dancing is a front for friendship

Part Gillie Kleiman's WebRes 'Not Working.' Find out more here.

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Yesterday my dear one, dancer Steph McMann, calls me. I use the term ‘dear one’ after my friend Tessa Parr, the actor and performance-maker, who often refers to her friends in that way. I like it. 

I tell Steph that I’m thinking about friendship and we talk about it a bit. She says that our mutual friend, dancer Flora Wellesley Wesley, once said that she thought that dancing is a front for friendship. I don’t know if she said it or what the context was but I really love it and am holding it near to me, like a new dear one. I hold it near to another newish dear one, this extract from a text that I read out in a professional context yesterday:

Through friendship...we undo ourselves and become new, in potentially radical and dangerous ways. In this sense, friendship is at the root of freedom. (1)

Today I am thinking about this question:

How can we mobilise our friendships - particular those with people whose working lives overlap our own - to be more genuinely dangerous to the status quo we need to overturn?

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1. bergman, c. and Montgomery, N. (2017). Joyful Militancy: Building Resistance in Toxic Times. Chico, Edinburgh and Portland: AK Press.

Thinking about Wages for Housework and thinking anew in the arts

Part Gillie Kleiman's WebRes 'Not Working.' Find out more here.

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Every day - every day - I am in conversation about the future of the arts. There is a constant pulling and pushing, to-ing and fro-ing. There is so much difficulty; I feel the tenderness and fear and sadness. There is so much heart. 

It’s not only that it is tough to work in the arts. Yes, there are total joys, and that’s part of why anyone works in the arts, but it is hard and we all misunderstand each other a lot, I think. Even in performance - the wild wet wash of that word meaning everything from the Royal Ballet to rural touring to commercial comedy to experimental performance art - we nudge against one another uncomfortably. I get the impression that everyone feels that they are speaking out of turn all the time, and that everyone else is, and it’s all a painful jumble based on care. Right now it is even more difficult, because the normal power relations are even more visible and somehow crumbling at the same time, with the divide between those who can and have and those who cannot and have not both being fought for and falling apart simultaneously.

I have been thinking about the ways in which the Wages for Housework Campaign of around 1972-7 can help us structure our thinking to find different ways to understand one another. Big note: I’m not a feminist scholar, in that I’m not a scholar of feminism, so my interest in thinking through this can and should be understood from my point of view as a freelance artist trying to figure out how to do things differently, with others. Here goes.

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Wages for Housework was a campaign by feminists in the US, Italy and beyond, which was created and communicated by groups of women working through self-published pamphlets, leaflets and other publications, as well as public demonstrations and other forms of activism. It sat alongside and intertwined with other organising happening at the time.

The demand seems straightforward: wages for housework. Women do housework; they clean and they cook and they raise children and they shop and they take care of the home and of the people who live in it. This is work, the activists argued, and it should be compensated with monetary remuneration. It is socially productive labour without which no value can be created by the men who go out to be ‘economically active’. Housework should be exchanged for wages, just as any other work might be.

But, as Kathi Weeks writes in The Problem with Work: ‘There is an interesting ambiguity in much of the wages for housework literature: Should the demand for wages be read literally or figuratively? Was it presented as a concrete policy objective or a critical ploy? Was it intended to be an end in itself or a means to other ends?’ (2011:128). I think we could place some of the same questions around some of the demands I am seeing discussed, published and both celebrated and trashed in the Zoom meetings and Twittersphere of which I am part. I am seeing calls for, variously, National Portfolio Artists, workers’ coops, local arts boards with only artists on them, the evacuation of venues of all paid workers in favour of DIY cultural production, state-funded salaries for an artist per ward, funders dictating the constitution of arts charities’ boards, salary caps, and so many, many other possibilities for bettering the way we organise ourselves in the subsidised arts. I am advocating for some of these and not others; I am interested in them all. But that’s not the point. I want to consider how these suggestions, often communicated as demands, might help provide a picture of what is happening and what is not happening in the experience of freelancers and others who are making these suggestions.

