Researcher Annelies Van Assche would like to invite you to partake in an interview on your experiences of the work environment of contemporary dance artists both in higher education and the professional field.

The interview is part of my senior postdoctoral research I am conducting at the Ghent University in Belgium under the title of The Real Artworld? Transgressive Behavior and Contemporary Dance (Education), which you can consult in more detail here (2023-2027). For this research, I would like to call on your expertise as a contemporary dance student in or graduate from this specific higher education program and would therefore kindly ask you to participate in an in-depth interview. I am looking for current BA3 students, recent graduates (1-10 years) and graduates of the program with more than 10 years’ of work experience in the professional field. The aim is to compare your experiences with setting personal boundaries within the contemporary dance world and the dynamics of transgressive behavior within the school and work environment.

Concretely, the interview would last about 1.5 hours and would take place between [approx. date] in a private room of your choice. I am of course flexible and together we will search for an appropriate time. With this research, privacy will be considered throughout the process and no names (yours or others') will be mentioned. The interviews will be recorded, but the transcripts will be deidentified. The data will be processed in a confidential manner. Participation in the interviews is completely voluntary and can also be stopped at any time. Before the start of the interview, you will receive a consent form with more detailed information on how I will process your data. At the end of the interview you can indicate if you are willing to further cooperate in the next stages of the research. Public travel expenses will be reimbursed.

Why am I interested in this?

Some of you may know me already, or may have come across my name, as I have previously conducted a four-year study on the precarious working conditions in the international contemporary dance scenes of Brussels and Berlin in the frame of obtaining a PhD in Arts Studies and Social Sciences. My PhD research resulted in a dissertation (2018) and a monograph published by Palgrave MacMillan (2020) entitled Dancing Precarity, presented here in a lecture at the Royal Academy of Antwerp. This former research was greatly informed by the notion of socio-economic precarity in the professional contemporary dance field. Thereafter, my junior postdoctoral research built further on these results but focused on the postsocialist Eastern European context and delved deeper into the dynamics between centres and peripheries in the field of cultural production. This three-year study resulted in an edited volume by Bloomsbury, which was released in 2024 under the title (Post)Socialist Dance. A Search for Hidden Legacies (with Dunja Njaradi, Igor Koruga and Milica Ivic). In addition to research, I am also a theory lecturer at the dance department of the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, where I also supervise artistic research. Before engaging in academic research, I worked as a production and tour manager at P.A.R.T.S., the international contemporary dance school in Brussels from 2011 until 2014. During all those years I have seen, heard and sometimes felt myself how much a career in dancing can physically, mentally and socially

demand of a dancer. Therefore, with this research, I would like to make my contribution to a better understanding of the working conditions and thus increase the resilience of dancers and improve the sustainability of dance careers.

I do hope you recognize the significance of this research and are therefore willing to participate. Please reach out to me via Annelies.VanAssche@UGent.be. If you have any questions at all, you may also contact me and I’ll be happy to give you a more elaborate explanation or schedule a short online meeting.

Many thanks,

With kindest regards, Annelies Van Assche

More info: https://research.flw.ugent.be/...

This research is funded by FWO – Research Foundation Flanders under the project 12A3U24N.