Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung
Wir schaffen Begegnung!
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.
Symposium of the Society for Dance Research / Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung e.V. (gtf)
Vienna, 25 - 27 September 2025
In cooperation with the Department of Music and Movement Education/Rhythmics and the Artistic Research Center at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw), and the Institute for Theatre, Media, and Popular Culture at the University of Hildesheim.
In his Sociology of World Relations/Weltbeziehungen (2016), Hartmut Rosa develops a concept of “resonance,” arguing that what truly matters in life is the quality of our relationships with the world around us and with other people. These world relations are characterized, on the one hand, by an affective response, an “experience of being touched by something other than oneself, without being dominated or externally defined by it” (2019: 45). On the other hand, they involve a sense of agency, an “ability to reach or affect this other without possessing or controlling it” (ibid.). Against this backdrop, transformations emerge as a process of reciprocal attunement, requiring a willingness to engage with one’s surroundings, to allow oneself to be changed, and to take risks in the process (Rosa 2016: 433). In this context, unavailability means that these transformations remain open, as the autonomy and difference of all participants in these processes must be preserved
Rosa frequently refers to music as a central medium for such sensorial world engagement, through which we become resonating “bodies of sound” within our environment – yet dance rremains largely absent from his discussion. This symposium takes Rosa’s framework as a starting point to ask whether and to what extent resonance is a suitable concept for dance: Are movements not inherently capable of generating sound or connecting with sound, cultivating meaningful relations with the world? How can resonance develop through choreographies or improvisations? If musicking (Small 1998) is an activity that establishes resonant relationships and meanings through sound (Müller-Brozović 2024), should we not also consider movecking – an embodied practice of dance and movement that similarly cultivates resonant relationships? Or does the omission of dance from Rosa’s resonance theory open a space for critical perspectives, challenging the sometimes overly simplified notion of all-encompassing world relations? How, then, can dance deconstruct resonance, and how can artistic world relations be put into motion?
The 2025 gtf symposium, Dance Resonance, invites both theoretically reflective approaches (e.g., from aesthetic, socio-cultural, socio-economic, and ecological perspectives), and explicitly artistic and practice-based research approaches – particularly from the field of artistic research.
Of particular interest will be the Institute for Music and Rhythm (“Bildungsanstalt für Musik und Rhythmus”), originally founded by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and relocated from Hellerau near Dresden to Laxenburg near Vienna 100 years ago (1925). The new leadership placed a strong emphasis on physical education. In 1939, Hellerau-Laxenburg was closed by the Nazi regime. Nevertheless, the institution exerted a lasting ‘resonant’ artistic and pedagogical influence on national and international reform movements and avant-garde dance. In what ways do historical and contemporary socio-cultural and political contexts intersect, and how do they inform artistic inquiry?
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:
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(at)mdw.ac.at
References:
Glissant, Édouard (2019). Philosophie der Weltbeziehung. Poesie der Weite, Heidelberg.
Müller-Brozović, Irena (2024). Das Konzert als Resonanzraum. Resonanzaffine Musikvermittlung durch intensives Erleben und Involviertsein, Bielefeld.
Rosa, Hartmut (2016). Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung, Berlin.
Rosa, Hartmut (2021). Best Account. Skizze einer systematischen Theorie der modernen Gesellschaft,
in: Spätmoderne in der Krise. Was leistet die Gesellschaftstheorie?, ed. Andreas Reckwitz & Hartmut Rosa, Berlin, pp. 151–251.
Sealey, Jenny & Lynch, Carissa Hope (2012). “Graeae: An Aesthetic of Access – (De)Cluttering the Clutter”, in: Identity, Performance, and Technology. Practices of Empowerment and Technicity, ed. Susan Broadhurst & Josephine Machon, Basingstoke, pp. 60–73.
Small, Christopher (1998). Musicking. The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Hanover, N.H.
Saito, Yuriko (2022). Aesthetics of Care. Practice in Everyday Life, London.
Organizing team:
Dominika Cohn, Vera Djemelinskaia, Stephanie Schroedter, Anna Wieczorek