In calling for wages for housework, women were ‘taking an opportunity to make visible, and encourage critical reflection on, the position of women in the work society...Toward this end, [the demand’s] promoters suggested that wages for housework could function as a force of demystification, an instrument of denaturalization, and a tool of cognitive mapping’ (Weeks 2011:129). I feel freelancers in my field doing this now, this act of demanding in order to map concerns. The sheer volume and variety of working groups, and the resultant collective ambivalence about whether to join forces, overlap, or back off, suggests that in making these demands we are learning about where soft and hard points of working in the arts - in whatever role and for whatever form of return - exist and perpetuate and progress and mould and fester and bloom and spread. We are learning how to make new forms of allyship which can fortify previously impossible vectors of communication between creative practitioners with different foci in mapping out our concerns and acting in solidarity as well as becoming clearer about who has a totally different understanding of what is at stake and how to go about making things better for everyone.

I am fascinated mostly by this process of denaturalization that is currently available. As I feel I often want to state: I am so sad and angry about what is happening in terms of public health, governmental mismanagement, and blatant corruption, and the consequent effects on the material practices, processes and livelihoods within my working world. Nonetheless I am interested in and invigorated by the novel possibility of making alien the ways in which we work - mostly how power, agency and resource move around - in order that they become impossibly strange. This pointing at the problems and noticing the frankly weird ways in which the sector and its powerpoints are built allows us to think completely anew and allows us to step out of the annoying and unhelpful tinkering at the edges. It is by making these demands that seem horrifyingly impossible that we can see how odd and unnecessary some of our ways of being and doing are and enable us to refresh our imaginations. We can begin to attempt to defog our visions - fogged up by habit, teaching, and the belief that everyone has everyone else’s best interests at heart - and really name and tackle the places where that is no longer really the case.

For me, Wages for Housework remains interesting in its imaginative potentials; I like that it produces more questions than it solves. It shatters a dominating assumption and set of lived practices based thereon in such a way that multiple worlds and forms of life become imaginable. If we - societally, somehow - pay wages for housework, does that mean we can do the same for child-rearing? What would that do for the nuclear family? Would men start to choose that work instead? What does that mean for our understanding of gender? How do we organise who pays? What impact does that have for our conceptions of social value, of privacy, of even the idea of the public realm? How do we begin to describe creativity when more people or different people take on this work - or drop it? What is the role of the state, or of industry? What is retirement? There are many more questions, many more answers, many more worlds. I would like us to think this multiply and this openly about how we do artistic activities and see what we can collectively realise as a consequence of being as creative and practical as we have been trained to be, to attenuate the practical questions at the same time as diving into them and seeing what comes of them.

Wages for Housework is also an interesting gesture because it collectivises what might usually be a private matter; instead of individual women asking their husbands for more pin-money to act as proper remuneration for their daily toil, or discussing the possibility of reorganising domestic labours to do paid work outside of the home, women came together to campaign. One of the consequences of this is that it prevents a singular conversation in the private sphere which might temporarily solve some of the material and emotional difficulty of what was then an assumed status quo: perhaps the husband would give the wife more money, if they could afford it, and then the wife might be appeased. This doesn’t do much more than fortify the existing arrangement. It is for this reason that I do not think that, in the arts, paying freelancers more or establishing a way for freelancers to be remunerated as non-freelancers (like a National Portfolio Individual model) is whatsoever sufficient. It shifts resources but retains the same model of distributing those resources, getting in the way of more effective and powerful change.

The Wages for Housework campaign was constituted as a set of actions that pointed to the fact that the system of relations between men and women - in the heteronormative model that was contentious even in the 1970s but is clearly not how we understand our families, relationships and sexualities now - was profoundly unjust. As I have written many times and will continue to write, we need to keep stepping back and reminding ourselves of the structures in which we work and how they necessarily demand a state of play that is misogynist, ableist, racist, ageist, classist, transphobic and activating other and intersectional oppressions. To change it does indeed mean that people will need to give things up, personally or institutionally. We will not be able to have ‘crown jewel’ organisations (also and forever dismantle the fucking monarchy wherever it appears). We will not be able to depend on meritocracy and social mobility (once again for those at the back: social mobility is a ruse). It will not be acceptable for some people who contribute to a place of work to earn six figures plus pension, holiday, sick and parental leave pay while others who also contribute scrabble around for minimum wage. It is hard to give things up when you’ve been told again and again that they are yours, or to take things on when you’ve been told that they’re nothing to concern yourself about. I imagine that partners of the women who were demanding wages for housework also felt misunderstood, undermined, and browbeaten. Of course these men also inherited a crappy system - a system that also disenfranchised them from responsibility from their own homes and distanced them from the joys of care. The patriarchy serves nobody well in the long run but it hurts some more than others.

