Abstracts are being accepted for the 2024 issue of Performance Paradigm on Moving South - The Reconceptualisation of Dance Research in the 2020s

Co-editors: Erin Brannigan, Tia Reihana, Siobhan Murphy, Emma Willis 

This issue of Performance Paradigm begins a special focus on dance and choreography, which is to continue, after this issue, as a special ongoing section in the journal. This inaugural and full issue aims to broadly track the state-of-the-field in our local region, encompassing Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific and is edited by members of the Dance Research Australia network. There has been a paucity of coverage of local dance artists in academic work to date, with the exception of contributions by various guest editors’ work on Brolga, Dance Research Aotearoa, the important work of Sally Gardner and Elizabeth Dempster's co-edited Writings on Dance (1985-) historically, and some monographs on specific artists and anthologies responsive to place-based storylines such as Rachael Swain’s Dance in Contested Lands (2021) and Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers (Eds. Baxter and Brannigan, 2014).

Dance platforms for sharing work local to the region have also been sparse. The Undisciplining Dance conference in Auckland in 2016 was an important recent milestone with the last Australian dance conference occurring in 2004 (Dance Rebooted: Initializing the Grid). The anthology issuing from the 2016 event, Undisciplining Dance in Nine Movements and Eight Stumbles (2018, Editors Carol Brown and Alys Longley), picked up on Elizabeth's Dempster's provocations in that 2004 event around “undisciplining” the art form, and this special edition continues the conversation.

Importantly, the scope of work in the field of Dance Studies in our regions has historically had a narrow cultural profile with much work still to be done on non-Western practices, traditions, and contemporary work. Moreover, expansion to include the professional dance and choreography of First Peoples and diasporic communities is essential. It is also a field dominated by artist-theorists, not just locally but internationally, and the shift towards redefining and deploying disciplinary tools (for example the newly expanded notion of “choreography”) unsettles and re-envisions how we embody our interdisciplinary knowledge.

So, this inaugural section asks: what model of Dance Studies might be relevant in our local context in the 2020 s and what are the points of convergence and distinction with allied fields such as theatre, performance, live arts and increasingly, visual arts? Themes may include:

• Intercultural dance practices
• Place/space
• Dance history
• Uneven modernities
• New dance dramaturgies
• Techniques, scores, practices
• National identities
• Dance diasporas
• Methods of practice-led research in dance
• Dance and activism
• Modes of creative composition and production
• Dance and archival practices
• Dance and screens
• Dance pedagogy
• Popular dance forms
• Politics of dance production

We welcome contributions in a variety of forms including critical essays, artists pages, accounts of creative practice as research and historical studies.

Please send proposals of approximately 300 words to submissions@danceresearchaustralia.com.au by 1 May 2023.

If successful, full articles will be due on 1 December 2023 for publication in Performance Paradigm 18, August 2024.

Dance Research Australia is a community initially established with 70 members which had its inaugural meeting in 2020. It is focused on Australian scholars, writers and artist-researchers working in the field of dance and allied fields both inside and outside the institution, and both locally and internationally. The working party currently consists of Associate Professor Erin Brannigan, Dr. Siobhan Murphy, Dalisa Pigram, Dr. Jo Pollitt (convenor 2022-2023), Shinjita Roy (PG rep), Dr. Tia Reihana, and Dr. Rachael Swain.

More information and journal contact details are available here:
https://www.performanceparadigm.net/index.php/journal/index