About halfway through the maternity leave and during our first co-habitation in Spain, we started thinking more seriously about how to get back to work. We wanted to keep collaborating with other artists internationally and we wanted to be able to do good childcare without assuming too much about how either had to be organised. It was clear that we had to reconsider our artistic modes of production. 

To give some context I will share a bit about my work before childcare. 

The short version is: Lots of travel. Three countries a week for long periods. Varying income, generally low, but living well because not paying rent (as accommodation was generally provided by my jobs or my partners jobs). Fun, but not very sustainable nor suited for childcare.

The longer version (feel free to skip the coming three paragraphs): Next to occasional teaching and touring as a dancer for other artists, I had realised two group performances funded by the Danish arts council and co-produced each by 3-4 european theatres and museums. For each production we would have 3-4 residencies, each time with 5-8 people working together for a period of 1-2 weeks. Most or all of those people would travel for each residency and travel for each show. Depending on the size of the team it easily costs € 2000 – € 3000 a day to work like that: fees, per diems, accomodation, travels and so on. This pace of spending makes it important to be very productive with your time: to squeeze out as much art from each day as you can, so that you can prove to the state that their investment was worth it and deliver a choreographic work within your budget (my budgets for those two works that each had 6-7 dancers were 60-80 K). 

An important problem with this model is that because each day is so expensive and you have to be efficient, you lose alot of what makes international collaboration politically relevant. You don’t have much time to attune to neither your collaborators nor the place you work. 

Before the first production I had applied twice a year for 5 years–each time spending weeks writing funding dossiers and making budgets and negotiating co-production agreements. In those five years I got by keeping my expenses low, taking day jobs, freelancing as a performer and teacher and doing unsubsidized projects with Simon Asencio. When I finally had the funds to produce on a professional scale I was very excited and had done a lot of research over the five years of applying. It was a satisfying and fun process. And it was exciting to learn how to do something for the first time on this scale. But the second time, for whatever reason it didn’t work out as well. I could blame the lockdowns and health anxieties that came with the covid-19 pandemic. As alot of my time and attention went into navigating how, when, and who could work together how. But I think the main problem was that I was repeating a mode of production which I had already tried and hadn’t put enough thought into re-shaping. 

Voila, lets continue here: 

In spite of all the financial, relational, artistic and environmental ways that international collaboration could be unsustainable, we did not want to give it up. Moving to the countryside and setting up a commune felt like hell, we did not want to replace the nuclear family with a chosen family, when family as an isolating function was the problem. We got inspired from the experiment we were already doing, namely the temporary co-habitaitons. And we imagined a process where we would live three months together with different collaborators in their context, one collaborator at the time. Work slowly, have time to take side gigs and engage locally, and slowly accumulate a group choreography which we would present at each locality. According to our budgeting this would allow us to do more shows with more collaborators than the usual European international dance production and touring model. And do so in a way that forced us to keep our relational structure porous. 

The Danish arts council were not convinced. Unfortunately they don’t give feedback. But we were stubborn. So two years and four funding dossiers including co-production agreements later, we got funding for ‘Domestic Anarchism’. 

At this point Penélope was not 6 months but 30 months old and we had tasted the delicious life of institutionalised childcare (see Jan van Eyck post). Andrea had her job and it seemed for different reasons a bit unreasonable to insist on the three month production model. Instead we updated it according to the resources (we were still at Jan van Eyck Academie), Andrea’s job and how we could imagine doing good child care for a 3-4 year old. In the new model each collaborator would co-habitate with us 1-2 times for 1-2 weeks at Jan van Eyck or in Bruxelles. And then afterwards we would go to their context for 1 month. Five 1 month stays would be spread out over 15 months. In other posts Andrea or I will share how this goes.