Considering Dance’s Value

What is it that makes dance so valuable—and how can this value even be determined? Choreographer and dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster delves into the question as to how dance interacts within different systems of exchange: as a product that is evaluated, traded, and commodified, and as a gift that fosters relationships and cannot be fully quantified. Positioned between market logic and social practice, she conceptualizes dance as an ephemeral phenomenon whose value is constantly reshaped in the moment of transmission and perception. Susan Leigh Foster is a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA in California. This text is an excerpt from the 2019 book Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion.

Susan Leigh Foster
Choreographer and Dance Scholar

 

What makes something valuable? How is its value generated and established, then secured and preserved? How is value intimated, legitimated, promulgated, enforced, and defended? What makes one thing more valuable than another? Why is something cherished, sacrificed for, invested in, and cared about more than something else? And what if this thing that is valued is not an object but an ephemeral event? How and why do people value a dance or the act of dancing? The term “value” carries with it a double etymological history, deriving both from the Latin valere, meaning strong and also from the Old French valoir meaning worth, usefulness, estimableness, and also strength. Thus value, in addition to asserting strength, brings into consideration the conditions under which something might be deemed to be useful or estimable as well as the prospect of criteria to be used in its evaluation. 

Investigations of value have been undertaken within disciplines ranging from anthropology and sociology to economics and philosophy. Across these fields of inquiry, no consensus or unified understanding of how value functions has emerged, since it can be conceptualized as what is appropriate, good, or desirable within social life, or, alternatively, as the product of an exchange that establishes what someone is willing to trade for something else.

It has also been investigated as the outcome of meaning making, as when something has value because of the condensation of associations attached to it or housed within it, or when value is demonstrated through the emotional or intellectual effort invested in a concept, a practice, or a way of life. Value accrues through individual choices that people make and is also established through the practices and institutions that assign significance to various kinds of objects and events. While it is generally recognized as a central element within human life, a vast range of studies has demonstrated that value is always context- specific; what is valuable in one place at a given time and/or to a particular person may impart different meaning when circumstances change. It is therefore imperative to locate value in relation to specific histories, locations, and groups where it actualizes.

In attempting to construct a theory of value through which dance might be analyzed, this brief commentary builds on conceptualizations of value as determined through exchange with those that examine how value is forged through symbolic encoding, as it is instilled in either objects or actions. Specifically, it looks at the moment in which dancing passes from one person to another as an act of exchange, one that is redolent with symbolic meanings, including those associated with its history and all the labor that has gone into its making. It examines this exchange as an occasion when those meanings become affirmed and lauded or derogated and dismissed. Because dance materializes with and for people, because we learn to dance from others and often present dance to others, the fact of its transmission is one of dance’s central and defining features. In these periods of imparting and receiving dance, the question of equivalence is raised. Why, when, and under what circumstances is one act of dancing regarded as being commensurate in measure, effect, force, or significance to something else?

Most studies of exchange examine the moment when goods and services are swapped for something else, thereby establishing their relative value as one of equivalence. In this process the value of something’s components or parts may be gauged along with the effort or labor entailed in constructing and rendering it. As an object or service is being created and then placed within a system of exchange, its merits, advantages, and potentialities are both assessed and asserted. However, it is only once it has successfully been traded for something else that a consensus around its value becomes apparent; otherwise, the sad refrain: “It was worth more than I received for it,” or its opposite, “I got such a deal.”

Although we sometimes judge that the ticket prices were too high for what the show offered or that a teacher should be given a special acknowledgment for care and attention received, what most often occurs during dancing cannot be quantified or otherwise strictly measured, nor does dancing behave like a physical object. Dancing is far too mobile, ephemeral, and rich in associations, memories, and histories to be easily assessed. Nonetheless, might not dances, like other services, be exchangeable for other things? They do go through a process of being formulated and then presented, even when, as in improvised dancing, those activities happen in the same instant. Sometimes dances are extensively prepared for, elaborately framed, and solemnly delivered; other times they are carelessly or haphazardly tossed out. In the registering of them, however formal that occasion, is an exchange occurring and, if so, is value not being determined? Are actions not evaluated as meaningful or nonsensical; as insightful, graceful, or abstruse; as forceful, pitiful, grandiose, moderate, or ridiculous? Do they not have relative merit or worth? And can they not therefore be considered as analogous to objects of various kinds that are capable of exchange?

