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Dance and wellbeing in Vancouver’s ‘A Healthy City for All’

Dance and wellbeing in Vancouver’s ‘A Healthy City for All’
Dance and wellbeing in Vancouver’s ‘A Healthy City for All’
Through the lens of the dancing body, this paper examines practices of health and wellbeing produced in response to City of Vancouver urban governance policies. In particular, it calls attention to the legislative onslaught by city government in the years abutting the 2010 Winter Olympics to cultivate and manage healthy people, communities, and environments. In an effort to sell Vancouver’s ‘liveability’, I argue City of Vancouver endorsed a new legislative alliance that merged a conspicuously Anglo-American wellbeing lexicon, favouring individual responsibility and self-governance, with the performing arts industries. Drawing upon interviews and performance-based research, the paper illustrates how Karen Jamieson’s community dance project Connect, created for the In the Heart of the City festival, embodies Vancouver’s tri-level legislative ambitions to nurture A Healthy City For All. This materialised through the crafting of a dance-health body practice (healthy people), by choreographing a sense of belonging with ‘at risk’ communities (healthy communities), and in the uniting of the arts and health professions in the process of ‘cleaning up’ disenfranchised neighbourhoods (healthy environments). In bringing together scholarship on cultures of wellbeing and creative dance practice, the article contributes to understandings of how the health-seeking subject is embodied and performed. It also offers a productive critique of the exclusionary nature of urban health legislation, and of the contested role artists and arts festivals can play in nurturing urban wellbeing and normalising inequalities
0016-7185
11-21
Veal, Charlotte
e631b98d-0115-4909-803f-700339892a25
Veal, Charlotte
e631b98d-0115-4909-803f-700339892a25

Veal, Charlotte (2017) Dance and wellbeing in Vancouver’s ‘A Healthy City for All’. Geoforum, 81, 11-21. (doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.01.016).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Through the lens of the dancing body, this paper examines practices of health and wellbeing produced in response to City of Vancouver urban governance policies. In particular, it calls attention to the legislative onslaught by city government in the years abutting the 2010 Winter Olympics to cultivate and manage healthy people, communities, and environments. In an effort to sell Vancouver’s ‘liveability’, I argue City of Vancouver endorsed a new legislative alliance that merged a conspicuously Anglo-American wellbeing lexicon, favouring individual responsibility and self-governance, with the performing arts industries. Drawing upon interviews and performance-based research, the paper illustrates how Karen Jamieson’s community dance project Connect, created for the In the Heart of the City festival, embodies Vancouver’s tri-level legislative ambitions to nurture A Healthy City For All. This materialised through the crafting of a dance-health body practice (healthy people), by choreographing a sense of belonging with ‘at risk’ communities (healthy communities), and in the uniting of the arts and health professions in the process of ‘cleaning up’ disenfranchised neighbourhoods (healthy environments). In bringing together scholarship on cultures of wellbeing and creative dance practice, the article contributes to understandings of how the health-seeking subject is embodied and performed. It also offers a productive critique of the exclusionary nature of urban health legislation, and of the contested role artists and arts festivals can play in nurturing urban wellbeing and normalising inequalities

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Accepted/In Press date: 30 January 2017
e-pub ahead of print date: 16 February 2017
Published date: May 2017
Organisations: Economy, Governance & Culture

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 406734
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/406734
ISSN: 0016-7185
PURE UUID: 00fa7923-ccb2-42fb-902e-b4fea1b75e5e

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Date deposited: 21 Mar 2017 02:06
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 05:05

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Author: Charlotte Veal

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