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If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution launches its new, third edition. The departure point for this edition is to explore a conceptual framework of the masquerade.
This can be read in the light of If I Can't Dance...'s continuing exploration of paradigms such as performativity, theatricality and feminism(s), produced in collaboration with artists in the form of experimental sketches, performances, readings, exhibitions, enactments etc., since its inception in 2005.
Over the next two years, If I Can’t Dance… will have manifestations in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Bilbao, Dublin and Eindhoven, collaborating with Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, de Appel arts centre, Sala Rekalde, Project Arts Centre and the Van Abbemuseum. Keren Cytter, Jon Mikel Euba, Olivier Foulon, Suchan Kinoshita, Joachim Koester and Sarah Pierce are invited to produce new projects that will be developed within the time frame of two years, and presented at the subsequent moments when If I Can’t Dance… will visit the institutions mentioned.
The prologue of Edition III will take place in Copenhagen. In a daylong programme in Overgaden, the artists involved will present their ideas on the projects to be developed. In Karriere Bar the stage is set for a performance of planningtorock. In the University of Copenhagen, on the occasion of the conference Interregnum (August 20-24) organised by the university in collaboration with Performance Studies international, Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher will give a lecture on If I Can't Dance... and its development.
The famous quote “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” is a source of inspiration to explore critical and celebratory dimensions in contemporary performative art practice. The quote has been attributed to Emma Goldman, renowned feminist and anarchist activist, who was born in Lithuania and moved to the United States in 1885.
However, as Goldman’s biographer and feminist writer Alix Shulman has explained, Goldman never said anything of the like (1). Instead, the quote is the embodiment of the renewed and fruitful interest in historical feminist practice since the 1970s. In 1973, a befriended printer asked Shulman for a quotation by Goldman for use on a t-shirt. Shulman sent a passage from Goldman’s autobiography Living My Life (1931), but the printer rephrased the passage into the famous “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”. As Shulman recounts, the citation subsequently found its way onto millions of buttons, posters, banners, T-shirts, bumper stickers, books and articles:
“History exploded so quickly in those hungrily feminist days that the slogan on the original shirt-run was soon dispersed and copied and broadcast nationwide and abroad, underground and above, sometimes, absent a text to be checked against, changing along the way like a child’s game of Telephone, until (...) [the] initial lighthearted liberties had taken wing as quotable lore and soared up into the realms of myth.” (2)
In line with this ongoing exploration of the potential of feminist legacy, If I Can’t Dance... would like to continue the explosion of history and to celebrate the myth of Emma Goldman’s dance, by critically presenting and exploring performative works of art.
1. Shulman, Alix Kates. "Dances with Feminists" Women's Review of Books, Vol. IX, no. 3, December 1991.
2. Shulman, "Dances with Feminists". Currently, renewed interest in the life and work of Emma Goldman has resulted in the elaborate Emma Goldman Papers project at the University of California, Berkeley.