Distance dance as an actor network

As a contribution to the critical and creative discussion regarding definitions and examples of how dance practices are being reimagined in the age of distance, this article focuses on possibilities and challenges with organizing virtual contemporary dance workshops for older adults. The aim of this article is to explore intra-actions within entanglements including older adult amateur dancers, a choreographer, homes, dance studios, the software zoom, devices, music, and dance during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Situations seen as webs of relations including the mentioned actors were created. To be able to describe how the constantly performed intra-active networks of dancers and other material actors were constituted, actor-network theory was applied. The results show specific trajectories that exemplifies intra-actions with the participants. The older adults became dancers that make meaning in their lives, even if the virtual trajectories possible to follow to some extent, are limited by the pandemic cursed distance

Reconstructing dancer identities

The Coronavirus (Covid-19) continues to reshape many lives socially, politically, and economically. Choreographic practice, performance, and those involved in dance are also affected in different ways. This article investigates the research question: How might the event of Covid-19 prompt the transformation of freelance dancers’ identities? Through a qualitative narrative inquiry, three freelance contemporary dancers from Aotearoa/New Zealand were interviewed. From a thematic analysis of the data, the theme of alienation and adaptability were drawn out. This research reveals that the event of Covid-19 has caused freelance dancers to question their identity and precarity within their communities and shifted their position to advance a sense of security. The stories shared by the dancers revealed that industry practices and conditions for freelance contemporary dancers in Aotearoa/New Zealand need redevelopment for greater sustainability, relevance and inclusion, which could pave the way for industry changes to occur post-covid-19.

Performing the Pandemics

Stemming from one creative experience that emerged in London during the lockdown period of early 2020, called the “Emergency Festival”, this article is a result of observations based on practice, centred around the festival that a group of multicultural, interdisciplinary movement-based researchers and dancers created, curated, and participated in. It explores the possibility of making a radical alterity out of a hitherto previously established ideas of territory, time, and community, using performative writing as practice-based analysis scheme. Employing the concept of “communitas” by Victor Turner (1969) to approach the phenomenon of dance through distance, the article examines the importance of the emergence of collaboration as a way forward, epistemologically looking at dance as a method of creating and sustaining communities that are longing for a sense of home in times of change. The writing is divided into three parts, focussing on the aspects of space, time, and community, all the while embedded in the nature of movement and its effect on the practitioners, and onlookers, concluding with contemplation on the place of dance in varied mediums and the way forward to study it in a period of global disruption.

Dancing someone else's movements through someone else’s body

In this article, we will describe the uneven conditions in which dance practices are being extracted and circulated by looking at how online gaming platforms have digitised and commodified human movement. The study of these controversial cases contextualised within the legal aspects of dance copyright are the basis to offer speculative courses for both dance practitioners. The first section explores the issues of digitisation and ownership of bodily movement within virtual spaces by looking at notions of disembodiment and dance as a commodifiable object. The second section illustrates the complexities of copyrighting choreography through a critique on how intellectual property regimes disregard collective and social practices. Finally, we will present alternatives for dance practitioners going forward by looking at how to protect dance as a digital object; the current initiatives to engage dancers with technological affordances; and the decentralising potential of blockchain networks to build new collaborative landscapes for the circulation of creativity.

Editorial: An urgency to (re)imagine dance in the age of distance

This special issue has been motivated by the transformation the world has experienced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Major upheavals and change have occurred in light of this pandemic and there is now a forced reconsideration demanded of what dance is and how dance practitioners, educators, and researchers might continue their work in sustainable, relevant and accessible ways. With such change comes the possibility for dance to be transformed, reconsidered, and reimagined in ways that have implications for meanings, enaction, contexts, communities, practice, education, policy, and application.

From street dance to hip hop

This text historicizes the concept of street dance (dança de rua) by showing distances and approaches in relation to hip hop. For this purpose, the analysis starts from the cultural history of street dance in the city of Uberlândia, Minas Gerais (Brazil), to understand the complex relationships that gave meaning and form to the practice of street dance between the 1980s and 1990s. In a first step, I investigate the various perspectives that permeate the bond between the popular dance and dance festivals, well as between the city neighbourhoods and dance clubs. In a second step, the analysis shifts to the cultural performance that allowed street dancers to migrate to the so-called hip hop dance. Analysing street dance and hip hop considering their ruptures and continuities, the text intends to contribute to studies dedicated to the presence of dance in the construction of urban identities.