General Call for Papers 

All articles submitted should be original work and must not be under consideration by other publications.

Choreographic Practices welcomes submissions throughout the academic year. Contributions are invited to explore choreographic practices from a diverse range of perspectives. We are especially interested in receiving critical/creative practice-led research that is interdisciplinary and experimental in nature.

Topics might include:

Choreographic methodologies and practices
Dance and interdisciplinary
Theatre, screen, sited or social movement practices
Improvisation processes
Dance and documentation
Choreography as social, cultural and/or psychological concern

Choreographic Practices incorporates critical essays, creative documentation, blogs in print, visual essays, dialogues, interviews and debate. We encourage submissions in both conventional and alternative modes of writing, including performative and visual essays.

Submission of an article to the journal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. By submitting a manuscript, the authors agree that the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article have been given to the publishers.

Types of Review

1. Open peer-review follows a traditional peer-review process except that the author(s) and the reader-reviewers are openly named. The writing is not anonymised. For this process, the editors ensure there are no potential conflicts of interest, and the reader-reviewers can decide whether or not to be named in the publication.
2. Collaborative peer-review is where the author(s) and a reviewer-collaborator enter a dialogue to help develop the writing towards publication. CHOR's editorial team will be responsible for choosing an appropriately experienced reviewer-collaborator, and this person can be more or less involved depending on the collaboration. For this process, the reviewer-collaborator can decide whether or not to be named at the time of publication, although we would expect most to agree to this. The extent or depth of the dialogue or collaboration would determine the way in which the reviewer-collaborator is acknowledged. 
3. Traditional double blind peer-review is where the author(s) and reader-reviewers remain unknown or 'blind' to each other. The writing is anonymised and the author receives anonymous responses from the reviewers via the CHOR editorial team.

Editorial contact: choreographicpractices@hushmail.com

Journal contributors will receive a free PDF copy of their final work upon publication. 

Special Issue Call for Papers

‘Differing Bodyminds: Cripping Choreography’ 

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 the Special Issue ‘Differing Bodyminds: Cripping Choreography’ we explore the potential of dance to rethink notions of corporeality, disability, skill and virtuosity. Insisting on the label ‘bodyminds’ (Price 2015) to emphasize the fundamental enmeshment of mind and body, we explore how visible and invisible disabilities affect choreographic practice and raise the question: How can disabled dance 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? 

More often than not, dance is associated with notions of youthfulness, fitness and ability. The trained body of the dancer – in classical and contemporary dance – is slim, muscular yet supple, perfectly malleable, and always ready to move (Anderson 2020). However, in recent decades we have seen choreographers internationally increasingly questioning this conventional bodily regime, working with dancers who do not conform to the norms of able-bodiedness, age or gender and taking these dancers’ specific embodiment as a generative matrix for the exploration of new movement vocabularies (Allbright 1997, 2001; Adam 2002; Kuppers 2003; Whatley 2007; Hickey-Moody 2009; Sandahl 2018a, 2018b). In so doing, these choreographers not only carve out new pathways in the field of dance in terms of kinaesthetics, space, technique, movements, rhythms and creation processes. They also disturb the conventional scripts entrenched in western cultural frameworks that prescribe how bodies and minds are supposed to function and behave. 

The Anglo-Saxon dance field was the first part of the dance scene internationally where explorations of disability began to appear (e.g. Jerron Herman, Axis Dance, Full Radius, Dancing Wheels, Kinetic Light). Although European experimental choreographers in the 1990s set out to question the ‘typical’ characteristics of dance and the bodily regimes that come with it, they remained within the boundaries of able-bodiedness. More recently, European choreographers are also starting to question compulsory able-bodiedness in dance (e.g. Felicia Sparrström, Chiara Bersani, Platform K, Michael Turinsky). This evolution has not only expanded the geographical scope of disabled choreographies, but also paved the way for new debates, due to differences in choreographic styles and philosophies, and new opportunities, thanks to different funding systems and infrastructure. 

