Call for Contributions: Dancing Spaces. Guest editors : Drs Ying Zhu and Alexis Weisbrod

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Sans titre ni photographe connu, [danseurs sur un toit parisien], agence de presse Meurisse, 1936. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Where the moving, inscriptive body and its accompanying choreographies nurture a constant and visually loud dialogue with the spaces within which they are embedded, dance scholarship houses investigations in which the body is layered over examinations of accompanying spatiality. Yet the dancing performed in everyday life by bodies operating in and with the built environment is equally revealing of culture.

This volume of Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies investigates what transpires at the intersection between pedestrian bodies and the theater of the everyday landscape. It is seeking conduits for uncovering meanings produced when space and architecture collide with bodies navigating and using the built environment, and when we make our way onto the streets and observe the shifting, gesturing, moving bodies that inhabit them.

Submissions could relate (but are not limited) to the following proposed themes:

1. How does the body’s interaction with the built environment uncover cultural meaning ?
2. How do pedestrian bodies and choreography define space and/or engage in the re-purposing of space (ex: The (re-) appropriation of Zucotti Park, NY by members of the Occupy Wall Street movement)
3. The impact of flashmobs on public (and private) space
4. The centrality of space and architecture in the development of site-specific choreography
5. Are pedestrian choreographies, within the built environment, relevant to dance studies?
6. How do built environments and space theory foreground the study of the dancing body?
7. How do bodies physically navigate the infrastructure and space of the internet?

As spaces for developing ideas and promoting debate, submissions should be approx. 1500 words in length, up to a max. of 2500 words. They may take on various formats including (but not limited to) short articles, poetry/fiction, critical dialogues, photography, illustrations, visual images, cartoons, drawings, or performative representations of dance.

Please forward inquiries and submissions to Ying Zhu — yingz81@gmail.com
Deadline: April 22, 2013.

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