Sfaa talk | Collaborative Performance + Activism in Reykjavík Iceland
Below is the talk I gave at the Annual Meeting for the Society for Applied Anthrpology for the session “Addressing Activism and Understanding Conflict”
Hi everyone, thanks for having me.
This talk goes traces the activism of the Icelandic Dance community and my own identity shift as a researcher to a collaborator in this activism. My Masters research took place in the summer of 2017 in Reykjavik Iceland.
I worked with the dance community through the Reykjavik Dance Festival, Dance House, and the Academy of the Arts.
Though the “idea” of collaboration had been suggested in my proposal, my experience in Reykjavik made these concepts tangible to me in a new way and changed the way I think about anthropologists’ role in communities and our approaches to doing collaborative and activist-centric research.
A quick background: The RDF was founded in 2004 as a way for independent dancers to bring together their funds and share their art. By 2014, the festival had grown, occurring three times a year and bringing in international guests and performers. The Dance Atelier opened its doors in 2010, as a place for these same independent dancers to work and spend time together. In the summer of my fieldwork, the building that houses the Dance Atelier was being torn down for a city project. This closing of the dance house coincided with an art critic’s comment in an article that the dancers needed their own space and a hashtag, #risindanshus or arise, dance house, then used by the dance community to gain support within the city for the obtainment of their new space. Finally, the dance program at the Academy of the Arts began in 2015 changed the way Icelanders could obtain dance knowledge-- affording them the option to study in Iceland rather than a foreign school. The program also brings international students to Reykjavik.
For the remainder of this talk I am going to discuss two related vignettes from my fieldwork and then discuss how this changed my identity as an anthropologist.
*there will be creatively intense language used in images and in my talk
The first vignette is titled HOT BODIES OF THE FUTURE and was both a two week workshop in August 2017 and a two-part performance in November 2017.
HOT BODIES OF THE FUTURE began as a call “So, do you want to be in a Feminist Choir?” from the RDF’s guest artist Gerald Kurdian from Paris.
Night one we read aloud three classic Feminist Manifestos: The SCUM Manifesto, Cyborg Manifesto, and the EcoSex Manifesto. I had asked Gerald if I could observe the workshop, and he had kindly suggested I should fully participate in order to make everyone comfortable.
This choice ended up putting me front and center from the very start, as we read through the manifestos-- I became the official translator for words or phrases the Icelanders were unfamiliar with. Although Gerald’s years of work focus on these manifestos-- he reverted to me for translation. I became aware that an the only native English speaker, my translation would have effect on the workshop. With this unexpected position I felt unsure of how to proceed with the rest of the workshop.
However, as the workshop continued on- it became clear that my small act of vulnerability was reciprocated in discussions of “invisible” cultural themes. I learned that these women felt that the world overlooked gender and sex issues in Iceland because of its reputation of being so feminist. As one stated: “before I do something challenging i always think: if i were a man this would be no problem, i don’t want to think that way.” They shared that that Icelanders were “ok” with women and gays, but not trans or other queer identities and they felt it was a stubbornness to growth when emphasized by Iceland’s progressive status.
Throughout the rest of the workshop, we journaled, pieced together songs, and placed these words into music Gerald wrote. The lyrics to both songs are up on the slide now.
As you can see: these songs do not hold back. In them lie personal stories, fears, and truths.
I left Iceland right after the workshop, saying goodbye to these women whose stories I know held.
My first month and a half in Denver I was bombarded by this guilt that I could not go back to Iceland in November to perform these songs. It felt as though this experience was to me, just fieldwork. Not only did I feel awful for “taking” the experience, but these women had the burden of performing pieces of me. Driven by this obligation I felt, I ended up back in Iceland for the festival.
The performance became a whole new level of activism and the importance of research in these contexts-- and it ties in directly with the second short stroy I wanted to share: the Spectacular Opening Party: themes of defiance.
To go in chronological order, I will quickly share about the overarching theme of the festival, inspired by Gerald’s work over the summer.
This is how the program described the festival: In the thickening dark of November, Everybody’s Spectacular finds hope in the idea that even the smallest acts of defiance can make a major impact on the world around us. Whether it’s standing up for a person’s rights, speaking out against sexual harassment and abuse, or kneeling down in protest on a football field, there lies in every defiant act a hopeful refusal to accept the status quo (Everybody’s Spectacular 2017).
