cultural entrepreneur?

‘Of course I undertake all sorts of things, but isn’t that what we all do all the

time? But … yes, I look for structures in which I can move around. I myself do

not create structures. In my view undertaking things has nothing to do with

subsidy – I mean it is not subsidised, or at least is not really subsidised. It

amounts to more or less taking care of absolutely everything yourself. This is

equivalent to entrepreneurship.’

When I ask actors whether they see themselves as a cultural entrepre-neur, the response is always ‘no’. Who then do they regard as being cultural entrepreneurs? Tom Van Dyck and Benjamin Verdonck. Performers who cre-ate quality work, develop a brand identity, work from their own ideas and also ensure the distribution of their artistic product. In short, for the actors, cultural entrepreneurship means that you exploit your own artistic product indepen-dently, autonomously and with integrity.

And yet amongst all the actors surely we should be able to come up with more than two examples of cultural entrepreneurs. From the reactions of the ac-tors interviewed and from what has been written about cultural entrepreneur-ship, let us distill the most important characteristics of a cultural entrepreneur and translate them into the career of an individual actor. Because what this actor undertakes runs like a thread through all the career stories. It leads to advocat-ing an alternative interpretation for the buzzword ‘cultural entrepreneurship’.

1. Making your own high-quality products = being active and remaining an actor according to your own standards.

2. Mastering the craft as an artist = developing yourself as an artist by keeping in touch with develop-

ments in the profession (through training, contact with education and the work domain).

3. Creating an organisation yourself = daring to approach organisations, active networking.4. Not being dependent on existing organisations = applying for individual subsidies or scholarships, job hopping and

freelancing.5. Being self-sufficient and not depending wholly on subsidies = daring to explore commercial avenues and bringing this into balance

with your own ‘product’, but also looking for another job, doing more than one job or looking for alternative types of funding. Government subsidies are alright, but should not be the only condition for remain-ing active.

really always taken into account, even though it is essential for employers to also focus attention on the reality of an actor with a hybrid career practice. The secu-rity of being able to coordinate various jobs financially and legally and so earn pension rights is what we call career security. Building up career security by way of various statutes, jobs, wages etc. is a major sore point. The difficult combina-tion of a permanent position – such as in education – with financial benefits, or the difficulty of remunerating oneself with a project subsidy are just a few of the problems an actor has to overcome as a career entrepreneur.

Applicability of the flexicurity concept in acting practice

It is clear that reflection on various types of security in the actor’s career does present us with several worthwhile alternatives. Moreover, the exercise also shows us there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of the coordination between the various policy areas (employment law, arts policy and activation). However, this idea of flexicurity does not adequately address the precarious po-sition of knowledge workers who are specifically engaged in research and de-velopment. During this phase they get no direct income from their labour, but have to find the funds to ‘buy’ the space and time they need. Consequently, re-garding the flexicurity approach to job security you would probably be inclined to say: retrain and find another job. This is may sound a little blunt of course, but it does demonstrate that in this vision there is no room for artistic practice as it appears in Flemish theatre today.

Moreover, this model of the labour market cannot be implemented for one special segment of employees (actors) in one special sector (the performing arts). The benefit scheme for performing artists is in fact a flexicure measure. This benefit scheme is unrelated to the social status of the artist and was already pre-viously adopted from other professional categories which also cover employees who are regularly unemployed. Artists who only work with short-term contracts (less than three months) find that the amount of their benefit is not reduced the following year. In this way mobility and job-hopping are not penalised. The flexi-cure is here undermined because there is no special activation policy attached to it. Consequently, artists who are entrepreneurial enough to activate themselves, and possibly work as an actor in a non-artistic activity, are not rewarded for this but in fact run the risk of losing access to the benefit scheme. In future, similar problems will probably emerge in many other sectors (services etc.). The flexi-curity debate should therefore be held primarily at the federal level (dismissal law and social security) and at the Flemish level (activation and lifelong learning).

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- Working on transparency. In a closed labour market like that of actors, mo-bility does not work if there is no transparency of supply and demand. Plat-forms such as Beton vzw and the Keynet database, especially for the audio-visual sector, are rarely successful for actors because there is still a kind of value judgement associated with them.

- Watch the boundaries. When ‘negotiating’ with employers there is nothing wrong with agreeing on commitment and involvement too. Indeed, em-ployers often regard freelancers as not being involved. Perhaps discussing mutual expectations regarding this could prevent any discrepancy between the feelings of the actor and the organisation.

Ideas for the sector and policy-makers

- CAO (collective labour agreement) based on seniority: a matter for debate. Although this system of reward does not promote the employment of older actors, there are few alternatives. A system of ‘peak wages’ – where pay ris-es up to a certain age and then drops again – might be considered. The lower wage is then compensated by higher job security for older actors. Moreover, with a peak wage there should be a guarantee that the pension is calculated on the basis of the highest scale and not the last wage paid, so career secu-rity is maintained.

