Showing Support: Some Reflections on Vancouver’s Dance Economies

<jats:p> Abstract: </jats:p><jats:p> This essay draws on a series of recent in-studio conversations and collaborations with different Vancouver dance artists (James Gnam and Natalie Lefebvre Gnam of plastic orchid factory, Ziyian Kwan of dumb instrument Dance, and Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg of Tara Cheyenne Performance) to ask how we value and make meaningful the process that leads to the performance product. Following from Shannon Jackson, I seek to make visible—to show—the various structures of support, from the operational to the affective, that underpin and enable this process. How might both the precarity (financial and physical) and the motility (locomotive and emotive) specific to dance as discipline help us to rethink the different economies of scale that performance engages: from the abstractly derivative and all-encompassing markets of global commerce to the resolutely embodied and intimate spaces of local collaboration? In attempting to answer this question, I am also seeking to account for the work of living—for both my dance-artist friends and myself—that goes into making and supporting a work of live art. </jats:p>