Call for papers for the Dance Context Journal 2025: Identities in Dance

Dance Context Journal. Photo: Mime on the Moon (Radim Vizváry, Mime Prague), © Anna Šolcová.

In human culture, arts are often considered the prime means of expressing individual ideas and abilities. Among them, dance as an art form carries unique visions and skills, but also struggles with issues related to social and aesthetic norms. Even before the emergence of professional education, dance was used as a physical activity that shaped bodies into a period-correct and beautiful form. This tendency has been exacerbated by professional dance, which is most strongly represented in Western culture by classical ballet technique. Aesthetic norms are not only about body types, sizes, and dimensions, but also gender, age, race, origin, etc. Today, the contemporary dance environment in particular is considered a safe space in which individuality and unique identity can be freely expressed. Freedom itself and its value, which can quickly and easily disappear in political and ideological chaos, also becomes a theme.

We invite submissions of article that raise or include (but are not limited to):

• Dance as an expression of identity and as a means of searching for it.
• Changes in the social roles of women and men and their impact on the field of dance and its power structures.
• New perspectives on the body, its norms and ideals and their influence on dance aesthetics and dance content.
• Approaches to gender identity and heteronormativity.
• Reflecting decoloniality and related themes in the Western dance repertoire (traditional and contemporary).
• Globalization and migration in confrontation with unique national aesthetic canons.

We would like to suggest that the abstracts of proposed articles and studies try to look at the selected issues from the "inside" and avoid the labels "us" and "others", which may imply an evaluative position and a certain mainstream norm. At the same time, looking "from the inside" will make it possible to reveal the principles of identity expression and its forms. The exploration of the chosen topic can take the form of a performance analysis, a theoretical study (historical, contemporary, qualitative, quantitative), a reflection on artistic research and production, or an interview. 

You can apply to two different sections of the Journal:

1. Articles of popular and educational nature, essays by critics, theoreticians, artists, etc., which range in length from 5,400 to 18,000 characters.
2. Peer-reviewed studies, which must meet the standards of scientific articles in terms of theory, methodology, citation of sources, and range in length from 18,000 to 36,000 characters.

Abstracts with article topics of 150 to 300 words and a short CV (100 words) should be submitted by 8 December 2024 using this form. When submitting abstracts, please specify whether the article is intended for the first thematic section (popular science texts) or the second thematic section (scientific articles).

Selected authors will be contacted by 30 December 2024. The deadline for submission is then 31 January 2025 for non-peer-reviewed articles, 15 February 2025 for peer-reviewed articles.

The full text of the open call can be found at the following link:

https://www.dancecontext.com/journal-2025

Source: Dance Context.