- Another option to increase the income security of older active actors is to in-crease the maximum benefit from a certain seniority for a short period (e.g. the first four months), as is currently the case in Denmark. The counterpoint to this right is that actors are required to do a number of hours’ ‘commu-nity work’ in the form of coaching, workshops or socio-artistic projects. Dirk Buyens’ idea of the ‘career journey ticket’ also offers career opportunities in the hybrid career context of the performing arts. You will find no quick answers here, but instead a plea for simulations and experiments with re-muneration systems. Who draws up scenarios in which job security, income security and career security fit together like three communicating vessels? In well-considered dialogue with the arts policy-makers and social partners, an integrated vision could give the sector more guidance.

- Social dialogue. Flexibility and mobility on the labour market cannot oper-ate without collectivising the risks for the employee. Here the unions could seek a new direction in future. Seeking risk reduction in a small laboratory such as that of the performing arts sector may be necessary if the union is also to evolve towards a flexible labour market.

- Services. The services provided by unions and the relief fund for actors are in-adequate at times because there is often a lack of the necessary knowledge,

Conclusions

The main conclusion from the study of the literature and the conversations with the actors seems to be that the image of the actor as a worker needs to be adjusted. To some extent the actor has become a ‘model worker’ on the twenty-first century employment market, although this knowledge worker often has to deal with the paradox of the theatre business. The new profiles the actors assume are an attempt to escape the insecurity associated with this while at the same time fully enjoying artistic flexibility. Actors come in many shapes and sizes, but generally prefer to seek the warmth of a group of fellow actors. One thing is certain: there is a delicate balance between uncertainty and flexibility, and yet there is a balance. The securities the actor considers most important are intersectoral job security, work security and income security.

Food for thought for actors

- All too often, reflection on and re-orientation of the career are frequently postponed until the actor finds himself in a real ‘career dip’. Which values feature highest on the personal agenda at different moments in one’s ca-reer? And is this list the same as it was during its early stages? It is best if freelancers keep a close watch on the balance between work and inactivity and they must decide for themselves in advance from which point onwards this equilibrium is broken.

- ‘Creativity is the ability to create, but also the ability to view situations or problems in a new way’ (Dany Jacobs). If an actor says he ‘can’t do anything else but act’, then there are two possible reasons for this. Either he is pre-

senting himself as an inflexible worker who stubbornly clings to a belief but has limited adaptability. The social re-percussions of this are unavoidable. Or else he rates his competence at other tasks so low that an inferiority complex prevents him from entering a broader employment market. This is according to the ‘employability’ philosophy: strength-ening broad employability both within the profession and the sector and in a broader labour market can prevent ac-tors from feeling they have nowhere to go and increase self-confidence.

‘Finding a job was the hardest part. To work as a

dancer or as a choreographer is very difficult. Even

if you come out of a school like P.A.R.T.S. It’s true

that some doors open up a bit more easily than for

other people, but still … wp Zimmer proposed me

to start working with them and that was for being

a graduate from P.A.R.T.S. But I was lucky as

well. The first year I worked a lot as a technician.

I wanted to get to know the job, but I also had to

earn some money. I did it for almost two years, but

I wanted to stay in touch with the field, rather than

work in a bar.’ Etienne Guilloteau

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Yes, but not like that!1

When I was asked to compile a statement on the current position regarding the place of research in the field of the performing arts and education, fifteen years after I had written a paper on ‘artistic research and development in the performing arts’2, I realised that I didn’t have time to carry out research my-self and that I would have to write it from a ground-level perspective with the corresponding subjective view. However, when I read the announcement and realised that my intervention had been announced as ‘a bird’s eye view’, I was a bit shocked. The ground-level perspective already makes me a little dizzy … There’s something you should know: once a shaman on the Indonesian island of Flores swore blind that my totem is not a jumping frog but a slow tortoise, and I must say that since then I have felt perfectly comfortable with that notion. So I am already finding it difficult upgrading this concept from the trusted tortoise’s unhurriedness, carrying everything on his back, to that of a frog frolicking in the field. But a bird’s eye view? That seems like a leap too far for me! And I thought:

‘Yes, but not like that …’

The preliminary reports

Yes, but not like that is also the title I have given to this discourse. It occurred to me when I set eyes on a number of preliminary reports about the performing arts, workplaces and art centres. The respective committees’ negative assess-ments of places such as Nadine, Les Bains, CREW and CAMPO, appeared to me to be predominantly based on the inertia or the relative invisibility of the results of their respective research and development work. Or on the committee’s in-

1 ‘Yes,butnotlikethat’isthemottoofamajorpsychologistfrombetweenthewars:ViktorvonWeizsäcker.Heassumesthat‘beingsick’(seetheconceptofpathologieslateroninthetext)hasapurpose;thatwemustnotexciseordenythesymptomsbutmustdealwiththem.Clinicsandhealthcareinstitutionsalsohavetheirsymptomsandare,asaresult,alsosickaccordingtovonWeizsäcker.

2 ElsBaeten,AnnOlaertsandGeertOpsomer, Naar een ontwikkelingsbeleid voor de podiumkunsten: de noden van de niet structureel gesubsidieerde initiatieven (Towardsadevelopmentpolicyfortheperformingarts:theneedsofnon-structurallysubsidisedinitiatives),Brussels:VTi,1996.

so that actors generally have to know how the system and the procedures work. Services tailored to each individual artist are not feasible, but a sound basic information service should be possible.

