The Brussels Dance Swarm on the Move: Precarious Bodies (not) at Home

Abstract

This article questions the notion of ‘home’ and proposes that a home is not confined to a stable location, but can temporarily emerge in mobile communities that materialize in contemporary dance performances. One such mobile community is that of the Brussels transnational dance scene, which is perhaps the most important of all contemporary dance scenes given the city’s status as a mecca for contemporary dance. An adequate understanding of the Brussels dance community will demonstrate that the notion of community includes a dimension of temporality that goes hand in hand with the members’ precarious existence, and will reveal that the community is grounded in transnational mobility and virtuality: the members are constantly on the move and thus never at home in the traditional sense of the word; instead it is a changing network of relations that constitutes their home. This article further explores the precarity, mobility and temporality of the Brussels dance community through analysis of the dance performance VOLCANO (2014) by Canadian-born choreographer Liz Kinoshita, which thematises the constant travelling of performing artists.

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