Now What? 

“Dance me that move where I gasp in the arms over reaching ever seeking"
Charles Macdonald 

The original call for this, Issue 10 of The Dancer-Citizen, was a request to look back and to look forward, to consider how over the past 5 years dancer-citizen practices have evolved, expanded, shifted.  Besides the anniversary feeling of a 5-year time frame of work, the instigation for the question was also that most annoying—and futile--of all tasks, The Five-Year Plan.  Frequently requested by funding bodies, beloved in the management literature, a supposed pre-requisite for new arts endeavors.  But…

One of the first lengthy debates we had in founding The Dancer-Citizen was whether we should have open calls for submissions, or themed issues.  Could we, and should we, try to divine where artists’ concerns might lie, whether there were common concerns, whether there were trends that we should be following.  Over these 5 years, we’ve tried various approaches—sometimes calls around a theme, sometimes open calls to gauge our growing community’s moods and concerns.  But…

What we’ve learned over time is that each issue ends up being what the issue should be.  A 5-year plan in the arts is a Potemkin, a sham exercise in a world that wants to morph, wander, evolve and respond.  Somehow, the submissions arrive and a theme begins to announce itself, coalesces, and gathers strength.  Whatever the call—themed, open, whatever—the work has appeared, the theme apparent.  The submissions for Issue 10 showed early to be concerned with the corporeal body, the physical practice, the manner of relating through collaborations with the new (technology) and the old (other life forms): the Undeniability of the Body, in the words of contributor Celeste Miller.  But…

As the closing date for the call approached in March, the pandemic was rolling, communities across the world were closing down, and we were separated from our practices and each other.  As Nadra Assaf reports, her friend (and earlier contributor to The Dancer-Citizen) Heather Harrington said on social media, “Why is it called social distancing?  It is physical distancing…has the body, the real body been taken out of the picture?  It is a physical body near, next to another body.”  We distanced from each other, for our own safety and for that of our communities, in all our various home countries and settings.  But…

We have to consider, once again, what does our work mean?  What do we do now?  Our contributors added to, focused their work:  Celeste Miller, Medicine in Motion:  A partnership; JoAnna Mendl Shaw, Improvisation and the Specificity of the Ask.  Dance gatherings scrambled, and moved online:  Nadra Assaf, Jimmy Bechara, Sarah Fadel, Amelia Youssef, Reinventing IDDFL:  Implementing a Dance Festival in Lebanon during the COVID-19 Lockdown.  Dancers’ rights, quality of life issues, long-standing, emerged with full force:  Melissa Melpignano, For a Different Sense of Time:  Italian Dance Artists and Labor Rights during the Pandemic; Sonia Destri, #ficaemcasa. Long-standing, gut-wrenching inequalities continue, continue, continue unabated, unsolved and unrelenting:  Bernard Brown, Processing Sugar Notes.  Solace is sought and offered:  Candice Salyers, Linnea Blakemore, Ayanna Coleman, Casey Collier, Kaylee Holley, Tarrah Mills, Margaret Pope, Dallas Robinson, Rodarius Washington,  Let Yourself Be Moved:  Raising Compassion for Food Justice through Contemplative Dance Performance; Charles Macdonald,  Dancing Within Never Without.  And, still, the body responds, undeniable indeed:  Clémence Debaig, Bother; Rachel Sweeney, Migrating Gestures:  Body Weather as a cartographic process within interdisciplinary pedagogy.  But…

Now what?

Jane M. Alexandre, PhD
Founding Editor

The Dancer-Citizen May 2020