In nearly five years of existence, The Dancer-Citizen has considered our work as dancers/ scholars/artists: what we suggest, challenge, define, question and describe. With our 9th issue, the un-themed call for submissions provided conceptions of dancer-citizenship linked to areas of justice and protest; to calls for awareness and even alarm; to questions of how the identity of dancer-citizenship means we instruct, learn, interrogate, and expose what is happening around us.
We choreograph dissent: Rachel Carrico, with five Reed College undergraduate students demonstrates individual pathways toward that identity via a site-specific dance; participants finding their own ways, their own physical/voices, their particular concerns.
We challenge convention, expectation, and definition: separate works by Britt Fishel and Amanda Sieradzki each examine gender norms, Fishel in “examining the objectification and animalization of women” and Sieradzki in an interdisciplinary, ethnographic critique of “the American Girl”.
We question—and mourn—our relationship with the natural world: working in Acadia National Park, Candice Salyers is awed and humbled by her surroundings, leading her to challenge “the significance of being human in conjunction with the rest of the living world.”
We explore our living history: Arielle Brown and Black Spatial Matters, with artists in residence Julie B. Johnson and muthi reed, “address and incorporate public histories of slavery and contemporary issues and pursuits of justice and freedom”. Brown has the heart of the matter: “Their expansive approaches to considering Black freedom insist on big welcome for ALL of us. Their arts/works/practices are strategies toward the next-next for ALL of us.”
Finally, we turn to the published works of colleagues engaged with our common issues with reviews of new works by François Matarasso and Anna Halprin offering two very different views of how we work in our wider communities.
Now, we move on to consider where we were when The Dancer-Citizen began: what we were working on, and with whom; how this work has shaped, led to, and continues to inform where we are now. We welcome your responses to Issue 9, and with the call for submissions for Issue 10 upcoming, we invite you to join us as we consider the growing, developing body of work around dancer-citizenship– and look ahead to where it might lead.