University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna | Cfp: Dance Resonance - Artistic Attunement in Motion

Symposium of the Society for Dance Research/Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung e.V. (gtf), Vienna, 25–27 September 2025

Key themes

We invite submissions exploring the following topics, along with other relevant perspectives:

• Resonance as a multisensory concept: How does the body relate to the surrounding world through different senses? How does this challenge the perceived dominance of specific senses? What connections can be drawn to inclusive artistic practices and the Aesthetics of Access (Sealey 2012)? How might aesthetic experience intersect with practices of care – as proposed by Yuriko Saito (2022)?
• Resonance as a communal concept: How has community been constructed through (embodied) world relations? What political implications are embedded in the act of bodies relating to one another? What forms and examples exist in (post)modern and contemporary dance, and how do they relate to participation and mediation?
• Historical resonances: How have dance, movement and/or music – such as Jaques-Dalcroze’s rhythmics or similar practices – been used to create meaningful world relations with lasting resonance? What cultural techniques were employed in the 1920s and 1930s to counteract the perceived “alienation” of the body? What resonant movements are being proposed today to sustain or restore meaningful world relations? How can Rosa’s resonance concept be critically re-evaluated in this context?
• Ecology: Resonance theory situates human subjects in relation to their surroundings and explicitly opposes a purely resource-oriented approach to the “environment”. This opens possibilities for posthumanist expansions of the concept. The symposium will therefore explore entanglements between the human and non-human within an ecological and planetary-feminist framework (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Margarita Tsomou).
• Queer theory: How does dance as an act of creating relations function as a queer practice? How might a queer inquiry into dance history reveal alternative axes of resonance?
• Postcolonial perspectives: How does resonance manifest from a de/postcolonial perspective, and what critical expansions emerge from it? Are power dynamics and hierarchies implicated in relationality, and how might they be deconstructed? For instance, one could think of Édouard Glissant’s Philosophy of Relation, in which he proclaims a relational “thinking the tremor,” which also manifests in and as resonance (Glissant, 2021: 45).

Submission guidelines

The organizing team welcomes submissions in various formats:

• Presentations (20 min)
• Panels (60 min)
• Workshops (45–60 min)
• Lecture Demonstrations (30 min)
• Lecture Performances (30 min)
• Poster presentations

Conference languages are German and English. Please submit a description of your proposal (max. 3,000 characters, including spaces) and a short biography (max. 500 characters, including spaces), specifying your preferred presentation format, by 30 April 2025 to: resonanz@mdw.ac.at.