We urgently need to consider dance as functioning within systems of exchange because of the tumultuous changes in the world economy that have taken place in the last forty or so years. Prior to this period dance was often conceptualized either as an artistic pursuit whose economy lay outside and beyond the world of conventional commerce, or alternatively, as a form of pleasure that diverted or replenished the laboring body. However, with the burgeoning of service industries and the consolidation of a pervasive culture of measuring and calculating human activity in terms of its productivity, even dance has been assimilated into machineries of economic assessment, marketing, and exchange. Now frequently construed as a form of labor, a concept that has begun to infuse every aspect of life, dance participates as part of the global capitalist and neoliberal world order that Randy Martin succinctly described as “a triumphant ideology that replaces state with markets, public with private values, and a liberal consensus with a conservative hegemony.”

It is also important to consider dance as functioning within systems of exchange because of the fact that dancers have started seeing themselves as workers, and also that, with the changing nature of work and jobs, it becomes increasingly possible to imagine exchanging a dance for a chair, a newly constructed website, a meal, or virtually any other kind of goods or service. With dance frequently validated as a form of labor, dancers’ efforts to perform to their maximum are seen alongside a range of other commitments that manufacture an authentic dedication to work. Not only are many dancers “working it,” but they also see themselves as workers engaged within a system of economic relations in which their efforts circulate through a marketplace.  To be sure, there exist numerous forms of dance and occasions where dance occurs that do not partake in this globalized economy. However, large numbers of dancers, including those working in culture and tourist industries, health and fitness, and in media and social media, have been swept up into these new procedures for constructing exchange and generating profit. The fact that dance is ephemeral becomes irrelevant since it now takes its place alongside so many other services that supply no tangible objects.

Although many forms of engagement with dancing may ultimately be traced to economic motivation and increased access to privilege, dancing seems both to demand and to generate other forms of dedication and desire that cannot be accounted for in economic terms. To reduce dance to its economics would significantly curtail an engagement with dance’s complexity and multidimensional wealth. How then to reckon with the ways that value is produced and exchanged in and through dancing? Two kinds of transactions—commodity and gift—have frequently been invoked within disciplines that study value because they define the theoretical horizons of possibility for a spectrum along which exchange can occur. Both forms of exchange are active and widely implemented in the world today. 

Within the commodity form of exchange, dance is tapped in the following ways: its ability to convene people produces an interactivity that is based in the autonomy of each individual; these individuals become connected but as isolated and independent entities within a network. Commodification of dance’s energy, which is presumed to be precious and scarce, entails the careful monitoring of energy followed by strategic expenditure to achieve a maximum effect. Thirdly, dance’s malleability of form and adaptability of place is tapped in commodification to facilitate dance’s easy transport from place to place. To generate economic profit, dance must be quickly and cheaply manufactured, delivered efficiently, and disseminated as widely as possible.

In contrast, within gift exchange, dance’s capacity to summon people into relation becomes a way of creating mutual indebtedness among all involved. Circulating gifts connects people not as isolated agents but instead is mutually defining and dependent beings. Dance’s energy, considered to be abundant and always available, is widely given and reciprocated. And finally, dance’s adaptability, its protean form and function, is cultivated as a way to engage with and commemorate particular times, places, and people. In these ways dance as gift is not transportable and instead binds itself to and operates within specific communities, connecting itself with and devising unique responses to their ecologies.

I offer these rubrics of commodity and gift exchange as an opportunity to reflect on what dance is, what it does, and why it matters, through an examination of value. These forms of exchange should be seen as two large-scale “what ifs”—as distinctive matrices or hypothetical frameworks for examining social relations in dance through which value is generated differently. At the same time, we must assume that value is relational and constantly in flux. The hypothetical frameworks that I am conjecturing here are not intended to produce boundaries around or grand narratives about dance, and I am certainly not arguing that they explain all dance, all dances, or all of dance, but rather that they suggest a set of parameters that might illuminate some important things about dance. The matrices are, therefore, envisioned as sets of questions raised rather than pronouncements about dance. They are moves made in a dance that is ongoing.

 

Extracts from:

Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion. Oxford University Press, 2019 

(Introduction, pp. 1-23)