The opening party took place at the performance space, Mengi. Four “festival tshirts” were given out-- which set the tone for the week of performances. The tshirts read:
1. The Truth will set you free but first it will piss you off
2. Not a hobby just an underpaid job
3. We are the antiracist, anticolonial, proqueer, interspecies feminists
4. Fokk patriarchy (and a variation in Icelandic)
The President of Iceland attended the opening, and received a tshirt and he image of the President with his shirt became the most used photograph of the festival: The cover of many newspapers, and the festival’s most liked Instagram post. To the members of this community his presence both validated the festival and reminded Iceland as whole that art, specifically dance, refuses to be quiet. Dancers often say that dance is the lowest in the hierarchy of art in Iceland: everyone knows music and design, people respect the theatre, but dance is newer, less funded, and less known. Again, #risindanhus was a fight that used this very logic, with the dancers refusing to be left without a dance space. The performances, the President’s presence and this hashtag all added momentum of activism of the community.
The climax of the festival was the QUEER BALLROOM FOR HOT BODIES OF THE FUTURE, organized by Gerald. The night opened up with a performance titled, Mothership, which I was a part of as the choreographer was a member of the HOT BODIES choir and had asked us to join. The idea is a physical and slow moving “ship” that moves through the streets as a combat against street-culture and cat-calling.
We performed the two songs a few hours later and when we exited the stage—I was stopped by an Icelander who was in tears. They thanked us for creating this space, saying that nothing like it existed for the queer community in Reykjavík. They thanked us for writing the songs, being honest and bare, and for facilitating this space. I was caught off guard as a non-queer, non-Icelander, that I was being thanked for the words we had sung. My reply was simply a hug.
As I began to write my thesis a few weeks later back in Denver, I spent a great deal of time thinking through this ephemeral and embodied research and how my obligations to the community had shifted as I grew involved with their stories and their raw art work.
The performance to me, became what dancer and dance theorist Katerina Paramana writes in her dissertation, Performance in the Contemporary Moment. She first states that “Theatre is a space of collective attention, where, much like in protests, individuality is not suppressed but many people give attention to the same thing at the same time”-- thus this festival became a space of this collective attention-- the songs and performances displaying Icelanders frustrations with gender issues and lack of queer spaces. These types of collective spaces create what Paramana calls, “ethical encounters.”
They happen like this:
Economy of relation-- so a big network or event, in this case we can call the global dance network-- and all the relationships this entails the economy of relation. This produces: spaces of decision, spaces of affect, and spaces of creative possibility. These in turn produce ethical encounters.
In the case of Everybody’s Spectacular, for example, the Space of Decision, Creative Possibility, and Affect were the specific performances that occured at the festival (which is a tangible manifestation of the global dance network)
One specific result was a space of creative possibility that turned into an ethical encounter is that one of the dancers from the choir moved to paris to study under Gerald, and came back to facilitate a PERMANENT choir/workshop/queer space in the city-- thus creating this needed space in the culture.
Paramana says that ethical encounters, “recognize fully, the alterity of the other and the ethical responsibility towards her in non-reciprocal terms.” And this is now how i see my role as a researcher, collaborator, and writer in this community.
My ethical obligations have been deepened: I share all my work with the community, I skype with members every so often, visit them abroad, and have continued to write on this fieldwork-- there is never too much to say. I have learned that as an anthropologist I wish to have deep connections to my participants. I do not want to theorize about what collaboration is, I want to do it. Being a member of the choir of course provided me with data, but it was a reciprocal relationship.
Most certainly in the study of an intangible art like dance and performance-- having a visceral connection allows the anthropologist to understand that much more. To me, it comes down to this: anthropology is the ideal discipline to study collaborative dance/performance art and has an obligation to do so. By tracing ethical encounters we can learn more how art impacts culture. Anthropologists are uniquely trained to this--we have vast and creative methods in which to archive, document, and understand visceral artforms. We can use these methods to learn how activism within artistic communities effect larger cultural movements. And it has become my mission to see this through: I want to live into my personal ethical encounter that came out of research. As an applied anthropologists I want to focus on tracing these encounters that occur from being a part of and attending these collaborative performance pieces and how culture deepens thanks to these art works.