Wages for Housework teaches us to demand the small things that seem impossible. It shows us the power of imagining other worlds through concrete proposals. It shows us how to step into and back from the personal at the same time, describing our experience and providing suggestions even when that would mean changing absolutely everything. It shows us how to work in a pluralist solidarity and to contest the systems that benefit those whom we might very well like or love, because we can see that those benefits hurt more than they help overall. Wages for Housework teaches us to hold on to what we’re asking for at the same time as remembering that we are determined in a direction for so much more.

Not Working: Sabbath

Part Gillie Kleiman's WebRes 'Not Working.' Find out more here.

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This text will be published at around 6pm on a Friday. For me, even though I have grown up mostly in Britain in a secular family, it is my experience of being with my Jewish Israeli father’s family in Israel for big chunks of time that has most influenced my sabbatical feeling. Friday evenings are this special moment, a kind of closure, a suspension of time, so filled with a dusky excitement that even though I’m not doing anything particular this evening I feel something is still hovering around me.

The following fragments are from my PhD thesis, which I also mentioned in yesterday’s text. They are commentary, a kind of lengthy theoretical notation to a description of a person, CJ, who was taking part in a choreographic project I was making, entitled Recreation. They have a more scholarly tone than what I’ve written so far in this residency. I’m not hiding the rest of the text and did consider simply publishing all of it, but it doesn’t seem necessary to what I’m asking myself today. (In any case you can read it from my website.) I hope the fragments can be something to swim in, to think with, even if that to which they refer is somewhat obfuscated. One day I’d like to write more about the sabbatical.

Today’s questions are something like these:

• What might be produced if we understand our lockdown/pandemic limitation moment as a form of sabbatical?

• What would it be to create, deliberately, for ourselves and for others, sabbatical possibilities?

• What happens when artmaking arises out of sabbatical power?

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There are rituals to end and begin sacred moments, sacred timespaces in which other things can happen. This needn’t be the sacrality of religion—this timespace could be secular—but there are always certain things to be done, said, heard, smelt, moved, touched, and even tasted which mark the beginnings and endings of things which we might find important; political theorist Bonnie Honig describes this as ‘a dense cultural sensorial synagogue that acts to wrest humanity or sacredness from the creaturely world of the everday’ (2015:469). I don’t know what is done around Christian special days; I’m not and have never been a Christian. I know that in Judaism even many secular Jews will host some kind of special meal at the arrival of the Sabbath, maybe eating or saying or drinking special things. There is a parallel to the start and end of retreats in the Buddhist tradition in which I practice, where a dedication ceremony starts the period and a ritual, often involving a fire and ending in a chant, will close the events. These things are not exclusive to religious people. I wonder if a secular version might be a beer at the airport before going on holiday.

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Giorgio Agamben’s writing on the sabbath is that which returns in bibliographies related to the term, and his writing begins with a Jewish take on the concept. For Agamben, the sabbath, the Jewish Shabbat or Shabbas, is not simply an extra bit of time added to the workweek, but a special time which exists in both continuity and heterogeneity with the six days that precede it in each cycle (2011:109). The sabbath sits in a ‘relationship of proximity and almost reciprocal immanence’ with work and inoperativity (110). The sabbath and inoperativity, that state which is the other side of the coin to potentiality (Prozorov 2014), are neither consequences nor preconditions for one another (Agamben 2011). Instead, inoperativity ‘coincides with festiveness itself in the sense that it consists precisely in neutralizing and rendering inoperative human gestures, actions, and works, which in turn can become festive only in this way’ (Agamben 2011:109). In this sense, inoperativity is connected to the kind of life that I am searching for in this chapter, in these accounts, a state that includes the potential for human endeavour without the necessity for its exercising, not a suspension of labour precisely, but a ‘temporary suspension of productive activity’, regardless of the realm of that productivity (economic, domestic, etc.) (Honig 2015:478). 

