Dear Dancer-Citizen Readers and Contributors,

With this, our twentieth issue, we celebrate ten years of The Dancer-Citizen. Thanks to all of you, we have published an array of works that collectively speak to the landscape and textures of dancer-citizenship from where you situate yourselves in the world, in your communities, and in your practices. You have helped us shape what has grown to become an invaluable collection of scholarly work in the forms of written articles and essays, videos, photographs, oral history interviews, poems, and more! 

In this issue, our contributors uphold an ethic of sensorial empathy, inquiry, and purpose. In “Choreography of Perception: Learning from Children’s Embodied Wisdom,” Valerie Ifill describes the inquisitive wonderment and “sensory immediacy” of children and the choreographic possibility it generates. Sasha Donovan-Anns offers an exploration of 18th-century dance notation as a generative “index of feeling” in her work, “When the Boundary of the Body Moves: an analysis of John Essex’ dance notation of ‘Trip to the Jubilee.’”  In her poem, “We Drink the Beauty of the World,” Lisa Green-Cudek recounts an “invasive and psychologically violent” encounter that prompts a powerful reflection on the ever-urgent relationship between values, embodiment, community, and resistance. And Lauren Neefe invites us into her participatory performance centering a sound of feeling as an investigation of emplacement, power, and privilege in “The Feel Phoneme: One Sound in Three Acts.”

Ifill, Donovan-Anns, Green-Cudek, and Neefe join over 90 contributors from all over the world who have helped us map an expansive landscape of dancer-citizenship from wherever we each are situated: geographically, culturally, and politically. Together, we have created an archive of meaning rooted in the experiences, perspectives, histories, and dreams of those who place queries of dancer-citizenship at the center of their creative practice, scholarship, and everyday lives. We are grateful to you, our contributors and readers, for keeping this work going, for growing the archive, and for reminding us of the vital need to read, write, and feel the possibilities of dancer-citizenship. 

This issue marks a turning point for The Dancer-Citizen. For the past ten years, this journal has been entirely run by a very small but mighty team without institutional or financial support. We are looking to restructure The Dancer-Citizen in a way that is sustainable and more able to withstand the pressures and obstacles of this political moment now and well into the future. Like many, we realize that this is a time to lean into community, and so we have hosted several community chats with past contributors to seek insights, resources, and suggestions. The ideas shared, the resources compiled, and particularly the ways in which people have volunteered their time, energy, and skills to help move us into the future have inspired and restored us - we are grateful!! Now more than ever, we need platforms that center the voices of people like you who claim and uplift bodily knowledge as a tool for inquiry, connection, and change. Please stay tuned and follow along as we explore new strategies to share your works with the world.

If you have questions, would like to offer suggestions, or volunteer time and/or resources, please reach out to info@dancercitizen.org

With gratitude,

Julie B. Johnson, PhD.
Co-Founder/Consulting Editor

The Dancer-Citizen December 2025