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This Is Where We Dance Now: Covid-19 and the New and Next in Dance Onscreen Published

July 20, 2021

This Is Where We Dance Now: Covid-19 and the New and Next in Dance Onscreen Published

This Is Where We Dance Now: Covid-19 and the New and Next in Dance Onscreen Published

We are thrilled to announce the publication of The International Journal of Screendance vol. 12, This Is Where We Dance Now: Covid-19 and the New and Next in Dance Onscreen

This journal issue is particularly exciting for the OSUDance community, having been guest-edited by current Associate Professor of Dance Harmony Bench with OSU alum and now Assistant Clinical Professor at University of Maryland Alexandra Harlig. Many of the journal contributions were presented at an online symposium they convened in March 2021, with the help of another OSU alum, Lyndsey Vader, for which nearly 300 people registered.

The issue theme arose in part to document and account for how amateur, artistic, and academic communities pivoted to reimagine what it means to practice dance and screendance under pandemic circumstances, when all dance became screendance. A running question of this issue is how well our existing understandings of dance, dance film, and screendance held up under the pressures of a heavily mediated and mediatized pandemic. This issue affirms that there is something both useful and urgent about gathering together the various projects of dance onscreen and considering them alongside each other, in particular to evaluate extant politics, platforms, genres, and norms, while also opening up space to reconsider the values attached to each of these.

Contributions from five continents include articles by L. Archer Porter, Francesca Ferrer-Best, Hetty Blades, Claire Loussouarn, Siobhan Murphy, Callum Anderson, Dara Milovanovic, and Kate Mattingly and Tria Blu Wakpa. Provocations and viewpoints were contributed by Elisa Frasson, Marisa C. Hayes, Marco Longo, Ariadne Mikou, and Katja Vaghi; Catherine Cabeen; Kathryn Logan; Maïko Le Lay; Sandhiya Kalyanasundaram; Elena Benthaus; Rebecca Salzer; Melissa Blanco Borelli and madison moore; Sumedha Bhattacharyya; Diane Busuttil; and Omari ‘Motion’ Carter. The issue also includes interviews between Laura Vriend and Nichole Canuso, and Tsiambwom Akuchu and Alexandra Harlig, and a review by Jo Cork.

This issue introduces roundtables as a print format, featuring edited and condensed forms of the three roundtables presented at our March symposium: TikTok and Short-form Screendance: Before and After Covid, Screendance Festivals and Online Audiences, and After Quarantine: The Future of Screendance. Additionally, full-length videos of these roundtable events are available on both the journal and conference websites.

IJSD is an open access journal, and we encourage you to share and utilize the contents of this issue widely! We thank the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme at The Ohio State University for providing support for this journal issue and symposium, and the OSU Libraries for their continued support of The International Journal of Screendance.

IJSD’s volume 13 will combine an open call with a themed section, Choreographing the Archive: Interfaces Between Screendance & Archival Film Practices, which will be guest-edited by Marisa C. Hayes and Luisa Lazzaro and published in 2022. The call for contributions can be found here.