Dancing degrowth: ‘fleshing out’ a new economy

Julia Pond, Julia Pond and Julia Pond

Chapter Chapter 8 in Dialogues for Degrowth, 2025, pp 98-108 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: How can tools from dance improvisation and embodied practices help us to ‘in-carn-ate’, or, literally, flesh out the practices of life in a degrowth economy? In dialogue with degrowth economists, Marxist and dance theorists, and working through an autotheoretical framework of transdisciplinary dance practice-as-research, this chapter considers how the [dancing] body can help to sustain a shift in our economic social relations away from economic growth at any cost. Through a shared expertise with capital in ‘training,’ dance is positioned as a visceral tool for ‘un-training’ the accelerative embodied practice of capitalism. Specifically, dance improvisation can counter the ‘senselessness’ (Kallis) of perpetual capital circulation, and offer experiences of time such as cycles, which help to disrupt the primacy of linear, forward-moving clock-time. A creative intimacy with decline, expiry and depreciation, conceptualized as directional tendencies of the body that run counter to the expansive, accumulative directionality of capital (Postone), destabilizes the concept of endless growth through practice rather than theory. The chapter concludes with a few practical scores (instructions for movement) drawn from the author’s research. From this entanglement of movement, writing, theory and practice, the tools of a danced economics begin to emerge.

Keywords: Dance; Degrowth; Economics; Anti-capitalism; Interdisciplinary; Improvisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035320769
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