Call for Papers

A Special Issue of Dance Chronicle

The field of dance studies has witnessed a shift in debates on dance history over the last three  decades. Studies have demonstrated how different traditions, aesthetics, characters, and  institutions have contributed over time to the perpetuation and global dissemination of  dance  practices from the Global North. Equally, local historiographies have analyzed dance heritages  that spring from diverse popular cultural practices and, therefore, do not neatly align with dominant  movement techniques and categories in so-called Western culture.  

Another important development has come from scholars, especially in the Global South, who have  worked with decolonial and de-colonial frameworks to critique and resist dance paradigms that  claim to be universally valid (Tambutti and Gigena, 2018; Wilcox, 2018; Purkayastha, 2018;  Cadús, 2019; Guarato, 2019 and 2022; Vallejos, 2020 and Marques, 2022). These studies have  shown how dances from the periphery, ethnic dances, geographies, family dances, and community  dances have provided a multifaceted panorama of dance practices and pasts, challenging the  tradition of Dance History as a field and/or Dance History courses that tend to focus on Western  theatrical forms and include others only when explained through a lens of Western theatrical forms.  Building on recent scholarship on decolonizing dance studies broadly speaking, this special issue  focuses explicitly on dance history pedagogy, thinking about how we teach the past to develop  more inclusive presents and futures in studios, on stages and in written narratives about bodies in  motion. 

However, the field as a whole is still shy about debating what and how historiographical revisions  reach the classroom. Introducing dance histories and historiographical debates can be intentional  or unintentional, explicit or implicit, decolonial or colonial, with ambiguities and gray areas along  the way. We hope that this volume will inspire more awareness around teaching dance pasts. To  begin this inquiry, the special issue poses the overarching questions: How do we teach dance  history? What conflicts and tensions are presented in the classroom (if at all)? How do  historiographical questions inform the teaching of dance history?   

Understanding the past as a constitutive element of the present and the projection of possible  futures, this special issue invites articles that rethink the contents, programs, and methods we use  in classrooms dedicated to the history of dance. What dance legacies and heritages do we define  as content? Do institutions that offer dance education reformulate their course programs to deal  with the plurality of pasts? What power do institutions have to maintain or transform teaching  programs and practices? What methods do we use to help students learn about dance history? We  invite contributions meditating on these and other related questions on dance history pedagogies.  

With this collective focus, this special issue aims to prompt an urgent rethinking of how we  currently teach future generations about dance's past.   

Potential topics include but are not limited to: 

 • Dance history teaching methodologies and curricula   

• Course and program review processes  

• Contents and works selected as basic references and which epistemologies guide these choices  

• Global and local approaches to teaching dance histories   

• How the teaching of history intersects with priorities of different degree programs (BA, BFA,  MFA, PhD) and potential tensions between these different programs  

• Orality, corporeality, and textuality as testimonial archives of the dance past  

• Tensions between teaching dances’ historical contexts versus focusing on dances’ aesthetics  and techniques  

• Intellectual disobedience and teaching strategies that defy global north paradigms  

• Teaching race, gender, and class within dance history  

• Dependence on, or autonomy from, global histories in teaching local dance pasts   

• Abandoned or forgotten pasts in the teaching of dance history 

Preliminary inquiries may be sent to Rafael Guarato (rafaelguarato@ufg.br) and Elizabeth  Schwall (elizabeth.schwall@nau.edu).   

To submit a research article to this Special Issue, please go to  https://rp.tandfonline.com/submission/create. Select “Dance Chronicle” as the journal’s title and  “original article” as the submission type.