With this Special Issue, we want to tap into the potential of these developments by bringing them in conjunction with crip theory, a relatively young field of study, situated at the intersection of queer theory and disability studies. Although crip theory builds on and recognizes the importance of early experiments in disability art/theory, it tries to expand the scope of thinking, exploring how radical disabled identities are developed in conjunction with other categories such as race, gender, age and class (Sandahl 2003; McRuer 2006). It explicitly integrates not only disabled bodyminds, but also fat bodies, bodies of colour and older bodies into the theoretical framework. Operating from an outsider's perspective, it can also accommodate what might be considered ‘disability adjacent’ identities – such as Mad, Ill, Deaf and Neurodivergent. Those who occupy these identities both claim and refute ‘disability’ as a means of demarcating how their experiences and perspectives may differ from the mainstream disability rights movement. What further distinguishes crip theory from disability studies is a shift from representation to creation and transformation. Focusing on ‘cripping’ as an act rather than ‘crip’ as a pre-established label, crip theorists explore the potential of these differing bodyminds to create new vocabularies for thinking about our bodies, minds, and senses, re-imagining what an accessible and just society could mean (Sandahl and Fox 2018; Fritsch and McGuire 2018). Considering this phenomenological turn through the lens of crip theory can open up a more intersectional rethinking of bodily and normative regimes in dance. 

Building on crip theory, 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 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).  

This Special Issue invites artistic and theoretical contributions that set up a dialogue between dance studies and insights produced by 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:
  • What is the potential of differing bodyminds to rethink (the development and future of) dance?
  • How might differing bodies in dance contribute to the exploration of ‘cripistemology,’ a term coined by Merri Lisa Johnson (2014), to describe ways of knowing through a relation to disability experience?
  • How can a crip theoretical lens take into account intersecting identities such as race, class, gender, age and sexuality without losing specificity or rigour?
• Cripping time and space:
  • Choreography and crip time/crip futurity. Crip time often refers to the extra time disabled people need when navigating day-to-day activities (i.e. working slowly during a pain flare-up, continuously being confronted with time-consuming barriers), but the notion is also used to speculate on disability’s liberatory potential to affect our regimes of temporality and our thinking on the future. How might crip time be reflected in dancemaking processes and their resulting performances? How does dance imagine future communities based on disability experience and/or differing bodyminds?
  • How do differing bodyminds relate to and take up space in innovative ways? How might different orientations to space influence choreographic choices?
• Ableism and ageism:
  • How do choreographers work with/approach ageing bodies?
  • What would it mean to understand the ageing body in terms of transformation instead of loss?
  • What approaches exist for in dance training for disabled bodies? What happens when non-disabled dancers become impaired or age?
• Disabled spectatorship:
  • What happens when we centre disabled people as audience members?
  • How do creative access and accommodations affect aesthetics and audience engagement?
  • How do marketing, promotion, and audience development influence the reception of disability dance?
• Neurodiverse, Blind/Visually Impaired, Deaf, Mad/Medicated, and Chronically Ill bodies in choreography
  • How can non-apparent disabilities influence choreography? What happens when disability cannot be readily ‘seen’?
  • How does disability become legible to audiences?
  • How might Deaf and disabled cultural practices inform choreography (e.g. sign language, stimming, communication boards, captioning, audio description)?
• Care ethics in artistic work
  • What are the ethics of collaboration between disabled and nondisabled dancers?
  • How can care be incorporated into the dancemaking process from choreography to rehearsal to touring?
  • How can care be woven into a dancer’s career trajectory?
• Claiming Crip and the dangers of appropriation
  • What are the ethics of nondisabled dancers ‘performing’ disability? (e.g. nondisabled dancers using crutches or wheelchairs)
  • Who can teach, perform, and promote the dance practices of differing bodyminds? Who profits? How might benefits be shared?
• Bodily training and injuries
  • How might we create ‘sustainable’ choreography that does not further impair, injure or cause pain?
  • What happens to dancers’ careers and senses of self when they are injured?
  • How might we rethink the role of impairment and chronic pain in the historical development of modern and contemporary dance?
• Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to dance and diversity
  • What insights might the social sciences, medicine, and the humanities bring to dance studies when considering differing bodyminds and dance?
  • What theoretical approaches and methodologies can be deployed to inform a crip approach to dance? 

The call for proposals is open to 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 ‘Types of Review’ above). 

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.