Not All Lateness Is the Same

This contribution is the result of a collaboration between a movement and performance practitioner, researcher and educator; and a dance historian. It takes as a starting point the circumstance of ‘being late’—be it for a dance class or for keeping up with choreographic trends—in order to explore how Western dance practices and theoretical discourses about dance perform, reflect and reinforce power-laden concepts and enactments of spacetime. ‘Not all lateness is the same’ is a dialogue between dance history (conceived as researching, writing, teaching and learning) and dance practice (conceived as learning, doing and watching). We explore these fields as situated within specific epistemic frameworks that define modes, limits, and values of knowledge production. Our engagement with the notion of lateness probes and pushes these frameworks—as well as the wider capitalist frameworks of production in which they are embedded—considering how dominant Eurocentric, modernist dance historiography places dance in a linear temporality of periodisation and a centre/periphery spatialisation, thus creating a hierarchical dynamic whereby peripheralised scenes, practices and even peoples are in a constant state of ‘lateness’ (typified in the 2000s with the expansion of Europe). In an interwoven way, our engagement with lateness simultaneously confronts dominant modes of practicing and teaching dance in the Western tradition which posit lateness—to the dance lesson, to the beat, to the rhythm of expected progress, to the conformity of a synchronised group—as a flaw, despite improvisational and somatic practices’ acknowledgement of, and even desire for, the open-endedness of immanence in the ongoing-ness of doing. Expansions of dance practice, provision (conditions, education, funding, infrastructure) and research, seen for instance through counter arguments to its prohibitive ableism through notions of crip time, have questioned forms of duration but not erased the dominance of setting timeframes of events that define and separate. Investigating these negotiations, we propose that some lateness can be reclaimed in a multitemporal and decentralised epistemic-practical framework.