Bringing the middle matriarchs back to their feet: Re-focusing artist support in dance

I’ve been digesting three days I spent with 45 women dancers who came to Sanctuary on the Fault Line’s 2nd annual lab and festival of wild dance this January 2022, joining live at Out There, Great Yarmouth UK and online from across the world – Peru, Edinburgh, Dodowa, Leeds, New South Wales, Athens, Oxford, Canada. We spent three days sharing class, talks, workshops, training in ‘wild dance practice’, taking part in live conversations and watching wild dance screenings together. Many have written to me since and told me that their life has changed in some way, which is an intense thing to say isn’t it, so I wanted to unpack this a bit.

I sense there were different layers to the impact the three days had on us all. The festival was called ‘Rage Is A Sane Reaction’ and had a core intention to share how and why explicitly female rage is largely supressed yet essential to the health and potential of the human family. And I think this is one of the key layers that reached all of us who attended in such an impactful way, our bodies and minds were opened to this and to our own feminine rage, which is a great source of energy and power as women and as dancers.

I sense secondly that the invitation to the notion and practice of ‘wild dance’ was empowering, and shifted many of us into a more agent, less hurt space as dancers. I think many of us have felt trapped in systems that supress us as people, women and dancers, trapped feeling rageful, without an outlet or an alternative. And the invitation of wild dance practice, proposed by Sanctuary on the Fault Line, is to acknowledge the hurt that systems are causing us, and the part we play in them, and to run. To liberate our practice into a different space, which returns us the ownership of our health and our dancing. And this wild practice also provides us with a network of women who are doing the same, not a group of women who are competing for resources or competing to be seen but a group of women who have returned to the spontaneity that dance needs to live. A group who are finding new realities for dance performance to dwell in; in wild gift economies where audiences are agile participating witnesses rather than receivers and dancers do not ask permission to dance and are immediately renumerated by their craft.

These digestions have prompted me to also contextualise what we are doing in this Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement – as re-focusing artist support in dance, bringing the middle matriarchs back to their feet. And that this movement could be as fortifying and liberating for the dance sector itself as we are learning it is for dancers and audiences. Those of us working in the dance sector all know that dance is not a sector that has many elders, partly because largely it has not been encouraged for dancers to go on performing into older age, partly because the way we are asked to work, not just the dancers but everyone in the sector means we are often broken – physically, psychologically, emotionally or all three, way before we inhabit elderhood. So we have no-one lending elderhood wisdom, but a pretty ‘young’ sector continually getting broken.

So finding ways to acknowledge the parts of the systems we work in that are hurting us, and ways to step away from them and grow ways of working in our bodies and cultures that are healthier and allow dance to reach this health towards audiences, could be the beginning of allowing a growth toward an elderhood that would fortify us. And as there are few or no elders, I think it’s a good bet to unhook and recover the middle matriarchs first; women in dance between 30 and 60 (ish) who have enough experience to acknowledge what is broken, enough maturity to work on recovering themselves and enough energy (somehow) and belief in dance to stop and turn around to a different way. And it is they who are largely coming to our labs and joining the network. They don’t leave the other systems entirely but they join Sanctuary on the Fault Line as a well that feeds them and the rest of their work in dance. And also as a well that feeds their health on a physical, emotional and psychological level.

And why the women, the matriarchs? Because this is a way to activate ‘anima’ the female part of our collective psyche, which women have a more tangible relationship with than men. It is her who always conjures the new, her who doesn’t jump to routes to market and communication but stays with mystery and flow, and her who protects and operates with care and furiousness.  Empowering matriarchs in community action and action for change is not unprecedented, because once you orient and activate this anima energy people are held and action is driven by care.

If you work in dance you might have noticed in yourself or in others that many of us middle matriarchs (and patriarchs)  in dance have already been making journeys to wellness – training as therapists so we can look after ourselves and others better, working out that we should find ways to hire bid writers, book keepers, administrators, instead of training in these skills and taking them on ourselves, voicing our concerns about current systems and realities, taking powerful caring stances in how we pay and employ others, taking caring approaches to artistic process and frameworks, seeking therapeutic interventions ourselves, paying for it by hook or by crook, going to teach full-time for parts of our career and then coming back to full time artistry with dogged determination.

But pretty much all of this relies on the strength and determination of the individual, and taking this all on too has added to the strain of the precarious financial situations we live with as dancers and the already too high demands on our physical and emotional lives. So we need to head towards a cultural change. We need to operate in healthy systems. And I think once the middle matriarchs orient in a healthy, liberated practice, in which we can pay our bills, we can spread this health through the sector and to public. We talked at length on what dance performed by dancers who are well could do for public at the lab (we will share the main talk on that publicly soon), and this is so over-looked; that the systems we are working in are not only hurting dancers and trapping them in a precarious reality, but that this is not serving public. Because if dancers are precarious and exhausted, it is this that they subliminally pass to audiences, when the potential of dance is that it could be passing the ability for powerful embodied health and liberation.

It’s curious to me that it’s often talked about in the dance sector as a problem that so many young people are now training in dance. I think largely because they worry that there is not enough jobs for them. There’s much talk of the great intelligence of dancers being used in other fields, of adapting. But perhaps this influx of dancers is the world pushing, cajoling us to find a way for the wisdom of dance to spread more fully into the world right now. Perhaps there is a current flooding of dancers right now that should not be redirected but harnessed as a great well spring for the human family, if we grew systems in which this health and intelligence could reach public more easily, unhurt, untamed.

Hayley