- Theatre practice in European flexicure countries. Models such as l’inter mit-tence in France have been thoroughly investigated, but perhaps we might also take inspiration from such countries as Denmark, where the impact of flexicu-rity on the regulation of artistic practice can currently already be examined.

- Activation and training for artists. In the whole legal tangle of the employ-ment of artists there is little clarity regarding views on the activation and training of artists (which are two pillars of the flexicurity concept). Is activity in the subsidised landscape rewarded or is participation in it discouraged as much as possible? There is still clearly a long way to go before agreement is reached between arts policy-makers, social security, labour law and activa-tion. Moreover, although people are shouting from the rooftops about cultur-al entrepreneurship, they do not take into account the practical aspects of an actor’s career. Today actors have adapted to flexibilisation by working across sectors and combining different jobs. Only it seems that the benefits for the artist are too unilaterally geared to a full career in the arts sector. Actors who develop their broad employability by way of other jobs are not rewarded.

- An arts policy that supports career development. Currently not enough at-tention is being focused on an age-conscious policy for the artistic core work-ers in organisations. All too often innovation appears to be equated with ‘young blood and fresh meat’. Now that a sector like theatre has adapted to a flexible labour model tailored to artistic practice and suppresses produc-tion costs through a fluctuating wage, the arts policy-makers must be alert to possible negative consequences of this new production mode. Innovation and onward movement need not be contradictory and hybrid career paths in and outside the theatre field provide a rich and diverse landscape.

Lien Van Steendam is a Master of Music, studied Cultural Management at the University of Antwerp and is currently artistic coordinator of Jeugd en Muziek Vlaanderen

(YouthandMusicFlanders).

Geert Opsomer

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chapters, dissertations), quotes and critiques, tokens of recognition by awards and scholarships, through results in civil society, through contract research, through context-specific indicators such as exhibitions and performances in large art institutions and theatres, etc.

And I thought: ‘Yes, but not like that.’

The invisible anonymous assessor (monitor 1)

And my thoughts immediately strayed to the recent talks at the Vooruit in Ghent by, among others, Hans Achterhuis (on the neoliberal meritocracy and the free market utopia), or those of Paul Verhaeghe, who refers to the role of a global as-sessor, a sort of security camera in the academic world that has implanted itself in top publications and from this panopticon monitors everyone like Big Brother.

According to these authors the notion is growing that this type of evolu-tion is structurally defined and unavoidably linked to our meritocracy, which only functions on a centrally managed and tightly planned system of evaluation (take the example of rating agencies), because only a limited number of win-ners are possible in the overall competi-tion. And that doesn’t necessarily make us happier. The general trend of impos-ing formal (non-substantive), external, quality criteria means that the pleasure of discovery, the collaborative encounter and the traditional approach to research increasingly has less to do with one’s own negotiated quality standards and more with the score we can achieve on an ex-ternal scale of values. Over the past fif-teen years the assessment of someone’s quality, desire and commitment has been gradually replaced by measuring and counting his output. Anything or anyone that cannot be effectively measured or produces invisible work is excluded.

It has become incredibly difficult to oppose these systems, even if they are

ability to associate research work with the final performance or artworks that it produces over time. The latter is a defect or at least an anomaly in the monitor-ing process.

Evidently, though without much argumentation, the committee is on the side of more recognisable output-oriented operations manifested through fes-tivals and small-scale productions.

It is of course much too soon to come to a conclusion without any form of research but I have a sneaking feeling that this could well herald a more far-reaching transparency (and I don’t mean this in a positive way), greater insti-tutionalisation and formatting of what research should be. The assessments express a demand for accounting and measurable transparency; the commit-tees are in no way prepared to join in the playful but relative ambiguity of initial research and in the unpredictability of its results. Artistic research reserves the right to not (yet) know and to end up where it didn’t start out to finish.

So yes, artistic research must be assessed, but not like that. A deeper reasoning is needed.

The output criteria

‘Yes, but not like that’ is also the feeling that I had recently when I participated in a meeting of art colleges and universities about ‘forms of output in artistic research’ during the ECOOM (Expertise Centre for Research and Develop ment

Monitoring) study day. There was a dis-cussion about a study by Walter Ysebae-rt, a historian and expert in the twelfth-century history of the Capetians, who, on commission to the Government of Flan-ders, works for ECOOM and is developing output indicators for the artistic research in the academy. In his presentation ‘Re-cent developments in the assess ment of artistic research’, Ysebaert compared output evaluation in the US, the UK, Australia and Flanders (why is the rating scale always Anglo-Saxon?). He talked about the benefits of output criteria such as: the presence of one’s artistic research in publications (articles, monographs,

‘I was at Colombia University in New York and I

was desperately unhappy. The composition depart-

ment at Columbia was kind of very competitive

but not in an interesting way. And I just saw all

the people getting their PhDs at Columbia and I

thought: “My god you are such a bad composer! And

you are getting a PhD in this! This is just ridicu-

lous ”, and I think that was the moment I decided

I was going to try being an artist before being an

academic. Because I realised those guys were get-

ting their PhDs and academic posts because it is

what all composers in America do; because there is

no funding, no music scene or not very much of one

or a badly paid one.’ Joana Bailhie

‘You have to look at other ways also to find revenue

because this new liberal wind and conservative

wind in Europe, we will be hunted and haunted

evermore, so we will have to be very resilient and

very creative. And share experiences and stick the

heads together and especially, not start doing the

same thing as these new liberal and conservative

parties are doing, rightwing, creating this discourse

of us and them. I think societies where they give

the possibility of as many creative energies being

able to pop out, to find a place, are quality societies

and we as artists should all be in favour of that.

