Celebrate and Demonstrate
Dancers, artists, workers and lovers of Spring, an invitation to participate in the May Day parade, to walk alongside other workers in solidarity, as companions in protest against precarity, austerity and marginalization.
Celebrate and Demonstrate proposed a political alliance between dancers and other workers in the form of rallying and marching together on May Day. It explored the potential for somatic dance practices to participate in radical politics as they are enacted today. In the context of popular demonstrations against social inequality and injustice, or ‘performative assembly’ (Judith Butler, Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 2015), somatic practice could participate in a profound shift of our understanding of politics. The kinaesthetically and environmentally sensitized body of the somatically trained dancer is particularly well adapted to engage in radical political manifestations.
I had been developing a dance practice of ‘companionship’ - attuning to a mutual state of being-with as the sole instruction, allowing rather than directing movement to emerge and relationships to form. It is a co-creative dance that is less concerned with the spatial position of bodies than with their disposition as being-with, and with what passes in the space between them - a practice of co-presence, being-together-with, being in the world, and as such aligning with notions of performative, political assembly. Celebrate and Demonstrate was a first manifestation of my desire to activate this practice of companionship in the world of political protest.
May Day London is a celebration of unforetold alliances. A gathering of disparate collectives and individual bodies. May Day 2016 saw groups representing causes as diverse as Arabs and Kurds unite for Freedom, junior doctors, migrant workers, the Brazilian campaign for democracy, civil liberties, women’s rights, anti-racism, Jewish socialism and assorted trade unions rallying and walking together for trade union rights, human rights and international solidarity. Individual group identities were apparent, individual protests could be heard, yet we gathered together, we walked together, we walked alongside each other in alliance. Our presence as dancers within and as part of this heterogeneity asserted our claim to be political. Being-with others we claimed public space with our bodies and manifest our equal right to have equal rights.
Further information see Roy, C. (2017), ‘Celebrate and Demonstrate: Radical politics in somatic practices’, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, 9:1, pp. 13–30, doi: 10.1386/ jdsp.9.1.13_1
Acknowledgements:
This project was offered the space to come into being by the London May Day organisers committee and was partially funded by Equity. It was realized through the energy and support of Flora Wellesley Wesley, Freelance Dancer’s Committee, Equity, Beth Doran, Equity, Kirsty Alexander and Ella Tighe, Independent Dance, Tom Taylor, SERTUC, Arnaud Desjardin, The Everyday Press. Thank you to all the dancers who contributed to this conversation and those who joined us for May Day 2016. Placards designed by Zoe Quentel: The Everyday Press.
