Dancing, perhaps most famously of the Tik Tok variety, has helped many cope and adapt to the past year’s pandemic, making people feel connected in an almost choreographed way. Not only infiltrating certain web sites, site-specific dance—choreographed work inspired by a specific space or place—is becoming increasingly relevant, especially in environmental terms. Recent projects such as Karole Armitage’s “On the Nature of Things” or Jody Sperling’s “Polar Rhythms” have taken nature, and more specifically climate change and other environmental issues, as their source of inspiration. A transformative art, dance offers the possibility of intimate connection and even continuous metamorphosis.

This panel seeks to explore the intersection of adaptation studies and the idea of dance (as) adaptation, inviting papers that seek to examine the adaptability of bodies in and through dance, dance as an adaptive practice or a language of translation, the choreographer as auteur, dance and film genre, or story telling and transformation through movement.

How are texts, stories, objects, or even environmental issues retold through the medium of dance? Or, how are dance performances represented through various modes of media, especially film? Borrowing from Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, how and why does one person/text/film feel compelled to perform the “dance of another,” whether as adaptation, remake, sequel, representation, or even for site-specific realness?

Papers may engage with the central topic in a variety of ways, including through contemporary dance scholarship, dance as theory, the adaptation of dance performances into film or other media representations, works of literature adapted into dance, pivotal instances of dance-writing in literature, dance movies, etc.

Abstracts of 250-300 words should be submitted directly on the NeMLA website by September 30, 2021.

Please direct any questions to Christina Parker-Flynn at christina.parker-flynn@fsu.edu

General guidelines for NeMLA abstracts can be found here:  http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers.html.

Conference web site:  https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html.