Vol. 6 No. 2 (2020): Decentering Dance Research

The purpose is to carry out a work of decentralization of dance studies which allows different reflection instances, based on the diagnosis that the practices of academic and artistic research still participate in the construction and maintenance of discourses that invest in the separation between "center' and "periphery, linked to eurocentric and american-centric assumptions. Therefore, it’s necessary to stop operating from the logic that adopts universalizing understanding of "dance history". It isn’t a simple task, especially as long as the hegemonic narratives aren’t destabilized: Is it possible to decentralize dance studies and practices that problematize this condition? The decentralization we seek is projected at different levels: historiographical, ethnographic, gender, racial, class, aesthetic, kinesthetic, choreographic, cultural, political, economic and social. Through this dossier, we’d like to contribute to the establishment of a general movement that encourages critical reflection in dance studies, as well as, that promotes an attentive investigation of the exchanges, circulation and power relations that condition dance and research practices.

Our objective is to favor an extension of dance corpus research, taking as reference the recent works on: cultural exchanges, post-colonial e decolonial studies; but also an exploration of the tension sites existing in the field. It’ll then be a movement to decentralize the look on dances, to decentrealing legitimizing stories, to decentralize institutional conditioning and decentralize ourselves as subjects of knowledge. We propose decentralization as a research exercise that favors the knowledge emergence and exploring the potential of dance research. In addition to its multiple and possible definitions, we understand decentralization as a critical practice and procedure in constant motion.