Now with this whole situation with the, how do you

call it, the punishment institute for the unemployed

people, who want us all to work to pay taxes, yeah,

they are becoming a bit more harsh again, and then

you see immediately some discourses and e-mails

popping up against this or that. And I think we

need to get another perspective, I think it’s part

of what we have to do. We have to transform these

types of thinking.’ Bart Vandeput

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ed in our paper Naar een ontwikkelingsbeleid voor de podiumkunsten (Towards a development policy for the performing arts).

Currently there is no reassuring answer to the question of whether the pathology that we defined in 1996 is still up for discussion. ‘Yes, but not like that’ means that from time to time people come together to establish a diagno-sis for our system’s pathology to make transformation and processing possible. And so …

Management takes precedence over riskIn 1996 we pointed out the danger that the authorities, but also and especially the sector’s structural actors, wanted to preserve, legitimise and expand their newly acquired positions and were no longer open to critical research or to a concept that tries to care for the landscape as a whole. Furthermore the per-forming arts sector gradually began to exchange its critical potential for busi-ness logic, market concepts and growth prognoses. In 2012 this trend has gen-eralised and has also become the norm.

 Transparent management structures have become more important than organically grown nuclei We found that the structural actors in the landscape preferred not to have to deal with much more change and for the first time talked of the ‘fragmenta-tion’ of the landscape and the need to combat this ‘fragmentation’. Those that critically questioned the system were the newcomers, the excluded (whom we called ‘pretenders’ after the French sociologist Bourdieu) and the critical voices within the system: concerned critics, dramatists, researchers and especially the artists themselves. They didn’t talk about ‘fragmentation’, but about ‘diversity’ and ‘differences’. In 2012 the discourse of the anti-fragmentation supporters prevailed over the quest for diversity. In the performing arts the choice was made for several large structures, the fusion of small and medium-sized struc-tures and several smaller marginal structures. The word ‘fragmentation’ is re-placed by ‘allotment’ while the ‘plots’ became ever larger.

 Greater homogenisation displaces heterotopic spacesIn 1996 we asked ourselves whether a policy that would promote ‘research and development’ could tear open the defensive strategy of a preservation policy. An impossible exercise as it appeared afterwards. In fact at the time it was about opening up heterotopic spaces in the landscape that had become all too solid.

Using field analyses inspired by Bourdieu’s research principles, a num-ber of views were presented about the power struggle that was being played out between ‘fragmentation thinkers’ and ‘difference or diversity thinkers’; or in broader terms: between ‘pretenders’ who in the extreme form were out for

less prevalent in the arts sector. We all know that it is only a question of time, because we all embrace the system in a cowardly fashion. We could organise a revolt, but then we must produce an effective analysis and have broad public support to be able to be unruly and daring and yet still be honoured. But don’t we lack the energy? Do we have alternatives for the panoptic figure?

So: ‘Yes, but not like that.’

Historic pathologies3

A good fifteen years ago the outlines of the neoliberal meritocracy were not so clearly defined, but one thing was already obvious: the winners of the artistic war that had flooded the existing theatre system in the eighties like a Flemish Wave – the pretenders being: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jan Fabre, Radeis, Ivo van Hove, Guy Cassiers, Jan Decorte, Wim Vandekeybus, Needcompany, Josse De Pauw, Eric De Volder, De Tijd, Blauwe Maandag Compagnie and so on – quickly rose to the top of the system in the nineties. Their supporters were their assessors and from then on they could apply the measuring rod in the direction that suited them best, as a result of which for the first time the new hierarchy began to operate in a self-affirming manner.

The dynamic effect of the developments and the experiment of the eighties had halted and threatened to get bogged down in a static hierarchy that kept everyone in place: a preservation policy! For the first time we felt the need to care for the factors that favoured this development and research and that dared to question the system on its pathology. This need was then reflect-

3 Inhiswritings,theartistThomasHirschhornsuggeststhatwemustworkwiththesystembecausetodayitseemsridiculousandimpossibletopreachtherevolutioninWesternEuropeandtorejectoropposethesystem,butalsobecauseit’sdangeroustojustgoalongwiththesystemandignorethesystem’s‘disease’.Onthebasisoftheircriticismofinstitutionsandinstitutionalsystems,theSpanishpsychiatristTosquellesandthephilosopherGuattariclaimthat‘eachinstitutionmustbecaredforbecauseitissickforallkindsofreasons:becauseoftheroleitguaranteesforsocietyandtheeconomy,becauseofitsfinancialdependenceonstatestructures,becauseofitsownessentialadministrationandhierarchyandbecauseofitsrivalries,clanformationandsearchforscapegoats.Ahealthyorlessharmfulinstitutionisonethatconstantlyquestionsitself,deceleratesandcanmaketransitionsfromonetotheotherdiseaseorpathology.Aninstitutionororganisationthatoperatestooeffectivelyandtoofastortooefficientlymustbetornopenfromtimetotime.Creativeelementsmusttearupandquestiontheinertia.’Also,byextension,theinstitutionsinourperformingartslandscapemustbecaredforandtreatediftheystillwanttostandfordevelopmentandresearchandnotforcentresofoverproduction,growth,violence,alienationandexclusion,forprofessionalautomatisms,careerplanningandforperpetuatingthesamesymptoms.

