The Future Unfolds:  losing our footing, seeking our balance, finding our stride?

With this issue of The Dancer-Citizen, it seems as if the future begins to unfold once more.  Were we on hold, suspended in isolation and in time…focusing on—what?

Whatever one can make of the current moment, it feels that the world is accelerating and turbulent, uncomfortable and uneasy at every level.  Searching for our footing, seeking our balance, we return once again to the concept of dancer-citizen: originating with “an understanding of the obligation we hold to seek and develop solutions for the challenges facing the communities in which we live and work”, exploring ideas and engaging in the world through movement. 

The call for Issue 13 asked for work engaged in this moment: protesting inequity, examining embodied memory, understanding trauma that will surely appear or has appeared in our communities and bodies, seeking to repair, reaching for joy, speaking of anger, solitary or calling on new or old alliances—wherever the work of the last year(s) has led.

Contributors to the issue have looked back and engaged with past work; extended and built on previous enquiry; responded and reacted to current and continuing wounds; and, finally, are reaching forward into the always-uncertain future.

Tentative, certainly; out of balance, probably.  But moving, forward.

Jane M. Alexandre, PhD.
Founding Editor

The Dancer-Citizen November 2021