The April 2021 issue of Dance Research Journal (DRJ) and this Foreword offer opportunities for looking backward, looking forward, and previewing the scholarship we are publishing in issue 53:1. Issue 53:1 is the first compiled by a new editorial team and under a new editorial structure. In January 2021, we became Executive Co-Editors of DRJ and assembled an editorial team including Editorial Assistants Katie Skinner and Michael Landez. We are happy to be working alongside Dr. Stacey Prickett, Reviews Editor. During this transition period, we have been consulting with each other regularly and finding ways of making decisions collaboratively ranging from daily operations, to editorial work, to visioning, while, at the same time, delegating specialized editorial labor and responsibilities so that we can cover more ground as a team. As the labor we have undertaken is considerable, and in large part invisible, we would like to take this opportunity to recognize and express deep and immense gratitude to each member of our editorial team for dedicating their time, effort, and care to our shared project of developing scholarship and advancing knowledge in dance studies.
We would also like to take this opportunity to express appreciation to Dr. Helen Thomas, former DRJ Editor-in-Chief, who completed her term at the end of 2020. Serving as Associate Editor during 2020, Rebekah had the distinct opportunity to witness Helen's work up close and the honor of working alongside her. Simply put, we have Helen and her editorial team, including former Editorial Assistant Clare Thomas-Powell, to thank heartily for the issues of the journal published under Helen's three-year tenure. We would like to recognize Dr. Thomas's tireless and primarily behind-the-scenes efforts to bring these volumes to fruition, including the sustained labor of managing the daily operations of the journal, mentoring the work of emerging scholars to successful publication, and carefully stewarding two special issues: Work With(Out) Boundaries: Precarity and Dance (Vol. 51: 1), co-edited by Katharina Pewny, Annelies Van Assche, Simon Leenknegt, and Rebekah J. Kowal; and In and Out of Norden: Dance and the Migratory Condition (Vol. 52: 1), co-edited by Inger Damsholt and Petri Hoppu. Throughout her term as Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Thomas furthered the mission of DRJ in developing and publishing outstanding contributions to dance research and knowledge in dance studies.
In accepting our new executive editorial roles, we commit to supporting the journal's mission and role as a leading platform for the development and dissemination of scholarly research in dance studies. At the same time, we commit to leveraging our and its resources in furthering the decolonizing missions of the Dance Studies Association, recognizing this ongoing work as integral to the journal's commitment to advancing knowledge in the field of dance studies. In particular, our goal is to align our work with anti-racism values, translating into meaningful and concrete actions our investment in dismantling white supremacism and anti-Black racism.
This work includes reflecting on how DRJ serves the field as a platform for the development and dissemination of research in dance studies and how we can best turn our attention and efforts toward growing the field through mentorship of authors at every stage of the process. It also includes collaborating with DSA membership and leadership, our editorial and advisory boards, and other stakeholders, such as the scholars, students, and artists we serve, to expand our vision of the kinds of scholarly work DRJ helps develop and ways of supporting a wider range of dance research scholars. We plan on expanding the diversity of voices involved in the visioning and publication of DRJ, including a greater number of underrepresented scholars in all facets of decision-making regarding the journal. And we are dedicated to centering BIPOC, global majority, anti-racist, queer, and other historically oppressed perspectives within the editorial and peer-review process by increasing the diversity of our pool of reviewers, securing culturally-situated subject-matter experts whenever possible, factoring underrepresentation into the selection and assignment process, and prioritizing social justice and inclusion in securing editors of special issues and special issue concepts. In all of these ways, the journal can and will participate in coalitional and collective dialoging, imagining, thinking, and doing in our editorial and publishing practices. In doing so, we will remain enlivened by and attentive to social justice work as it arises, focused on what we can do to make changes for the better and for the benefit of more stakeholders in our field.
Along these lines, we are excited to announce three upcoming special issues that engage with social justice and anti-racism concerns including:
○ Arms Akimbo: Black Women Choreographing Social Change, edited by Nadine George-Graves. This issue will be published in August 2021, as we are experiencing the anniversary of George Floyd's murder and the subsequent renewed global demands for racial reckonings. As a part of that moment, this issue will challenge us to think more deeply about race and gender, Black female subjectivity, and our demands, expectations, and assumptions about gendered Black bodies (and people) in dance practices.
○ Queering Dance Modernism: Sexuality and Race on Stage, edited by Lucia Ruprecht and Eike Wittrock. Slated for publication in 2022, this issue will examine the productive confluence of dance studies, queer theory, and critical race studies in re-engagements with modernist performance.