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the decree so as not to have to enter the battle with the large structures and to be able to quickly proceed to the growth and continuity phase: own buildings, resources and grants.

Management of the status quo takes precedence over the development and probing of the landscapeIn our paper we also recommended creating space, at the level of the artistic landscape, for complexity and experimentation independent of the compul-sion to produce, for research structures, for diversity and for negotiation and co operation. In practice this means honouring room to move, independent research and non-politicised spaces for experimentation without gatekeepers but with effective caretakers, employment and research scholarships, expand-ing the relationship between education, research and art, separate advice for the development and flow of research from training to practice, research into non-hegemonic practices and workshop and studio policies, etc.

A number of the heterotopic spaces and of the proposed instruments were later incorporated into the 2004 decree, such as scholarships for individu-al artists and workplaces as possible spaces for research and experimentation.

The phenomenon we referred to at the time is no less relevant today.Furthermore, in terms of sustainable development things have not im-

proved and now a number of these rare heterotopic spaces are being silently run down.  

The development policy was never given the chance to grow sustainably and the paradigm of a preservation policy soon took powerful hold, supported by interventions by the authorities which on the one hand encouraged fusions and scaling up (growth), but discouraged fundamental research and the con-struction of organisations around the artists themselves.

It was above all the change that involved not developing any more struc-tures around artists and thus no longer basing a landscape on research and artistic necessity had major consequences.

Also, the disappearance of the large ensembles was not compensated by an alternative concept of a community of theatre-makers. This meant that the individual had to sell himself to the existing profiled and evaluating struc-tures rather than making space for research and trial and error in the field. The many workplaces and scholarships couldn’t compensate for this lack of a collective dynamic. Now more than ever there is a need for care, development concepts and sustainable theatre practices.

I now want to address these issues in the light of recent developments in the field of artistic research in the sector.

change, transformation and development, and ‘guards’ or gatekeepers who wanted to preserve the system and in their extreme form sought transparency, control of the access to a certain area, preservation of the competitive position and opposition to excessive heterogeneity.

Producers’ individual development is halted by the ‘prohibition’ of developing structures around artistsOur paper established that the career of a valuable performing artist who finds no place in a permanent structure is relatively short, that there is no room for ‘the trek across the desert’ or the ‘renewal’, a point at which certain artists ar-rive in later life, that they then disappear into receptive structures such as ed-ucation, conform to large structures to earn a living or are excluded. In 1996 there were also many examples of valuable producers who were praised by the advisory committee as artists but whose organisations were disbanded or questioned: Eric De Volder, Josse De Pauw, Dito’Dito, De Roovers, etc. In 2012, and this is an intervention from the time of former Minister of Culture Anciaux, it has become almost unthinkable that new structures would once more be built around individual artists. The engine that actually set the renewal of the eighties in motion can no longer support any bodywork. The scholarships re-present a (major!) consolation.

The continuity of structures has taken precedence over their emancipation and renewalThe year 1996 demonstrated that organisations are prone to a cyclic course and that it is strange that the dynamic of the eighties, with management changing every four, eight or twelve years, threatened to get bogged down in a way of thinking based on growth and progression that is completely unsustainable. Pioneer organisations tried to grow and invest in buildings, a permanent pres-ence, structural grants and so on as quickly as possible.

We found that most organisations asked for continuity based on their merits. Anyone who deliberately chose not to grow was often penalised by the policy-makers. It seemed impossible to slow down the pace of growth and the compulsion to produce or to take a step back towards a small-scale set-up.

We wrote at the time that this ‘growth concept’ could not be sustained and would in the short term lead to more than ten instead of three huge mon-ster structures that would take up a position at the top of the system and that would gradually force the average and small fry out of the existing order. Mean-while this movement continues on its course.

Another consequence of the preservation policy we warned about was the anchoring of partitions. A fine example is the socio-artistic field that first presented itself as a series of pretenders but soon opted for a separate part in

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inherent to research initiatives. Furthermore, the profiling of the curators who inhabit the performing arts landscape forces the researchers to submit to the external criteria devised by these curators. We also see that in Flanders, dance research and conceptual, more predictable forms of art have more chance of intake than slow and unpredictable research and work processes that require the necessary care and development or which are experiential or cannot be made immediately visible.

Research pretenders have to respond to the curators’ external output criteria to have their quality accepted. So they hop from one project monitor to another to offer their research a temporary and precarious place.

Yes, but not like that! More than fifteen years later there is now a need for not overly politicised places for tinkering and development or for transit zones (with or without a caretaker), where producers can linger for a while (and which indeed has a time limit …) and work on their research.