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It strikes me that the workshop is a way of practising the Sabbath, in the way that Honig suggests (2015). She proposes that there exists a sabbath-power which emerges from festive inoperativity, through which new forms of relation are possible. The sabbath-power is enacted through practice, a practice of the senses. In the workshop we use at least four of the five usual senses (taste is usually excluded), but also others: we use proprioception and balance, we feel one another’s body heat, and more mysterious things, like sensing another’s feeling of comfort or discomfort in coming into contact with them. Honig’s sabbath-power seems strong; a force. Thinking it in practice allows it to become much more subtle, it permeating, rather than charging, through a space and time.

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Just as ‘[p]resents, gifts and toys are objects with use and exchange value that are rendered inoperative, wrested from their economy’ (Agamben 2011:111), so are these postures recuperated from a state of high charge. Their economy should be one of dance, their value coming from stage dance’s traditional values of poise, strength, skill, and virtuosity, but the dancerly frame drops out of operativity in this sense in favour of the sensorial. In the practice of sabbath-power choreography changes on a level of quality rather than shape. Just as the sabbath can contain the same tasks as the workweek, so can the choreography retain its normative values, but the alteration is visible as a result of the suspension of the productive. In movement this shows.

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A sabbatical texture is one of being in the present, mindful of what is happening and what is being done. The sabbath’s actions are not in preparation for any future or the fallout of any past, but are undertaken within the sabbath itself. Work, particularly project work, conducts itself always towards a future: a project is a projection (Bayly 2013; Wikström 2016). The projectness I experience is the busyness Agamben suggests is the human race’s answer to our very sabbatical nature: ‘[h]uman life is idle and aimless, but it is precisely this lack of action and aim which makes possible the incomparable busyness of the human race. Man has devoted himself to production and labour because he is in essence deprived of work, because he is above all a sabbatical animal’ (2007:138). 

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This is the true feeling of sabbath, this when actions that could be done anytime are done with a relationship to the productive potentials of work without realising those potentials. The activity of work—and even its site—has not changed, or not changed much, but this reframing of the space and time as one of a break—a sabbath or sabbatical—allows for ‘the liberation of the body from its utilitarian movements, the exhibition of gestures in their pure inoperativity’ (Lucian in Agamben 2011:111). This makes it possible, paradoxically, for something that could be called an important part of the rehearsal process to occur as part of a break. I think it is Recreation itself, its interests and agendas and methods, that allow this suspension to occur.

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Agamben doesn’t use the common phrase ‘day of rest’ to describe the sabbath, but Honig, writing through Agamben’s work, does so several times in one article, even playing in her writing with rest and wrest as homophones. I don’t know where I stand on this. It seems to rather suppress Agamben’s assertions about the sabbatical as inoperative, as unrealised potential; is the potential still present when the being is only semi-conscious? I come to two thoughts: either rest, particularly sleep, is so personal as to not belong to the political project of the sabbath, which always involves others; or rest is still so associated with recuperation from the last workday and preparation for the next that it cannot be sabbatical proper.

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To my mind, this creation of a sabbatical landscape, a way of being together that suspends, as Agamben suggests, work and inoperativity in proximity to something festive like the sabbath, should be enough for anyone. CJ’s request represents the privilege of the sabbath, the fact that to take time out of the productive is not necessarily available to all people equally, however you cut it; there are material conditions in which people have to operate which prevent sabbaticals.

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The sabbath has its own ethics, its own political charge. This is not about making work better for the worker, but in coming into contact with productivism and seeing what else is there by stepping through it. Honig writes: ‘we see here a practice that has some family resemblance to the idea of the General Strike: a suspension of work that presupposes the productive power of workers, but also generates the generative powers that may open new and different orders of economic life’ (2015:474). I’m inclined to disagree, for a strike presents itself as a temporary state through which, indeed, economic imaginaries can proliferate and cause change, but ultimately the impact remains within that sector of human action. Sabbatical inoperativity, on the other hand, has the potential to open up other orders completely, ones where deeds and words occur for lifeful purposes unrelated to economics.

