Representing Ourselves into Existence

This chapter explores the energetic and innovative trans cinema movement that emerged in the 1990s by looking at case studies of the first transgender film festivals—Counting Past 2 in Toronto, the International Transgender Film and Video Festival in London, and Tranny Fest in San Francisco. Each festival took a different approach to trans film programming, community building, and arts funding. Together, the three festivals helped define a specifically transgender identity and community that overlapped with but were not the same as “queer.” They also influenced the programming of lesbian and gay festivals, carving out more room for trans-made work. These case studies demonstrate how film festivals can contribute to social and aesthetic movements, how festival organizers have overcome and become mired in the challenges they face, and the many ways in which trans has long put pressure on “lesbian and gay” and “queer” in the face of its erasure.

Mapping Constraints of Art Extracurricular in Indonesia as An Effort of Policy Design

Extracurricular arts programs are an integral part of instilling character qualities in students. This research aimed to map out the constraints to extracurricular arts in elementary schools in Indonesia. To achieve the goal, this research looks at government initiatives aimed at enhancing the standard of arts extracurricular activities in elementary schools across the Country, which were carried out from 2013 to 2019. The method used in this study is a qualitative method with a participatory observation approach. They were collecting data using participatory methods, observation, and guided discussion. This study’s results indicate that schools’ various obstacles in implementing extracurricular programs, ranging from the availability of competent teachers in the arts, funding constraints for trainers, and the existence of regional autonomy. This constraint mapping is very useful for designing policies and extracurricular programs that are appropriate for schools.

Prologue

What happens when an ethnographic, cultural relativistic approach to arts funding runs head-on into a “fine arts” approach governed by assumptions of excellence, appropriate targets of funding, and methods of distributing funds? This chapter, based on twenty-three years (1978–2000) working at the National Endowment for the Arts, will respond to this question through my personal conceptual and methodological challenges and experiences. When the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities were created in 1965, there was talk of creating a third endowment for folklore. This effort was unsuccessful, but it points to the belief at the time that American folk art traditions would not be well served by the federal endowments. There was much truth to this, as I and my colleagues regularly bumped into “glass ceilings and walls” that silently worked against us in supporting our field of hundreds of cultural traditions and thousands of art forms. My ethnomusicological training and experience were invaluable, not only in understanding the art forms and responding to their needs, but also understanding the biases of the institutional culture in which we were housed. At the same time, while certain aspects of my training at UCLA helped in navigating the waters of arts funding, much of the knowledge I applied to my work was learned “on the job” in extra-academic activities and mentorships rather than in university courses and seminars. This line of reflection will yield observations and recommendations to improve training and to increase ethnomusicology’s applicability and social and cultural relevance.

Who cares? At what price? The hidden costs of socially engaged arts labour and the moral failure of cultural policy

In the broader context of research into cultural labour, this article focuses analytical attention on working conditions within socially engaged arts practice, which have been under-researched to date. In particular, the article aims to uncover the unacknowledged costs shouldered by socially engaged practitioners working on publicly subsidised participatory projects. On the basis of the analysis of qualitative interviews with socially engaged artists and creative professionals, the article calls for an explicit effort to bring our public cultural institutions to task in relation to what Mark Banks calls ‘creative justice’. This entails highlighting the mechanisms of systemic exploitation of artists within current funding practices and the ways in which project-based funding rarely incorporates, as a matter of course, provisions to ensure the fulfilment of duties of care towards both artists and participating communities. The article draws on feminist ethics of care to advance a first intervention towards developing fresh thinking on the moral economy of the subsidised arts sector; it does this by starting from an acknowledgement that the normative environments of contemporary arts funding point to a clear moral failure of cultural policy.

Opening up the pit: Negotiating a punk ethos with PUP

What does it mean to be punk within the Canadian music industry? This article offers a close reading of the band PUP’s politics, grassroots partnerships and personal interviews to argue that they not only skew punk in genre terms, but also embody a punk ethos. Furthermore, this article will confront the ambivalent politics of punk as it becomes entangled with cultural nationalism and national identity-building through institutional arts funding and awards. If punk is about resisting the establishment, how might we reconcile PUP’s reputation as a definitively ‘Canadian’ band with their outspokenness around issues ranging from anti-Black racism to police violence to ongoing colonialism? In what ways might PUP’s leftist politics be absorbed into Canada’s national identity through their receipt of institutional recognition, funding and awards? To make sense of these entanglements, we draw on Tavia Nyong’o’s punk or punk’d theory, which responds to the apparent reification of queer theory and calls on scholars to cultivate a punk spirit. Following Nyong’o and other punk scholars, we ask: is PUP punk’ing the Canadian music machine?

Value

Chapter 5 theorizes flexibility in relation to the neoliberal discourse of value through a close reading of the 2013 dance film The Art of Defining Me. Following the 2008 global financial crisis and subsequent austerity measures and budget cuts to the arts, artists had to justify (even more than before) the economic value of their work vis-à-vis their “Unique Selling Point.” While neoliberalism demands that all artists frame their work in economic terms such as cost and profit, multiculturalism layers an added demand on South Asian artists to perform ethnic and racial difference in recognizable and sellable terms. Through the subversive power of satire, the film exposes the neoliberal underpinnings of multicultural arts funding in Britain and brings into sharp focus the economic value of authenticity and exoticism in an increasingly market-driven dance industry that prizes difference insofar as it can be made profitable. Taking a humorous look at the arts funding system in Britain and the complex racialized landscape that British South Asian dance artists must navigate, the film renders visible the absurdity of British multiculturalism and funding demands on South Asian dancers, and the flexible, auto-exoticizing maneuvers they deploy to thrive within it.

Flexible Bodies

Flexible Bodies charts the emergence of British South Asian dance as a distinctive dance genre. Analyzing dance works, dance films, rehearsals, workshops, and touring alongside immigration policy, arts funding initiatives, citizenship discourse, and global economic conditions, author Anusha Kedhar traces shifts in British South Asian dance from 1990s Cool Britannia multiculturalism to fractious race relations in the wake of the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks to economic fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis, and, finally, to anti-immigrant rhetoric leading up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with dancers, in-depth choreographic analysis of major dance works, and the author’s own lived experiences as a professional dancer in London, Flexible Bodies tells the story of British South Asian dancers and the creative ways in which they negotiate the demands of neoliberal, multicultural dance markets through an array of flexible bodily practices, including agility, versatility, mobility, speed, and risk-taking. Attending to pain, injury, and other restrictions on movement, it also reveals the bodily limits of flexibility. Theorizing flexibility as material and metaphor, the book argues that flexibility is both a tool of labor exploitation and a bodily tactic that British South Asian dancers exploit to navigate volatile economic and political conditions. With its unique focus on the everyday aspects of dancing and dance-making Flexible Bodies honors the lives and labor of dancers and their contributions to a distinct and dynamic sector of British dance.