It seems plausible to me that these places should be located either between the domains of education and work, a sort of transitional structure based on the flow of researchers and research between education and work domains, or discovered by producers themselves. Now that structures are no longer built around producers (an intervention from Anciaux’s time), I believe it is necessary to create research platforms for producers and by producers.

 StudioOne very important tool that is often underestimated is a permanent studio where performing artists can work. The maximum development of spaces in the performing arts ensures that people can briefly reside and work in these spaces, for the duration of a residence. For a study to develop it is impor-tant that the research material can grow. In my experience of working with producers such as Benjamin Verdonck, Stefanie Claes, Simon Allemeersch and Johan Dehollander, such a studio seems extremely important. Until now there is no existing studio policy for the performing arts.

 Artists’ platformI believe that another instrument is the artists’ platform. Recently, in Courant 98, Diederik Peeters made a strong argument for producers, who organise inter-mediate structures between themselves, guaranteeing a long-term vision and creating a context for decelerating their research and development. They are no longer obliged to jump from one project to another and are able to immerse themselves in the research unit for a time and share their overheads using co-working spaces. A quote:

The sector’s pathology/lack of care and home-made techniques for research (monitor 2)

If I Google ‘artistic research in the theatre sector or the performing arts’ I get five results for the Lemmensinstituut study led by Claire Swyzen (who belongs more in academic research-in-the-arts), and one result for the study day ‘Om-gevingen voor artistiek onderzoek’ (Environments for artistic research) by Rits and VTi on 15 March 2012 and three results for research by the Erasmus Uni-versity College Brussels. Not a single mention of independent research by per-forming artists or performing arts organisations. Academic research is already the most visible on Google.

Nevertheless the term ‘research’ is used a lot for ‘practice as research’ in the sector. The term ‘research’ pops up in almost all grant applications and, just like the term ‘audience education’, has different connotations. Pure academic research in the sector is rather limited and research particularly concerns prac-tices in the workplace, arts centres and the artists themselves.

Artistic research follows a different logic than the urge to establish profiles that has long played a role in the performing arts. Over the last fifteen years the

large growth structures have determined the discursive agenda and are dominant. STUK, Vooruit, deSingel, Kaaitheater, KVS, Toneelhuis, NTGent, etc. proudly state that since the beginning of this century the great fit of profiling and the competi-tive struggle in the performing arts has come to an end. Nothing is further from the truth! Smaller organisations (the medium-sized are disappearing rapidly) must face the competition. They are sub-ject to the adage ‘merge or sharpen up your image’. This urge for profiling totally contradicts the open policy that demands that an institution welcomes research and uncertain artistic developments.

In practice the authorities and ad visory committees refer research pro-jects and development projects to the big players, but these apply efficiency norms for programming and production that directly oppose the ‘slow art’ that is

‘This may also be interesting for “slow art”. This

management agency wanted me because they

liked a performance that I made and they thought

that it had a lot of potential to sell, so they really

wanted to invest, and then we didn’t manage to sell

it at all, and then I also turned into these curato-

rial things, more research-based work, and more

process-based also, and then they refused to have

me. They said that they don’t know what to do with

what I produce and that they need products that

they can sell. For me it was a bit of disappointment

because … I mean, now I think I was really naïve, I

also understand their interest completely, but in my

mind I thought that we shared a certain ideology

and that it is maybe about selling, but it’s about

selling things that are also unsellable maybe and

then finding creative ways of exposing them and …

But I was completely wrong about their intention

and I am not criticising them at all! But for me it

was a bit of a slap in the face.’ Adva Zakai

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purely academic research has a chance of being honoured, because it already of-fers possible results at the start, I would like to argue for a number of positions that start out from the opposite: the de-sires of the researchers and of the im-possible. What you desire in your deep-est thoughts and feelings will never be achieved: it is precisely the impossibility of this desire that is the origin of creativ-ity and of much artistic research. It is pre-cisely this pre-logical order of deficiency, or of plenitude, excess, that presents the possibility of a development that can operate experientially and transformationally because we do not know what it will lead to.

It involves developing and questioning a slow art, beyond all these ex-ternal output criteria, application criteria and economic principles of research efficiency, and which tries to articulate the impossible so as to move closer to creating a study.

 Carers versus monitoringIn our recent encounter about environments for artistic research I compared Myriam Van Imschoot’s research path with a ‘tacking thread’. Sometimes the thread is visible, you are working and you display the results, but sometimes the thread is invisible and then there is no remuneration or presentation. That’s how the life cycle of many studies unfolds: from scholarship to residence to show time to workshop to living room to benefits to the basement to scholar-ships to a project in a workplace to festival to new residence to benefits to performance to lecture performance to socio-artistic performance to les-sons to new residence and so on. I want to introduce a field of tacking thread, woven by various artist-researchers through the landscape and by way of vari-ous organisations across the partitions between them. Well now, who knows about all those threads? Who knows where the thread from the workplace will stop, when benefits will start and when the thread will pop up again in a festival project or in another residence? Who knows when one thread will cross another?