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Honig writes that ‘[i]n the sabbatical state of exception all divisions are meant to disappear, rather than to be (re)inscribed’ (2015:473). In the conversation I am describing to the left our social divisions are becoming blurred. In conventional terms I am the boss and CJ is the worker; his asking to take time out of what is contracted work is a challenge to this relationship, to this instance of power and control. But CJ’s understanding of what is happening is that it is a form of sabbath, in which ‘the laws of social division are suspended and everyone is a king’ (Honig 2015:473). For us together to maintain our collective practice of the sabbath it was necessary for me to meet this challenge with what then felt like capitulation, and what now feels like a reasonable—and even desirable or ‘enchanted and enchanting’—pursuit of the sabbatical (Honig 2015:474).

References

Agamben, G. (2007). Art, Inactivity, Politics in Guerreiro, A. (ed). Criticism of Contemporary Issues: Politics. Porto: Fundação de Serralves. pp 127–141.

__________. (2011) Nudities. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Bayly, S. (2013). The End of the Project: Futurity in the Culture of Catastrophe. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. 18(2) pp.161–177.

Honig, B. (2015). The Laws of the Sabbath (Poetry): Arendt, Heine, and the Politics of Debt. UC Irvine Law Review 5(463). pp. 463–482.

Prozorov, S. (2014) Agamben and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Wikström, J. (2016) A Comment On Bojana Kunst’s The Artist at Work. Sarma Docs #2. 

Recapitulating hypocrisy: work and not-work in flow

Part Gillie Kleiman's WebRes 'Not Working.' Find out more here.

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I am noticing already that this process, this online residency, is a kind of unfolding of itself, an opportunity to make connections between things I know and things I think, and things I have known and things I have thought before. As I have written on my own blog, I am trying to manage a tone that is personal and political and thoughtful but not scholarly. I made a plan but have already veered off, each bit of something sending me to another place. In a sense, this is becoming a kind of diary of a week, with many things missing. Nonetheless, it is both a provocation to keep thinking, and a pretty good record of my preoccupations at this moment. These texts, then, are necessarily unrefined and unedited.

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Yesterday I tried really hard not to work. I had to take a work call, though, because the person just called me out of the blue, and it was something that needed sorting out. I also received WhatsApp messages about work-related matters, and had to make some work-related decisions. I did some reading for something that I consider to be work, some ongoing learning I’m doing as part of work time. I did manage not to turn my computer on. This has become a kind of rite of resistance, a way to prove to myself that my mind and body and spirit are not, on that one day, absorbed by work.

I have written about things that I do that are not work before, here, thinking mostly about a radio show (currently having a pause between series) that I have been making with my friend Marian. In this text I also write about other things I do and want to do, and share opinions. That text is part of today’s offer; a hyperlink is a knitting in.

Today I am thinking about another blogpost I have written in the past few months, a post about my own hypocrisies, which you can read here. I’m weaving this together with the radio-related post and with yesterday’s writing by focusing on this paradox I hold within myself:

An artist is a worker and should use worker-organising methods to improve their conditions (e.g. unions)

Vs

 

The category ‘professional artist’ should be dismantled so everyone can make stuff without it being a profession, with all the difficulty, exploitation, exclusion and creative stifling that that brings.

 

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In attempting to create for myself a four-day week, I have had to try and become clear - albeit temporarily, provisionally - about what is work and what is not work. This is a tricky beast in both theory and practice. It also has some difficult consequences: it can easily make very spurious but dominant views about what is and isn’t worthy of such a term spin into my praxis. It makes domestic labour, so carefully, vigorously and clearly fought for as a work practice by feminists for over fifty years, occupy a non-work place in my life. It masks caring work and community work. It demands that I should decide which friends are friends and which friends are work-friends and asks that I divvy up my energies towards those people in peculiar ways.

 

One of the texts that really interested me when I was in the reading phase of my PhD was Work’s Intimacy by Melissa Gregg (2011). Not only does this book provide fascinating insights, based on rigorous fieldwork, of how our work gets closer and closer to us, even when we might not want it to be so, through changes in technology and culture as well as the ongoing furling of neoliberalism, but also because it records a period of time, 2007-2009, where these changes felt new and unknown, and somehow even exciting (remember getting your emails on your smartphone for the first time? I do!). In 2011, Gregg couldn’t possibly have known how this trend would continue.

