Dance Objects

Dear Colleagues,

What are dance objects? What can we learn from them about dance, its socio-material relations, and even objecthood itself? Dance is often conceptualized as resisting objectification, as emphasizing instead lived experience, movement, and event. Fraleigh, for example, suggests that “the dance begins and ends in lived time and immediate perception” and “leaves nothing concrete—as object—behind” (1987, 48). Yet there is a range of objects and kinds of objects involved in and generated by dance practices:

• Material objects manipulated or worn by dancers and audience members (e.g., scenographic objects, props, costumes, fashion, accessories, etc.);
• Pictorial, sonic, and other representational objects that depict or capture dance and dances (e.g., drawings/paintings, photos, notation scores, and films);
• Digital objects (e.g., video files, moving and still digital images, motion capture and other types of dance data, and dance as algorithmic/generative objects);
• Fictional objects (e.g., dance imaginaries, fictional worlds, fantasies, esoterica, and utopian conceptualizations);
• Ephemera and fetish objects (e.g., postcards, posters, fan-made and dance collectibles, etc.);
• Sensual objects or affective immaterial entities, produced through different participants’ interactions with dance performance events.

We might also think of dances as objects, as, for example:

• Repeatable patterns or sequences of movement (dances or works as distinct from their performances);
• The acts of dancing or dance discrete events, products of labor, and types of dialectical–relational objects;
• Abstract or fictional objects (e.g., pure or indicated types, norm-kinds, and non-existent things);
• Commodities with exchange value on the theater marketplace;
• Choreographic objects, i.e., expressions of choreography’s principles without the body (Forsythe 2011).

In this Special Issue we are interested in what we can learn from dance objects through their social and material relations/conditions, as well as what we can learn about dance objects’ ontologies as divergent entities. How are dance’s “objects active within social and pre-social practices” (Caroll et al. 2020, 7)? What is the phenomenology of interaction with them? What affects development in and through them? And what if we decentre the human and think instead about the objects’ inanimate poetics and patterns of “vicarious causation” (Harman 2007, 190)?

Perspectives (and combinations of perspectives) from a range of disciplines might be relevant to elucidating such questions, including epistemologies of the Global South and views from the peripheries of dominant knowledge production. Relevant disciplines and fields include (but are not limited to): dance and performance studies, audience studies (including fandom), visual cultures, digital humanities, material culture, philosophy of art, performance philosophy, dialectical materialism, social ontology, phenomenology, object-oriented ontology, and actor–network theory.

We invite articles on any of the above themes as well as other topics critically examining dance objects, objecthood and objectification, in senses already understood or yet to be imagined.

Dr. Tamara Tomic-Vajagic
Dr. Anna Pakes
Guest Editors

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• dance objects
• ontology
• materialism
• visual culture
• commodity
• ephemera