The Interdisciplinary Book Series: Dance in Dialogue

Bloomsbury Academic

The Interdisciplinary Books Series Dance in Dialogue critically examines the relations between Performance, Dance, and other disciplines. It fosters interdisciplinary approaches, cross-disciplinary exchanges, and conversation as a mode of knowledge production. The series aims to offer new ways of interrogating the relation of performance and dance to other disciplines and to the political, cultural, social, and economic issues and contexts in and in relation to they are created, presented, and theorised. 

We seek to challenge the ways in which scholarship has been traditionally represented and disseminated, critically explore the dialogical relationship between theory and practice, and foster the ethos of collaboration, dialogue, and political engagement that is needed for vibrant knowledge production within and outside of academia. We encourage experimentation in publication format and research developed through innovative forms of collaborative and collective working across different modes of disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiry and dissemination. 

To realise this vision, the series offers two distinct publication formats via two strands:   

In Conversation

A collection of short books that present radical thinking emerging from curated conversations between the body(ies) / performance / dance / choreography and another discipline, area of research, field of knowledge or practice on topical artistic, cultural, and political issues. Written by leading thinkers (artists and scholars) who critically explore the insights the different areas of knowledge and practice offer into one another, as well as the affordances, potentials, and implications of these insights for the contemporary world, these approximately 40,000-word books typically develop out of international conversation events and are published within approximately a year after them. 

Moving forward

A collection of cutting-edge and forward-thinking, full-length monographs and edited collections that challenge understandings of the body(ies) / performance / dance / choreography and its (their) relation to political, cultural, and socioeconomic issues and contexts, foster dialogue and interdisciplinarity, and critically explore the relationship between theory and practice.

Other titles in the Series

In Conversation titles:

Performance, Dance and Political Economy: Bodies at the End of the World By Katerina Paramana and Anita Gonzalez (eds.)

Dance, Architecture and Engineering By Adesola Akinleye

Moving Forward titles:

The Choreopolitics of Alain Platel’s Les Ballets C de la B: Emotions, Gestures, Politics By Christel Stalpaert, Guy Cools and Hildegard De Vuyst (Eds.)

FALLING through dance and life By Emilyn Claid

Advisory Board

Maaike Bleeker
is a professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of

Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance. Received 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award, Dance Studies Association. Believes in our shared capacity to do better, and to engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. Consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and voice-over for permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016. Books: Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004); Black Performance Theory, with Anita Gonzalez (2014), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion; with Philipa Rothfield (2016); Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft (2018). Creative: Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker, January, 2017. Recent teaching: University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; Lion’s Jaw Festival; Movement Research MELT; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, University of Nice. In 2013, working with Takiyah Nur Amin, founded the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 300 researchers. Expertises: Black expressive cultures and their impacts on everyday life.  slippage.org.

Susan Jones is Professor of English Literature and Fellow of St Hilda’s College. She has published widely on Joseph Conrad (including Conrad and Women for Oxford UP), nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s writing, the periodical press, and modernism. Formerly a soloist with the Scottish Ballet, Glasgow, she also writes on the history and aesthetics of dance. She is founder and director of Dance Scholarship Oxford (http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/dansox) and author of Literature, Modernism, and Dance (Oxford University Press, 2013). She was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship 2017-18 to write a book on Samuel Beckett and choreography.

Alexandra Kolb is Professor of Dance at the University of Roehampton. She was previously Reader at Middlesex University (2012-2017), Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Dance programme at the University of Otago in New Zealand (2006-2012), and Coordinator of Academic Studies at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance (2005-2006). Following her doctoral studies at Cambridge University, she also worked in academic publishing in the fields of dance and music for a short time. She is the author of Performing Femininity: Dance and Literature in German Modernism (2009) and many scholarly articles, and the editor of Dance and Politics (2011). She is a recent recipient of the Marlis Thiersch Prize (2017), the Gertrude Lippincott Award (2014), a British Academy/Leverhulme Grant (2015), and a Harry Ransom Fellowship (2013/2014). She is Research Degrees Convenor at Roehampton, Reviews Editor for Dance Research, and has served on the Executive Committee of the SDR since 2013.

Books in Series 

This dance belongs to the world and the world belongs to everybody.’

This motto reveals the deep social and political commitment Alain Platel developed within the unique choreographic oeuvre of les ballets C de la B. Founded in 1984, it has become a company that enjoys huge international success.

Through the four topics of dramaturgies, emotions, gestures and politics, this book unravels the choreopolitics of Platel’s les ballets C de la B. His choreopolitics travel beyond conveying a political message; rather than defending one opinion, Platel is more concerned about the exposure of the complexity within the debate itself.

Highly respected scholars from a variety of fields contribute to this book to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the intense emotions, damaged narratives and precarious bodies in Platel’s choreographic works.

More Coming soon

How to submit a proposal 

To submit a book proposal, please download the appropriate Word form for either the In Conversation or the Moving Forward strand of the series. After completing the form, please email it to danceindialogueseries@gmail.com.