Going back to the roots of entrepreneurship: empirical evidences from the practice of dance

Purpose This work aims to investigate the specific field of arts entrepreneurship by focusing on the practices of vertical dance, a language of contemporary dance where dancers move on a vertical axis, moving suspended on the surface of buildings and walls. We focus on vertical dance as a meaningful bodily practice to explore the particular combination of dance and human movement, going beyond its purely metaphoric dimension. Design/methodology/approach We adopt a micro-social perspective, observing the practices (Gherardi, 2012; Nicolini, 2012; Sicca, 2000), that took place from 2013 to 2015 in the daily work of Wanda Moretti, a Venetian choreographer and co-founder of the company “Il posto”, observed in different contexts of artistic practices (Zembylas, 2014). Findings Deconstructing the overlapping dimensions that compose the space in our daily experience (force of gravity and the supporting surface), the vertical dance clarifies how often we undervalue the complexity of the space and, at the same time, opens up the way for a better understanding and investigation of entrepreneurship in artistic fields. Originality/value The study enlights how different categories, such as the human body, space, and movement, are a particular entanglement of elements, useful in order to highlight some of the fundamental assumptions at the heart of the field of entrepreneurship. The heterogeneous complexity of space and bodies is emphasised, challenging its ordinary conceptualisation.