Hidden labour

Hidden Labour is a site-specific performance protest, staged in and around the Laban Building, highlighting the systemic barriers that disabled dancers face in higher education settings. The protest identifies the cost of extra labour that disabled dance student carries, through the term of ‘hidden labour’: describing the additional time, energy and emotional cost of navigating systems that were not designed for them. Disability research points to an exhausting cycle of self-advocacy, renegotiation and institutional friction that disabled students absorb on top of their studies. This protest seeks to make that invisible labour visible.

“disabled artists are faced with two options: to limit their practice to the so-called inclusive dance field, mainly as performers, rather than makers or teachers, or to ‘bend’ themselves into a ‘normalistic’ model of training in which their bodies and experiences do not fit”

-Kate Marsh in Manifesto for Inclusion (2024)

The protests makes use of principles of site-specificity, linking the significance and societal meaning of the Laban Building to the lived experience of those in it, and those who did not manage to get into it. It makes use of doors, walls and windows as symbolism for showing the power-relations between those who determine who gets in or who gets access, and those who are subject to these decisions. The work does this by creating a miscommunication between the action of the performer and the inherent action-based knowledge that objects hold.