Call for Papers: Choreographic Practices

Special Issue: ‘Differing Bodyminds: Cripping Choreography’

View the full CFP here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/choreographic-practices#call-for-papers

Guest Editors:

Leni Van Goidsenhoven (University of Amsterdam)

Carrie Sandahl (University of Illinois)

Jonas Rutgeerts (KU Leuven)

Deadline for abstracts or artwork proposals (300 words): 10 October 2023

In spring 2022, we organized the symposium and doctoral school Differing Bodyminds – Choreographing New Pathways. These events were Belgium’s first to focus officially on crip theory, which is a critical perspective that analyses, exposes and critiques systems of normalcy in representation and social practices as well as a framework for imagining alternatives based on disabled ways of being in the world. The aim was to adopt the term ‘crip dance’ as a lens to theorize embodied and experiential forms of knowledge-making in the performing arts, exploring how new forms might produce difference not as a divergence from the norm, but rather as a constant process of differing that opens up multiple ways of relating to body, mind and movement. Inspired by our explorations, we are now guest editing a Special Issue of Choreographic Practices that we are calling ‘Differing Bodyminds: Cripping Choreography’. 

Building on crip theory and dance studies, we propose ‘differing bodyminds’ as an analytical tool to choreograph differently and rethink the dancing body. We aim to do more than simply pay attention to the representation of different bodyminds on stage (i.e. identifying a dancer/fictional character with disability X or discussing access in terms of civil rights). Here, we explicitly value and integrate different bodyminds in the process of choreographic creation and dramaturgy and include them into our collective imagination of the future. In doing so, we align ourselves with the recent phenomenological turn in the field of disability choreography, in which crip artists draw on the specificities of their disability experiences of time, space, relationality and material social conditions to rethink (their) choreographic work (Sandahl 2020). You can find our position paper on this topic for Choreographic Practices here.

This Special Issue invites artistic and theoretical contributions that set up a dialogue between dance studies and insights produced by critical disability studies, crip theory, critical race theory, ageism and queer theory. 

The topics of this Special Issue can include, but will not be limited to:

•Crip aesthetics and poetics 

•Cripping time and space in dance

•Ableism and ageism in dance

•Disabled spectatorship

•Neurodivergent, Blind/Visually Impaired, Deaf, Mad/Medicated and Chronically Ill bodies in choreography 

•Care ethics in artistic work 

•Claiming Crip and the dangers of appropriation

•Bodily training and injuries 

•Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to dance and diversity

The call for proposals is open to the academic audience as well as those working through choreographic practice, and we welcome submissions that are rich in visual content, or that activate or test the formatting limitations of the journal. We also welcome and support artists/scholars who are interested in developing their submissions through Choreographic Practices’ collaborative peer-review process 

(see https://www.intellectbooks.com/choreographic-practices#call-for-papers).

Please send abstracts or artwork proposals (max. 300 words and optionally max. 5 images) and CV (merged in one PDF file) to choreographicpractices@hushmail.com by 10 October 2023.