 

Nor would she have been able to predict - at least within the scope of her research - that the gig economy would bloom so spectacularly. Performing artists are, of course, the original gig economy workers; we do gigs.  A few years ago I remember commenting that the rise and expansion of the gig economy might be helpful for artists; if more people are subject to these conditions, then there will be more attention on the particular forms of exploitation to which we are subjected, and we might be able to get better organised to resist and transform ways of working to make it so that we all live well. I have been somewhat disappointed; what I realise now is that really we should have already developed better tools for such worker organising, and there is very little there. Policies from arts-related unions and campaigning groups often focus on important but ultimately highly-specialised minutiae, like very tiny adjustment in payscales or the temperatures of rooms for this kind of rehearsal versus that kind of rehearsal. Though these are useful, and I think we each need to push in the ways we find most helpful, I wonder what it would mean to back off from these details to look at the bigger, more structural problems we experience in our places and times of work. Things aren’t working, and the pandemic has made that starker than ever; this is being well-recognised across the arts and we need to keep saying it to make sure we don’t forget.

 

In Gregg’s work, she demonstrates how the worker is so involved in a culturally coerced presenteeism that work encroaches upon every part of their being. This is entirely encouraged in the romanticisation of artists and arts workers: the dominant narrative of the artist is that we can’t do anything else because our hearts are artists’ hearts and we’ll get some kind of spiritual blueballs if that’s not what we do every day. I can see how that can seem like the truth sometimes, and even a rewarding place to be. It makes it seem like the rest of society has to support us, because we really have no choice, so please pity us and help us. I think that this is wildy unhelpful, and, moreover, untrue. There are many forces that make a person become an artist (including but not limited to a higher education pyramid scheme that convinces young people that they must have an undergraduate degree in something and that there is a career available to them despite it all, if they just come here and work very hard). 

 

We need this structure of identification in order to proceed along the lines of a worker unionising or lobbying; we need to show that there’s no way for us unless working conditions improve, because there’s nothing else that we could possibly do. I sometimes work in this way and will continue to do so, gathering together with other arts workers to improve conditions through campaigning and some version of industrial relations, trying to reshape what we’re doing to make it less harmful, even though the invocation of ‘industry’ and even ‘worker’ can have the stymying effects of having us all work in the same way, in projects or organisations that are themselves shaped by the strictures of late capitalism. It looks like we’re doing the right thing but it might be more a question of less wrong than more right.

 

The other option is to relinquish the role of artist, the role of arts worker, as a role in the world of work at all. That would be to soften the edges of things, to make more porous work and not-work, to let in. This does not undo the intimacy of work but frames it in new terms and textures; it lets me talk to my friend and not worry about who she is to me or what that conversation is doing work-wise but to appreciate the connection as just one thing unfolding before me that can be. This is liberty; to do the thing because it’s the thing I’m doing, not because it’s for something. As theatre director Jan Ritsema says, the way of being, as an artist, is that every day is a Sunday. 

 

The thing is, I don’t want this just for me. I want this for everyone. I want everyone to be able to participate as fully as they like in whatever culture suits them. (In other terms, I want some form of cultural democracy.) I don’t want to have to wrap myself in the protective armour of the title ‘artist’ in order to fight for my right to survive and do this thing; I don’t want artmaking to separate me or make me seem special or make me seem that I think I’m special. Artists aren’t special, any more than anyone else is special. We don’t deserve a better time than anyone else. I think artists do a lot - measurable and immeasurable things - to make human life what it is. One of those things is that artists always and already constitute work’s intimacy in ways alternative to our capitalist reality. It’s not enough to just not be working, because not-working, as Gregg theorises and I have attempted to describe, is already so close to working that a firewall is both futile and unnecessary. It would be better to elaborate that intimacy in a softer way, in a way where we don’t need to worry so much about it. We don’t need to feel guilty, then; we know it’s all part of a flow. To do this we need to let other people enter that flow, be part of that flow, experience that flow - and that means we need to work together to reconstitute our activities beyond work and not-work, and give ourselves the possibility of doing so.

 

One suggestion, about which I will write more: UBI NOW.

