Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Gerhard Richter

So, it seems we need to insist that art is just that: Art. Valuable as hell, but with no usefulness. The utility of art is always a secondary effect, one that will disappear as soon as we start focusing on the secondary effect instead of focusing on the primary cause.

Maybe it would be possible to focus a bit less on creating something that is new, and rather focus on creating something that is distinctive instead? Something that is personal, not very original, not bringng a big new vision of the world and the contemporary modes of production, but, rather, raises one idiosyncratic voice in the general chatter and maintains that voice for longer than the 15-minute attention span of the art world? You know, actually trying to say something in a language that others can kind of understand? (Communication is, of course, based on a shared language, i.e. one that by its very definition is not new. I find the struggle to create new movement languages etc. a bit strange. First of all: Can you define dance as a language? Probably not. Second of all, if you ARE able to define it as a language, why would you want to invent a brand new language every time you do something? What’s the communicative value of a language that nobody — including its maker — understands? Somehow I don’t enjoy reading novels in Arabic, even if it’s a brand new language for me. The newness of the marks of ink on paper doesn’t make it more interesting than if I could actually understand the language… I’d much rather understand the language and be amazed at how the author masters it for her own purposes…)

My humble suggestion: Stop evaluating works of art (or subsidy applications…) on the basis of their newness. I would much rather be evaluated on the basis of the integrity of my work and the relevance of this work in whichever context I place it in… I’ll probably still fail miserably, but at least I’m being evaluated in terms that are useful for me — and most of the people watching the work.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t want to see or hear new stuff, most of the time I’m delighted to. I just feel that the focus on newness of art can undermine the quality of the work, pushing artists to do stuff just for the sake of being new, rather than sticking to older methods when they are appropriate to the work, methods that could potentially have made their work much more unique and — let’s face it — genuinely new…

The beauty of someone else saying something is that you suddenly can realize how wrong you’ve been about that something… In this case it struck me that I’ve been trying very hard to squeeze this idea of the distinctiveness of the art forms onto my work, in a sort of futile protest against the kind of postmodern devaluation or skills that I can’t really deal with. In the end the idea started looking like my sister’s pug: a very fat dog with a very small t-shirt. The idea just doesn’t fit with reality, at least not mine. My reality is one of constantly crossing borders between art forms, grabbing a bit of inspiration here, a couple of working methods there, putting it together in a very eclectic mix that eventually becomes a performance that is nominally a dance work.

More or less at the same time that the realisation struck me that my way of thinking was wrong, I was struck by a possible way out of the mess. The basic problem was this: How do I justify spending so much time developing and fine-tuning a very specific craft (that of dance and choreography), working on the finer points of the extended leg or the arched back to the point of autism, if I can’t even call it by a proper name and say that this is DANCE and nothing else, and nobody else has a right to the title of DANCE… On the other hand: If I were to give up dance as a separate art form and dedicate myself to ART in general, not making any distinctions between, say, a stretched leg and a C# from an oboe, I would quickly fall into an absurdly unskilled, vague and totally useless space, one that I could never work from.

So, what would be the solution to this problem? Well, I don’t know if I have a definite solution, but I have found at least one possible avenue for thinking constructively about this: I would suggest replacing the word Disciplines with the words Skill Sets. A Discipline, the way I think about it, is a historical, traditional complex of rules, expectations, conventions, forms, whatnot. It’s pretty functional to think in those terms sometimes (how would we otherwise be able to think of something as a classical ballet performance, and something as Georgian national dance?) However, in the setting I work within this becomes too limited, too constrictive. Thus the need for another term. Enter Skill Set: I think of myself as an expert on some (physical movement the foremost of these), and a non-expert on some (costume design would be pretty high on that list…) aspects of performance making. I’ve built a set of skills within my profession that are specific to what I’m doing, a skill set that is unique to me, and one that makes me who I am, professionally and personally. This skill set exists across a bunch of traditional disciplines. I know a great deal about moving my body in the style of some martial arts and release technique, I know some fundamental acrobatics, I’ve been getting some input from acting, I’ve been playing a lot of different instruments to a certain level and composed music to the best of my ability. All of this contributes to my performance making, and has helped me produce what I have been very careful to call dance performances. It’s just that the origins of these performances stem from all kinds of other places, resulting in what will never be “pure” dance performances, and probably never should be, either. Seems to me that art’s too rich to be constrained by disciplines. Maybe (probably) I’m barging through an open door right now, but at least I’ve managed to open up one in my own head…