CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS
to the 2019 yearbook of the german dance association (gtf)
Tanz der Dinge / Things that dance
ed. Johannes Birringer & Josephine Fenger
Submission deadline: 15 February 2019
Reviewing current dance and performing arts research and a host of publications
that address kinetic lives, things that matter, objects that dance or connect
into other organisms and assemblages, one gains the impression of a vibrant
neomaterial/epistemic turn, a “call of things” in dance which in turn calls for
critical reflection. Tanz der Dinge/Things than dance will look into the
vibrations of lively materials, reconfigurations of human and inhuman forces,
social choreographies and choreographjc objects, animatedness and the agencies
of assemblages as a means of thinking about performance experiences and
movement potentials across a range of interdisciplinary practices and
theoretical discourses.
The current wave of new materialisms has brought attention to things that move
or are moved, “vibrant matter,” physical phenomena, machinic or animated agents
and assemblages, the labor of apparatuses and intra-actions between human and
nonhuman forces. It has raised awareness of passages in the “political ecology
of experience” linking new dance philosophies (Erin Manning/Brian Massumi’s
Thought in the Act) with choreographic, theatrical, sonic and media
installation practices, and recurrent interests in hybrid material performance
and puppetry with political theories (Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A
Political Ecology of Things), ethnographic and social science studies, as well
as postcolonial and critical race theories (on the materiality of liquid
blackness, for example, and historically specific and located sensorial
experience and affect).
Materiality and myth in dance are subject to a shift in meaning which
privileges "epistemic things" (Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Experimentalsysteme und
epistemische Dinge, 2006): before the object is charged with meaning, the inner
dynamics of matter defines a new focal point for performance aesthetics. Object
oriented, immanent philosophies of art and performance are part of this
pressing concern with materials, plasticities, the lives and deaths of entities
formerly known as passive objects, inanimate things, inert matter. The
synthesis of sound, rhythm, movement and materiality returns us to a conception
of choreography that recover collective, symbiotic creativity of ritual dances.
Along with the traditional morphology of objects to dance and musical
instruments the examination of danced things and choreographic/musical
repurposed objects moves on to factors of artificial intelligence and sensor
technologies in current dance aesthetics. Contemporary questions about the
agency of objects and the forces of materialization have increasingly blurred
the borders modernity had erected between the animate and the inanimate.
The Karlsruhe Symposium (October 5-7, 2018) dedicated to our theme has been
successfully completed. The editors now prepare publication of the annual
yearbook of the gtf 2019 (vol. 29) to which you are invited to submit full
essays for review. This is an open call; we also invite contributors not able
to participate in the symposium and come from the disciplines of dance and
theatre studies, performance and cultural studies, anthropology and social
sciences, as well as from fine art, sci-art, sonic art, art history,
architecture and film/media studies, as well as practitioners from any of these
fields. We invite essays (up to 3,000 words), shorter provocations and artist
pages. You can download information regarding formatting/editing guidelines
from the gtf website. Please feel free to contact the editors if you have any
questions. We accept contributions in German, English, French, Italian and
Spanish languages.
Proposals and first drafts: 15 February 2019 / Final drafts: May 15, 2019
Publication: September 2019
www.gtf-tanzforschung.de
Abstracts and completed essays to:
johannes.birringer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
josephinefenger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
+++++++