Not Working: I am not working.

Part Gillie Kleiman's WebRes 'Not Working.' Find out more here.

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I am not working. When this text is released I will not be working. When this text is released I will not be working, because it is Wednesday, and on Wednesdays I do other things that aren’t work. Specifically, today, the day that this text is released, the day after the today of the writing, I will be: Buying vegan cinnamon buns for Carole and me from a bakery by the river Fortified by the buns and aided by Carole, weeding the back garden, cutting down the rogue ash tree, and sorting out this year’s spent plants from the vegetable patch at the front Hoovering the flat No really, hoovering the flat, the whole flat, and mopping the kitchen and bathroom No, definitely hoovering the flat, even if it means doing it at 9pm which is the latest I dare Maybe meditating, maybe doing some yoga, maybe doing a Gaga class online and trying not to feel like I’m in an episode of Smack the Pony Delivering food parcels in Walker for East End Women Maybe changing the bedsheets Answering some emails about Star and Shadow Cinema’s radio activities (not radioactivity) Reading some texts in preparation for the Marrickville School of Economics session on Thursday, which is about kinship Making a loaf of sourdough or maybe some flatbreads I was talking to Andrew about why I want to only work four days a week. This is complicated and involves more than just me and my desires, but I will start there. I don’t want to be my work. I want, when someone asks me what I do, to be able to say that I garden or deliver food parcels with the same force and sense of proximity and authority as when I say ‘I’m a choreographer’ or when I have said ‘I’m a university lecturer’. This is so close to Marx’s ‘hunt in the morning’ quote but isn’t quite that really, because we’re in a different time than Marx was. I don’t want to be any of it, any one, neat formula; I don’t want to be putting forth a tidy, refined narrative of my life. My life, maybe everyone’s life, is made of shaggier dough. I want to make more space for myself to do things and not feel guilty about them. I already always feel guilty about things I’m doing or not doing, whether they be professional, domestic, voluntary, community-focused or leisurely. I will probably feel guilty if I don’t achieve the things on the list of non-work activities. But I want to alleviate a bit of it all by freeing myself from the burden of work just one day of the ‘working’ week. This is already not working.  In the three weeks since I began this four-day week rhythm I have worked on one of the weekends. As I look ahead to the demands on my time for the next days I see that I will also work this weekend, probably not the whole time, but at least a bit. I don’t want to do this, but I have taken on quite a bit more work than I had realised, and something important came in last-minute that is time-sensitive and that I want to do. That wanting is complicated. It’s not working, but it feels important to try. It feels important to sensitise myself to my own capacities, to know what is possible in what full-time employed people would call a 0.8 FTE contract, a contract I have only with myself, really. It is also important for me to feel out what it is to have three days a week where I am not working. This feels like three days of holiday but it’s not that, not really a break, because of course there are many things to which I am committed that have nothing to do with work. In the past I have tried to wrap these into work: I work from home so need to keep my home workplace-clean, or my volunteering gigs help me understand things or build connections for my choreography. I don’t want to do that any more: I don’t want to justify my life because it’s work. It can just be life. It’s fine like that. I am aware that I can try to make for myself a more lifeful life partially because I am choosing so and partially because I have housing security and no dependents and, for the moment, I have enough work to keep myself professionally satisfied and financially afloat as long as I live an inexpensive life. This attempt is mine. But it, of course, sits against a broader context of struggle for less work and more other things, other things that are variously elaborated as family time, leisure, care, community participation, the cultivation of the commons, self-development, personal days and so on. Each of these can be critiqued fully, and have been, just as they have been fought for. In order for me to be able to get closer and more nuanced about what it is that I seek I need to practice it; I learn by doing. For me this is a choreography, a management of space and time and activity and relation, but a choreography that I effort hard not to be reduced to the work of a choreographer. As I said to Andrew, I want the things that are very much work adjacent - I could consider what I do with Star and Shadow, the few emails, the odd radio show, a meeting or two, as work, and I would feel justified in that even if there is no money earned - to not feel like work. This not working is as much feeling out, describing for myself what not-work feels like here, how and who I am by not working, as it is deprioritising work and deeply prioritising other things. I am not working. See you on Thursday, when I will be working.