In the same encounter, Elsemieke Scholte (d e t h e a t e r m a k e r) suggests that extra care is needed to follow up the work. What happens when an artist-researcher leaves the workplace? What happens before he reappears with a production? How does each researcher weave his threads differently? This presupposes a critical empathy for a study path and a couple of negotiated ad-hoc criteria.

‘A new model: no collectives, no companies, but communities of artists; small

groups of individual artists whose individual work favours a demonstration of

affinity. Clusters of artists who might work together occasionally but who com-

ment on each other’s work, discuss their practices and exchange ideas and views

about their field of work.’4

 Connecting structuresYet another model seems to be the flow into the work domain of collective re-search done with arts students in education. One could use intermediate struc-tures that promote the flow of research and in which older as well as younger artists form research communities that are partly subsidised by education and partly by the arts.

This flow and development of practices remains the cornerstone of the establishment and could prevent us from being stuck once more with the institu-tionalisation of artistic research for the wrong reasons: namely to enable an aca-

demic career and remuneration or to pro-file oneself as a workplace and to demand that producers adapt to this profiling.

It mainly involves recreating a place for small structures developed around artists, which offer a platform for them to wilfully articulate their research and allow room for temporary invisibil-ity and trial and error, and which conse-quently are not adapted to the regime of the artist/travelling salesman who drifts here and there to promote his projects or to dance to the tune of the curators.

Theatre and the performing arts have been community affairs since way back. A unique aspect in the develop-ment of research is an organic research dramaturgy and support. This is some-thing that requires a specific expertise that is all too rare in the sector and if it is present is not considered as productive.

At a time when, for economic rea-sons, mainly conceptual and/or format-ted artistic research (with a blueprint) or

4 DiederikPeeters,‘Degoestingvaneentypischindividuelekunstenaar’(‘Thedesiresofatypicalindividualartist’),in:Courant98,Brussels:VTi,August-October2011,19-21.

‘I believe in the idea and the importance of artist

run workspaces in Belgium, Brussels, Europe, the

world …The camaraderie with artists that think

similarly and have a vision for something very spe-

cific is important, and I think we need each other to

make something happen on any kind of scale.

One of the main benefits of an artist run workspace

is that we can take back some power. We have given

over most of any power we had in this business.

The artists don’t even have their finger on the

pulse, they are the pulse of what is going on in art.

And I believe art to be not a luxury but a funda-

mental building block of society and as much an

anthropological endeavor as anything else. People

who studied economics and are very strong on the

business side, who have become responsible for the

artistic decisions and the direction that art takes

on a large scale, that is very dangerous, in my opin-

ion. With the absence of an artistic mind in that

process. Because it’s like having a left brain run an

artistic universe. I think that collaboration is how

things should go.’ David Hernandez

‘I tend to see my work that is situated between, may-

be a place of the impossibility to express something

and the possibility of it, actually. It’s very directly

related to emotions, my work, and it’s all the time in

constant dialogue with the art field, with the system,

our social system, what affects me and how I see my

place inside society. So I don’t try to bring this to an

auto-referential thing but I try to see my body as a

place I could compare to how society works and how I

am affected by it.’ Marcos Simoes

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step towards the craftsmanship of re-search, a step towards taking time for a development, sharing research and es-pecially taking the time to develop crafts-manship, to share misunderstandings, to make mistakes and to generate new insights and transformations out of our ‘fallibility’, to have intensive encounters, gain and share experiences, not to get straight to the objective or form, time to digest and for all this to materialise in practice. This working method has ex-isted for a hundred years and is almost dying out after just a few decades. It desperately needs a revival in light of omnipresent ecological and economic disasters. We must also share what we don’t yet know and before we actually know it. That’s why we need time and space.

Artistic research is not something you can explain in ten seconds. It does not provide much of a wow factor, but it works well in terms of sustainability and long-term visions.

Meanwhile we see how quickly places that can still offer time and space for research, care and subjectivity, are cut back. You see it happening in psy-chiatry (Verhaeghe), in education, in the health sector, in science and now in the arts. With an unobserved ideological fervour, the roots of an ancient practice of tinkering, research, studio work and craftsmanship are being eradicated.

It is no longer permissible to allow the ‘undefined’ to remain so; it must be determined and addressed. With a little philosophical daring we could pro-pose that the protocol is the murder of impossibility and therefore also the mur-der of any authentic, original or genuine ability. The necessary tension between possibility and impossibility is undone when men erase the singular through standardisation and objectification …

We must learn once more to trust slow creatures and learn to toler-ate the true work that is often slow and invisible but which has tangible results. When I mentioned that my totem is a tortoise in fact I also wanted to ‘discover the slow and sustainable’ soul and give a central position to ‘the apparent inef-ficiency of research’. But before we can demand economic efficiency from the researcher we must learn to tolerate his ‘outside position’.5

5 ChristopheDejours, L’évaluation du travail à l’épreuve du réel. Critique des fondements de l’évaluation (Theevaluationofworkinthelightofreality.Critiqueonthefoundationsofevaluation),Versailles:INRA,2003.

That too is a form of ad-hoc monitoring, but then from below, and not through towering external yardsticks. After the contraction of more traditional roles as critics or dramatists, where do the archaeologically-inspired carers find themselves, they who have painstakingly spun the spider’s web by detecting and monitoring the researchers and making suggestions about the way for-ward? To me it seems like a form of organic dramaturgy or production that di-rectly opposes the familiar forms of curatorship or the criteria used by assess-ment bodies.

