Dance Chronicle Special Edition
A Special Issue of Dance Chronicle
Call for Research Articles
All manuscripts will receive double-anonymous peer review. Submissions will be accepted at any time before August 15, 2020. Please submit manuscripts through the Taylor & Francis Submission Portal.
Movement Arts in Dance, Theatre, and Intermedial Performance
The physical role of the body on stage holds equal fascination for dance and theatre scholars and practitioners.
On one hand, particular genres such as commedia dell’arte and poor theatre have emphasized the agility, dexterity, kinesthetic equipage, rhetorical gestures, and raw physicality of players. In actor training, Stella Adler famously commanded actors to “physicalize” in order to develop the sense of a character in a scene at a moment in time.
On the other hand, the historic development of ballet tells a story of transition from court to theater, with the elements of theatre–including drama, design, voice, and spoken texts–often assuming surprising proportions. In various periods and places throughout the world the theatrical roots of dance and the dancelike ritual roots of theatre have intermingled in productive ways.
We invite contributions addressing how performers, directors, choreographers, and designers have explored the immediacy of the body and the power of presence in movement arts and intermedial performance. Articles may address, but need not be limited to, such subjects as:
- How have various forms of physical theatre, including commedia dell’arte, pantomime, and circus, merged elements of dance and theatre to produce innovative intermedial genres and artists: Mummenschanz, Cirque de Soleil, Michael Motion, Complicite, etc.?
- In what ways do forms of Asian and African dance drama exhibit rich dimensions of dance and dancelike movement: Noh (theatre of ghosts), Kabuki, Kathakali, etc.?
- How have puppet theatre practices and the construct of the puppet reflected and refracted human movement in the West and the East?
- How have robot, cyborg (half-human, half-machine), and weapons of war affected movement arts or practices on screen and digital media?
- How practices in theatre intersected with dance or dancelike phenomena: Stanislavsky technique, Meyerhold’s biomechanics, Jerzy Grotowski’s poor theatre, etc.?
- How have hybrid forms of dance/theatre evolved in the 20th and 21stcenturies: dance plays, Tanztheater, etc.
- How have particular choreographers and genres of dance displayed strong linkages with theatre in contrast to approaches emphasizing dance for dance’s sake: e.g., Antony Tudor, Martha Graham, opera-into-ballet, performance art, ballet d’action, etc.?
- How have dance and theatre practices intersected in the American musical theatre to blur the lines between high art and popular forms: Hamilton, Spring Awakening, etc.?