This article reflects on the relation between dance and contemporary production, which is today very often described as postfordism. The discovery of the body and its autonomous movement is in the history of contemporary dance closely linked with the strong resistance to the disciplinary and repetitive modes of production. On one side, autonomous movement of the body is influenced by the kinaesthetic knowledge developed in the fordistic factory; on the other side it is transforming the same knowledge into the aesthetic and perceptive research of the liberated subjectivity and her singular movement. This article shows that political potentiality of dance has to be reflected again from the perspective of how we produce today, or to put it differently: How do labouring subjects exist in contemporary society? The autonomy of creativity and aesthetic experience, which was an important part of the resistance to the rationalisation of labour in the 20th century, nowadays presents an important source of productive value. Subjugation consists today of continuous movement, flexibility of relations, signs, gestures and bodies. Production encourages constant transformation and crisis of a singular subject, with the intention to capture the outbursts of creativity and bestow it with value. Production demands ceaseless collaboration, which has to be temporary but not too affective, otherwise it can become ill-timed and destructive. How then do we exactly work, when we work with dance? Political potentiality of dance is not related to the leisure space outside of work, but it has to be put into the conversation with flexible production modes and immateriality of the contemporary work. In the last decades we can follow these changes in recent dance performances, especially when we observe some interrelated phenomena: the visibility of working procedures, redistribution of collaborative bodies and production of (dancing) knowledge.

This volume is dedicated to the question of how dance, both in its historical and in its contemporary manifestations, is intricately linked to conceptualisations of the political. Whereas in this context the term "policy" means the reproduction of hegemonic power relations within already existing institutional structures, politics refers to those practices which question the space of policy as such by inscribing that into its surface which has had no place before. The art of choreography consists in distributing bodies and their relations in space. It is a distribution of parts that within the field of the visible and the sayable allocates positions to specific bodies. Yet in the confrontation between bodies and their relations, a deframing and dislocating of positions may take place. The essays included in this book are aimed at the multiple connections between politics, community, dance, and globalisation from the perspective of e.g. Dance and Theatre Studies, History, Philosophy, and Sociology.