{"id":413,"date":"2013-07-31T15:50:23","date_gmt":"2013-07-31T15:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rescen.net\/blog5\/?p=413"},"modified":"2013-07-31T15:50:23","modified_gmt":"2013-07-31T15:50:23","slug":"soft-bodies-soft-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rescen.net\/blog5\/2013\/07\/soft-bodies-soft-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Soft Bodies, Soft Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much of our blogging to date has focused on the ‘up close’ material of the project, in ethnographic or phenomenological terms, examining specificities of language as it is spoken in rehearsal room, or as it might get to grips with the immediate realities of activities there. One of the project’s propositions however, is that intercultural work doesn’t simply arrive, occur and rest in studios and on stages, but that it passes in and out of them in flows of varying complexity in which the influence for impact of the work itself on others may occur at several removes of time and space from these originals. There are ways in which each or all of the ArtsCross participants can be said to represent the interests of their culture, nation, institution or constituency (e.g. ‘dancers’ or ‘academics’). We can all probably be said, in some degree, to be trying not only represent those interests to others, but also to enact them in ways that make them meaningful for others — explaining, moving, exchanging and so on. Whether or not any of us are actively choosing such a role however, I would also suggest that we are all being moved by currents of a so-called<\/nobr> ‘soft power’, that moves between individual bodies and larger political ones and also carries and continues the effects of their gestures beyond their immediate reach. Again, it’s a proposition of the project that there is more than metaphor at stake in such suggestions, and that events in The Place’s rehearsal studios and theatre bear witness to, and are caught up within this extended movement of power.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, the British Council and the policy think tank Demos published ‘Influence and Attraction’, a report on culture and ‘soft power’ (1). This document is worth bearing in mind in relation to the ArtsCross project, and not only because of the cultural relations effected by bringing together such a range of actors from different cities and backgrounds. The report tries to trace some of the ways in which cultural activities bear upon the societies that participate them, and outlines eight ‘forces’ that shape cultural relations. It’s ironic of course, that at a time when the arts are consistently undermined domestically in politics and the media as fripperies, internationally, Britain is trying to take ever more advantage of the presumed strengths of its ‘cultural industries’ and of their value as drivers of the ‘creative economy’. In the report’s foreword, the Foreign Secretary William Hague suggests that ‘There is nothing to be feared, and much to be gained from the growing diversity in international centres of culture around the world. This opens up new opportunities for Britain and the British people…We in government are determined to play our full part in helping to liberate that ingenuity and talent across our national life, and to champion it all over the world’. Whilst there’s undoubtedly something platitudinous in such statements (incisive forewords are surely something of a rare breed), what rescues Hague’s comments, and the report they validate from being entirely so, is the extent to which soft power acts upon a politican like Hague, at least as much as it is enacted by him. It is this that maybe lies at the heart of the paradox of the profile the UK’s arts policy mentioned above. Although the arts budget represents only 0.1% of government spending, it suits the domestic agenda to get tough with frivolities like ballet or fringe theatre, despite their providing a return on that investment to the tune of 0.4% of GDP. However, as Britain’s ability to project power by military or industrial means overseas declines, Billy Elliot <\/em>and Warhorse <\/em><\/em>are recast as not only lucrative exports, but gestures with which to palpate the sensibilities of overseas others and attune them to the social, cultural and political body of Britannia that reaches out through them.<\/p>\n

\"_AWL3360\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0The eight forces that shape cultural relations identified in the Soft Power report are as follows:<\/p>\n