Hats and maps: a collective juggling with its own precarity

When I heard the phrase ‘wearing multiple hats’ for the first time, it sounded a bit funny, but nonetheless left a bitter taste in my mouth. Working in the dance field very often requires multiple skills (writing is one of them) but lately this multi-tasking for your life seems to have become an inescapable norm. Unanswered emails accumulating in your inbox. Rehearsal schedules like unsolvable riddles. Sleepless nights trying to make it for the next open call deadline. Our work-life balance seems like a paraphrase to Samuel Beckett’s famous wording: ‘Fall again. Fall better.’

Even if you are not already familiar with Beckett’s motto, you may still wonder: why are there so few initiatives that critically reflect on our precarious worklives? In the Greek dance context, where institutional funding for independent dance artists and infrastructures is scarce, one artistic collective has ventured to map some of the current working conditions. Based in Athens, undercurrent (Nassia Fourtouni, Christina Karagianni, Elena Novakovits) identifies as a versatile platform that gives dance a refreshing twist: by organising exhibitions with personal objects as artefacts (‘remnants of an ongoing activity’), doing workshops and symposia, and, lately, also undertaking some publishing initiatives. The most recent, Working (in) statements – a rare example of an alternative pedagogical project supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture – emerged from a series of workshop-encounters, and aims to ‘provide a polyvocal read and exploration of the matters regarding dysfluent working flows; practices of juggling, systemic faults, complexities hidden in everyday life.’

The book (visual design by Kostis Sotiriou) is a collection of testimonies, theoretical extracts and anecdotal evidence regarding precarious working conditions in Greece. In the words of the collective, it ‘supports polyphony’ and proposes a ‘multilayered way of sharing material’ so that the reader ‘engages with it in playful way’. It unfolds as 8 separate maps, allowing us to navigate freely through a number of complex but all-too-familiar topics: the unsustainable flexibility of work, the temporal workflow of projects and open-call fatigue, the merciless production cycle in which artists (and not only) are trapped in, the possibility of mother-friendly working contexts. As I lay the different maps on my table, turn them around, hold them in my hands, I think: the landscape, however harsh or pretty, is already there, but the maps show possible ways to explore it. Yes, we have tools to analyse current conditions, but testimonies coming from the local context are still scarce. On one folio, someone blandly describes her busy day: ‘the day that I didn’t finish writing a personal message and I might find, days later, the half-written message I had started writing.’ I cannot but think of ‘self-unfinished’ as a way to capture this unnerving impression of being always busy with something that is more than work and that rarely gives you a feeling of accomplishment. What is the word for it, underachiever? If so, why is underachieving so overwhelming?

I read from another map an extract from queer Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel’s poem/manifesto ‘I Speak For My Difference’ and wonder if this book follows a path that Lemebel’s writing paved: a hybrid collection of observations, part memoir, part journalling, giving voice to people who sense the urgency to be heard and, like the poet, declare that ‘I don’t trust this democratic dance.’ I stay with the poem’s disarming frankness for a while, my thoughts now thrown into different directions. Maybe this is what I like about poetry, that it escapes the linearity of time. Could we ever find a way to work more poetically, escaping the linearity of productive time, the relentless timekeeping of life and work?

The topic of time is addressed in another section of the book, but the book as an art object also ‘endures over time’ and becomes, as undercurrent stresses, ‘an attempt to participate in the relevant discourse from the perspective of our own periphery’. Working (in) statements also aims at ‘articulating shared struggles’, that is, to find common cause with others (both dance artists and less visible or more peripheral workers such as dramaturgs, assistants, producers, and so on), not simply in theory, but through the recognition that critical reflections are not separate from the way we work, collaborate, or advocate for fairer conditions. It’s about allowing differences to emerge within our common state, and approaching the field from a plural, ecological perspective.

All three undercurrent members share a sense that precarity is a symptom of how the promise of autonomy has resulted in less secure jobs. ‘Risk forms part of the notion of personal enterprise’ I read from a quote, among glossaries concerning self-employment, desired professional skills, and the inevitable risk cultural workers are faced with. For undercurrent, ‘precarity is not a natural state that just happens to everyone, rather it’s politically induced and structured in ways which expose certain groups and people more intensely to social and economic insecurity than others. Focusing in the cultural field, precarity is often discussed as a shared condition and not rarely, it is aestheticized.’

It can also be laughed at. The book features a collection of humorous memes such as ‘not sure if entrepreneur or just unemployed’, and ‘quit my 9–5 job to escape rat race, now self-employed and work 24/7.’ Certainly, humour can be a form of mild resistance, but who can afford to be underpaid to make their dream come true? How many hats do you have to wear in order to make ends meet? Current conditions in the dance field wouldn’t have been possible without the figure of the self-entrepreneur, who signals a new way to define a successful career path, where risk becomes a synonym for strong will and audacity, self-branding a name for authenticity and creativeness, and over-exposure and hypervisibility ‘equals’ hard work. If that sounds redolent of the language of self-help manuals, that’s because it is – and like them, leaves out the stubborn materiality of the work. Can we ever escape this vicious cycle?

Another map displays a quote by Italian design writer Silvio Lorusso: ‘entrepreneurship generates precarity, which in turn requires entrepreneurship.’ I look at my watch: I am running late for rehearsal (again). I take a map with me to read on the metro. Its vivid purple-fluorescent yellow colour soon catches the eye of a woman seated across from me. ‘Great title,’ she says. I flip it around to see what she has just read: ‘I can do it better, but I can charge more for it’. Sometimes you just need a nodding smile to make sense of this mess that’s called work; at others, a map to navigate you through matters that matter to others, in order to walk that landscape together. ●