It reminds me of the work of the French educationalist Fernand Deligny, who transcribed lines on tracing paper to illustrate the way autistic children strolled on their walks, where they tied themselves in knots, where they back-tracked a lot, what they avoided, in brief: how their wanderings created their own language. He called the lines that this created lignes d’erre (straying lines). For him they formed a language that revealed more about the identities of the children involved than the few words they uttered. Deligny considered tradi-tional treatments to be inadequate. Well, these lignes d’erre are part of the care he extended to these children and of an alternative method and approach to their journey, separate from a panoptic vision.

As far as the sector is concerned, we have urgent need of Delignys and Scholtes who with due care will track down researchers, support them, and connect the various threads so as to be able to make suggestions about which path to follow through the landscape. At a time of competition and extensive profiling, this type of work is not very productive, but it is immensely important. The care-monitoring process takes precedence over the external, imposed yardsticks and the panoptic assessor.

 Conclusion 

This does not mean that we cannot say yes to the great acceleration of the 21st century, yes to peer review, yes to blogs and fast media, yes to excellence, yes to results and visibility over time; but not as it is done at the moment. We are all playing the same game and none of us is totally free of blame, but that can’t be all … Art and research also take time to develop things, to potter about, to fail, to make strange leaps, to try out insane ideas, to set off in unpredictable direc-tions, to get lost and discover something else …

Joint workspaces, slow goods, slow society, slow science and slow art are important tools for sustainable development in artistic practices. We are back to the tortoise I mentioned at the very beginning. In this climate, of fast art, short-term formats and trends, deceleration is an important step. A

‘I think that this ideology of progress is something

that has to be carefully questioned, because it

presents many problems. So the idea that there is

not just one future, but that there could be many dif-

ferent futures. And that this way of perceiving time,

this eagerness to go to the future, or this patience to

remain in the present and to allow, in the present,

for different temporalities to appear, I think it’s a

matter of not only patience, but also a will to linger

in the present moment.’ Fabián Barba

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A tortoise follows her path unseen through the desert of slow art and encounters other things besides the sports cars:Not via the motorway but the country roadsThe road is long and perilousWith highs and lowsTrial and errorExcess and dearthPoor and slow artImpossible connections and encounters He who scraps the place of the impossible,Also scraps working on himself, caring for himselfCaring for a landscape, caring for creativityHe who scraps the place of the impossibleAlso scraps the development of theatreand by extension theatre itself.  The scrapping of …

THAT TRANSFORMS THE IMPOSSIBLE INTO A RESEARCH PRACTICEOR THAT QUESTIONS THE POSSIBLE WORK ON ITS IMPOSSIBILITYREDUCES THE ABILITY TO SEARCH RESOURCEFULLYWHEN, AS A PRODUCER OR RESEARCHER, YOU ARE CONFRONTED WITH AN UNFAMILIARAND CHANCE SITUATION Moles, toads, koalas, ants and anteaters, salamanders, snails, ducks, penguins and …TORTOISES OF THIS WORLDHOIST THE SAILSHURRY SLOWLYFESTINA LENTESPRING COMES SLOWLYYES, BUT NOT LIKE THAT 

Geert Opsomer has a PhD in theatre studies and is a lecturer on the directing course at the Rits. Along with Johan Dehollander he organises the Plateau/Platform voor Artistiek

Nomaden (Platform for Artistic Nomads, PAN) at the CAMPO arts centre, which is the part of CAMPO that carries out artistic research.

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To get an answer on your questions, there are several possibilities: you can use the contact form on vti.be or call us on 02 201 09 06 (ask for Nikol Wellens or Annelies Van den Berghe). Every second Tuesday afternoon, we also organise a First Aid @ VTi session: we block our agendas from 2 pm to 5 pm to help starting artists with their questions about subsidy applications, infrastructure, artistic matters, contacts … These information sessions are personal, free and without appointment.

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COLOPHON

Perspective: Artist. The position of individual artists in the performing arts in Flanders

Authors: Delphine Hesters, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, Femke Snelting, Michael Murtaugh, Maarten Bresseleers, Lien Van Steendam, Geert OpsomerCoordination: Delphine Hesters, Joris JanssensEditorial staff: Floris Cavyn, Gunther De Wit, Delphine Hesters, Joris Janssens, Bart Magnus, Annelies Van den Berghe and Nikol WellensCopy-editing: Gunther De WitTranslation: Gregory BallLayout: Gunther FobeLayout data-diary: Constant vzwPrint: Newgoff

With special thanks to Constant vzw for their data-diary contribution and to the artists who were so kind to share with us their thoughts and experiences and let us use fragments from conversations we had with them during Open House (17-19 May 2012, Brussels).

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercialNo derivative Works 2.0 Belgium License. To view a copy of this license,visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/be/deed.en.

ISBN 9789074351423D/2012/4610/2

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Since 1987:Documentation centre for theatre, dance and music-theatreVTi assumes responsibility for the intensive documentation of performing arts practices.

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