How might artists be better supported through the complexities and vulnerabilities of working in and with communities? This was the key topic of the first “digital discourse” session: a set of three open meetings on Zoom, dotted across the CROWD residency programme, with invited artists discussing key themes that matter to participating artists and organisations.
An earlier blog post shared some working practices from Toni-Dee Paul, an artist and access assistant who embeds care in everything she does. This post offers suggestions and provocations from the second guest artist, choreographer/writer Claire Lefèvre.
1. Introducing the performance doula
A doula is a figure who holds other humans through difficult thresholds in life. Someone who supports, cares, challenges where needed, above all is present to complexity and skilled in navigating it.
Every making process needs such a figure: usually that work is taken by, for instance, a producer, a dramaturg, a stage manager – and almost always it’s carried out by a femme in the room.
What happens if that care work is seen as skilled labour in its own right? What happens if the expectation is not that it is done for free? How might its value be seen?
If the work is a baby, what kinds of queer feminist parenting do you want to raise it with?
What kinds of “childcare” would enable the lead artist to step away if they need to?
And how might this enable a shift away from single authorship?
2. The care work biography
As part of her research into radical softness and making care work more visible, more valued and more integral to artistic practice, Claire has developed a strategy called the care work biography. Unlike the usual artist biography, it reveals the human and lived experience behind the list of performances and career achievements.
The care work bio practice invite artists – and the organisations and institutions reading their biographies – to:
– list and take into consideration all the unpaid labours artists do on top of their artistic work/studio work
– realise that it amounts to a whole job in itself
– acknowledge that this is skilled labour, not something that femme/Disabled/BIPOC people are ‘naturally’ good at
– think of care as relational.
This extract from Claire’s own care work biography shows the principles in action (it can be read in its entirety on her website):
Claire Lefèvre is professional hand holder, prolific to-do-list-writer and passionate eye-roller. She is known for finding the exact book to inspire your research process, reminding her colleagues to take lunch breaks and always responding to emails in a timely manner. In recent years, Claire has witnessed hundreds of rehearsals and work in progress showings, proof-read and given feedback to dozens of funding applications, and produced a vast number of advertising posts on Instagram. She’s been known to respond to midnight phone calls from panicked co-workers trying to meet a deadline, as well as consoling rejected artists by sharing her own extensive collection of unsuccessful proposals, which she wrote on her days off. Some of her career highlights have been surviving 20+ years of dance training, calling out abusive curators at press conferences, and engaging in a regular practice of emailing institutions to let them know that the fee they are offering isn’t legal.
For anyone interested in writing their own care work biography, Claire offers the following guidelines:
– use bio language: She is known for, their work specialises in, he is inspired by the work of…
– list job titles, greatest achievements, research questions etc etc
– Think of people, places, things you care for
– Think of people, places, things that care for you
– Where did you learn care work/emotional labour?
– What are unpaid tasks you engage in as part of your artistic career?
– What are methods of care you developed to survive?
CROWD 
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