The annual symposia are at the core of the Society's activities.

Interdisciplinary in nature, the symposia facilitate exchange as they bring together people from different areas of dance research (dance studies, dance practice, dance therapy, dance educationpedagogy) who present their latest research findings. The symposia offer different presentation formats and constantly develop new ones in which participants are invited to join the discussions.

Additional social events complete the symposias' programs and create space for encounters. Since the symposia are often conceptualized and organized in collaboration with other associations and institutions, they initiate and support the creation of productive local networks focusing on dance.

 

Call for Papers:
In turn – Choreographies of Change

Symposium of the Society for Dance Research
Frankfurt am Main & Gießen, 15–17 October 2026

In cooperation with Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts (HfMDK), Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus-Liebig University in Gießen, and the Master Programme of Performative Arts in Social Fields at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences.

In Parable of the Sower (1993), African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler says, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.” The sentence emerges from Earthseed, a fictional belief system developed under conditions of ecological collapse, social violence, and radical inequality, in which change is not a choice but a condition of survival. Rather than a metaphor of mutual influence, the quote names an inescapable reciprocity between action and consequence. During these times of rapid political, social, and economic change, which, under the precarious conditions of late neoliberal capitalism, often mutate into crises, the annual GTF symposium engages with change as a complex and uneven process whose transformative potential is equally entangled with desire and hope, but also with vulnerability, loss, and struggle. At the same time the notion of change profoundly shapes our contemporary experience as individuals and communities and is, in turn, interconnected with our context, ultimately capable of social and political mobilization through unlikely situations, alliances, and cross-disciplinary solidarity. Dance and choreography from this perspective offer a privileged site to explore how change is sensed, negotiated, resisted, and reconfigured through bodies, relations, and material conditions. The title In turn – Choreographies of Change points to a dual perspective: on the one hand, it asks how ongoing transformations choreograph bodies, relations, and temporalities; on the other, it considers how artistic and social choreographies emerge as practices that intervene in, are marked by, and reconfigure these transformations.

The notion of change always involves multiple directions and is linked to transformation and movement, originating in the ancient Greek word metabolē (μεταβολή, ἡ), meaning change or transformation. One initial meaning of the term refers to changes within the body, signifying the exchange of vital substances within a living organism. Another refers to the demise or reversal of movement (as in Plato’s Republic), changes in the form of government (as in Aristotle’s Politics), or migration and military mobilization (Polybius in the Histories). In each of these meanings, movement is contained, whether change is described as the shifting of matter within a living organism or as the movement of constellations within the social or political context.  Equally, the Latin movere points to various forms of movement: on the one hand, physical movement (such as in dance) and, on the other, affective motion and collective mobilization (Brandstetter, Brandl-Risi, van Eikels, 2007). Both terms, metabolē and movere, open a field of tension among body, affect, and society, in which change manifests as a multilayered movement. While these genealogies foreground movement as a central metaphor of change within Western philosophical traditions, they also reveal the limits of universalizing concepts of change. It is also important to rethink change as a historically and politically situated process. Change does not unfold on neutral ground: it is lived differently by differently marked bodies. It can mean emancipation for some and dispossession for others; mobility for some and forced displacement or immobility for others. From this perspective, choreography becomes not only a compositional practice, but also a critical tool for exposing, resisting, and reimagining the regimes of movement that organize contemporary life. Choreography can also be thought as a particular practice where histories of violence, care, resistance, but also hope and desire are inscribed and renegotiated through bodies.

Building on this, this year’s symposium proposes that understanding change in dance be approached aesthetically, socially, and politically, examining the interactions among choreographic processes, social and political contexts, and individual transformation. At the same time from an embodied perspective, change is not only experienced as movement, but also as fatigue, interruption, repetition, care, waiting, and repair. That´s why many dance practices and choreographies can be examined also from the perspective how they engage with the change through the work with memory, repair, opacity, fugitivity, and collective care.

To examine these interactions as potential choreographies of change, the symposium focuses on practices in dance, choreography, embodied practice and social choreography that operate between social, political, embodied, and choreographic processes such as dramaturgy, mediation, pedagogy, social work and production. Because they operate in the in-between space, these practices significantly contribute to movement across different dimensions of change.

Key themes

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

• Choreographies of change: How can a choreographic perspective shed light on the different forms of change and transformation and offer insights into their shaping processes? How can choreographic perspective and practice contribute to societal and political change? How can choreography expose, resist, or reconfigure the uneven and conflictual processes through which change takes place?
• Dramaturgy as practice of social and political mobilization: How can dramaturgy become a tool for social and political transformation? Can it bring together various strands of social practice?
• Movements of collectives: How can we grasp the transitions between the individual and the collective? How is choreography organizing group dynamics? How can bodies and forces be linked into more-than-human agencies?
• Pedagogy: How individual developmental processes unfold between learning, mediating, and ageing in times of rapid change? How do feminist and decolonial pedagogies rethink learning, authority, vulnerability, and embodied knowledge in times of rapid change?
• Institutions in change: How do forms of mediation and cultural institutional contexts respond to societal upheavals and crises caused by transformation? What processes inform institutions as places of openness towards changing times?
• Solidarity infrastructures & DIY production: How to build alternative modes of production that resist extractive, competitive, and precarizing logics? And how are these infrastructures and modes of production embedded in the historical perspectives of resistance, feminism, and decoloniality?

This year’s symposium is conceived as a gathering that brings together various actors and practices. It is situated within the field of dance studies, in proximity to researchers and practitioners from other disciplines, including sociology, Social Work, production, dramaturgy, and activism. Participants are invited to propose academic or artistic presentation formats, including workshops, panels, artistic interventions, or provocations, as they see fit.

EMERGING SCHOLARS FORUM

The symposium will be preceded on the first day (October 15, 2026) by a forum for emerging scholars, which offers researchers in the early stages of their careers the opportunity to present their research in a supportive environment with room for discussion and feedback. Contributions should address a topic from the researcher's own ongoing research and should not exceed 10 minutes for the presentation.

Please submit your work as indicated below and clearly indicate in the title or header that you are proposing your work for the Emerging Scholars Forum.

Submission Guidelines

Presentations (20 min)

Panels (60 min)

Workshops (45–60 min)

Lecture Performances (30 min)

Interventions (20-30 min)

Other formats (max. 60 min)

Conference languages are German and English. Please submit a description of your proposal (max. 200 words) and a short biography (max. 100 words), specifying your preferred presentation format, by 29 April 2026 to:

katja.schneider(at)hfmdk-frankfurt.de

A participation fee applies. Participants will be offered catering during the conference and transport between the venues

References

Aristotle. 1998. Politics. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

Brandstetter, Gabriele, Bettina Brandl-Risi, and Kai van Eikels. 2007. “Übertragungen: Eine Einleitung.” In Schwarm (E)Motion: Bewegung zwischen Affekt und Masse, edited by Gabriele Brandstetter, Bettina Brandl-Risi, and Kai van Eikels, pp. 7–25. Freiburg: Rombach.

Butler, Octavia E. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.

Egert, Gecko. 2016. Berührungen: Bewegung, Relation und Affekt im zeitgenössischen Tanz. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

Plato. 1991. The Republic of Plato. Translated by Allan Bloom. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books.

Polybius. 2010. The Histories. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Organizing team

Prof. Dr. Bojana Kunst, Mila Lanz, Prof. Dr. Sebastian Matthias, Prof. Dr. Katja Schneider

Funded by Hessian Theater Academy

CALL FOR PAPERS