Announcing: REWRITE with Dance Art Journal
REWRITE is an editorial series platforming artists to challenge dominant histories and shape new futures in the dance and performance sector.
Chisenhale Dance Space (CDS) and Dance Art Journal (DAJ) have teamed up to commission a series of opinion pieces which draw on perspectives from across our respective communities. Starting from September 2024, we will release an article event month for eight months.
These articles resist contemporary pressures to depoliticise artmaking, and cover a range of topics related to anti-oppressive practices, care, sector politics, and experimental forms of working & creation.
Writing has always been a vital way that the ephemeral artforms of dance and performance are framed and remembered. However the pool of people writing these narratives has historically been narrow. As an artist-led organisation (CDS) and grassroots independent media (DAJ), we align with a lineage of outspoken artists, sharing anti-mainstream takes in the studio, after the show, on solo blogs, artist-led magazines, or in the group chat.
This series seeks to broadcast these conversations to wider audiences, and influence much needed positive change in the sector we love and exist within. Each article will be available to read for free on the DAJ website. We hope you’ll share your thoughts and add to the dialogue!
18th December 2024
How can institutions support trans artists? by Elspeth Wilson
“A dance world steeped in binary organising principles of gender – sitting within a wider world or swinging arts cuts and transphobic rhetoric – presents multiple intersecting problems for trans artists and audiences”
20th November 2024
How Can Artists and Institutions Work Together? by Stella Rousham
“After a decade of austerity slashing public sector arts funding, we are no longer in a world where dance artists can rely on full-time contracts with a single company or institution.”
31st October 2024
Many Moving Parts by Debanjali Biswas
“As a dance artist with experiences of im/migration, I have found that movement for dancers of colour in Britain is an incontrovertible part of a legacy of colonialism and political ecology.”
25th September 2024
Bringing Care Rituals Into Practice by S’ol Jelenke
“Is the dance industry an environment that prioritises care? And if it isn’t, what needs to change?”
dance art journal are a dance magazine that writes about underrepresented dance makers.
Formed of seven writers, they create content that puts independent artists at the forefront; writing reviews, conducting interviews and using their social media channels to support and promote artists’ work. Mainstream publications, with an emphasis on traffic-driven content, rarely connect with the contemporary dance scene that independent dance artists spend their careers working in. DAJ are committed to documenting the whole story, to maximise the reach of independent artists’ work.