○ Assembly, Gathering, Being with Dance, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz, Jasmine E. Johnson, and Eric Mullis. Projected for publication in late 2022 or early 2023, this issue will investigate the “processes and politics of gathering” and the ways in which “being together is diversely experienced.”
These special issues will allow us all to dive deeply into vital current research areas while our regular issues will allow us to look broadly at the full scope of dance studies. We begin our part of this important work with this issue and look forward to continuing to help advance dance research.
This issue features articles that advance knowledge in dance studies in several important ways including questions around ownership and authorship, and how to account for and problematize legacies of movement, scholarly practices, and avenues of embodied transmission and transcription. Each article centers around questions of situatedness, both epistemological and also with respect to each author's relationship to the bodies and/or embodied ontologies at issue. All of the articles, in one way or another, view the body and bodies as sites of cultural struggle and change.
The issue begins with Mai Misaki's “Colonial Rupture and Native Continuity in Indigenous Cultural Representations: Through Hawaiian Ancient Dance Kahiko,” which investigates the historical and cultural genesis of an intergenerational controversy over the resurgence of the practice of hula kahiko, one of the two main genres of hula, among a “new generation of kahiko dancers.” Leveraging ethnographic research based in part on interviews and engagement with Native Hawaiian female kuma hula elders representing resistance to the resurgence of hula kahiko, Misaki's article examines hula kahiko as an embodied site of “apparent rupture and unbroken continuity” of Indigenous dance traditions under pressures of colonialism then and now. Acknowledging both the kuma hula elders’ questions regarding the authenticity of the novel approaches to kahiko, and also the ways those approaches represent cultural resilience and change, Misaki underlines the importance of recognizing diversity among hula practitioners as well as with respect to their embodied expressions, all of which “resul[t] from colonial oppression of the tradition [and] support contemporary constructions of Indigenous cultural heritage.”
Dotun Ayobade's article, “Invented Dances, Or, How Nigerian Musicians Sculpt the Body Politic,” centers on the ways that “scriptive prompts” in Nigerian popular music “elicit specific moved responses from dispersed, heterogeneous and transnational publics,” what Ayobade calls, “invented dances.” Taking for example popular social dances such as Open & Close (Fela Kuti 1971), Shoki (Lil Kesh 2014), and Shaku Shaku (Olamide 2017), Ayobade illuminates “how collectivized movement can convene real and virtual communities with an intensity that animates Nigerian youth culture.” More than “fads,” these phenomenal conjunctions between music and dance “underscore popular culture as a terrain of struggle, a field in which artists and their listeners shuffle around within normative structure to contest or concede, via embodied means, the scope and meaning of culture.”
In “Cautionary Contours: Joann Kealiinohomoku's Silhougraphs® and Dance Analysis in Black and White,” Judith Hamera deploys anthropologists Jonathan Rosa's and Vanessa Díaz's concept of raciontology to reckon with an “analytical tool” developed and trademarked by dance ethnographer Joann Wheeler Kealiinohomoku that she called “Silhougraphs.” Intended to facilitate the cross-cultural study of dance as “contoured space,” these were silhouetted images Kealiinohomoku produced by “meticulously tracing photographs of dancers in multiple genres”; they served as stand ins for “shape and space,” or what were considered at the time to be primary elements of dance analysis. Hamera, by contrast, sees Silhougraphs in terms of “racianalysis,” a “legible exampl[e] of the ways racialized figurations and histories can unintentionally circulate in US, white, liberal, antiracist scholarship,” and thus a “cautionary tale” in illustrating how “racially overdetermined figural and methodological genealogies of the silhouette that compromised Kealiinohomoku's relativist commitments against her intent.”
K.E. Gover's article, “‘You stole my work! And you stole it poorly!’ Choreography, Copyright, and the Problem of Inexpert Iterations,” offers a fresh take on questions concerning plagiarism and copyright infringement of choreographic works and poses challenges to prevailing wisdom that dance is an awkward fit within the existing copyright framework. Stemming from the conundrum indicated in her title, Gover teases out differences between “ownership” claims and “unauthorized use” as they have or could apply to the “copyright regime” for dances. She asks, “How do we separate what counts as essential to the choreographic work from the adventitious features of a given performance, instantiate by a particular body or bodies, at a particular moment in time?” The answer is to consider an entwinement of “interests,” both economic (ownership) and non-economic (reputational), as forms of “wealth” accrued in acts of making and performing dances, in an understanding that “one may claim authorship over a movement sequence even if the execution in a given instance is artistically unsatisfactory.”
