MISSION STATEMENT
Inspired by the quote of the anarchist Emma Goldman, the platform explores the critical and celebratory implications of this statement in artists' work, curatorial and theoretical practice.
If I Can't Dance... works along the systematic of collaboration. It doesn't have a 'house', but instead produces and develops projects and programmes that have different manifestations in different institutions within the Netherlands and abroad. Each edition, defined by a certain field of investigation, engages a set of partners and unfolds along a travelling trajectory.
If I Can't Dance... believes in this unique potential of art, being both critical and celebratory. Emma Goldman's statement we like to embrace, as it suggests that the search for agency and the potential for empowerment lies in all elements of life and cannot be regulated to a firmly cordoned-off arena named the political. Thus it is embedded and reflected in art too.
Each edition is an ongoing process of research - of "contemplation" - segmented by moments of presentations at the subsequent venues enabling public exchange - opportunities for "action".
Emma Goldman (1869-1940)
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. 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, 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."
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.
