2024 Editorial Section
Complexities and Challenges in (Re)-Searching Dance
Akhila, Debanjali, Rajaram, Urmimala
In August 2009, upon the invitation of Lubna Marium the Director of Shadhona, two dance practitioners from India conducted a week-long workshop with practitioners of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Titled Naach Khunji, or Searching for Dance, it was led by Urmimala Sarkar Munsi and Debanjali Biswas who were then affiliated with the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Following World Dance Alliance’s model and ethos of discovering dance at the intersections of training, creativity, lived experience, imagination, the workshop encouraged the participants to explore how to expand movements from a kernel of an idea to an ensemble choreography. The dance community of Dhaka chased the many meanings of contemporary dance and what can be defined and delimited if the ‘contemporary’ is analysed in the diverse cultural context of Bangladesh.
The dancers arrived with a variety of processes, training methods and pedagogical vocabulary. They were asked to challenge what their bodies and minds were familiar with, to search anew. The week ended in a showcase and a day-long seminar. All performers and discussants exchanged opinions on reworking received cultural forms while staging. While the workshop found that articulating a pluriverse of movements came more naturally, beginning to write with an aim to share scholarly and practice-based writings seemed more challenging. The in-depth conversation with young minds of Dhaka soon evolved into building a space where dance scholarship would be with care for those seeking anew.
Soon after, the Journal for Emerging Dance Scholarship (JEDS) was launched to rise to the urgent need of creating a space for new and emerging scholarship in dance studies. It was also a way to encourage scholarship from writers who did not feel comfortable writing in English. Lack of mentorship in for non-English speaking scholars from Europe, Latin Americas, South Asia, South East Asia and East Asia countries, and the Arab world still remain outside our ambition to a large extent. JEDS attempts to address the uneasiness of their first foray into the academic world, buy encouraging young scholars to submit essays to JEDS in English or any other language.
One of the other ideas was to create a space for learning and growing in career by becoming a guest editor of the journal. That has been a success in the past years. The guest editors who volunteer, are younger scholars who often struggle to balance time and responsibility as they are in a vulnerable space as an early career having joined a new academic institution, are post-doctoral scholars, are writing up their PhD thesis, or are in shifting spaces. Their editorial stint is normally between 2-3 years, and they learn alongside the authors navigating directions and specialisations towards their futures. They leave their mark on JEDS, as well as the emerging
scholarship they have steered towards publication.
What is also important for this journal is to abide by ethical scholarship, and to encourage acknowledging and writing from various cultures and different traditions of writing. We also try to evaluate scholarship on ways of writing that are not reflective of Euro-American scholarship criterions which tends to dominate as the style of writing in many peer-reviewed publications so far.
Reimagining the Terrain: Futures of Dance Scholarship.
What does it mean to create space—not just offer it—for those who have never been inside the room?
As we look toward the future of dance studies, we must think beyond existing models of scholarship and institutional frameworks. The challenge is not only to invite new voices, but to reimagine the entire ecology in which knowledge is produced, shared, and valued. This involves a deeper negotiation with power, access, and the subtle hierarchies that persist even in well-intentioned spaces.
We must ask: What does a journal look like when its form is shaped by those who have historically written with gestures rather than grammar? How do we create editorial practices that are not simply about selecting and refining, but about listening and co-learning?
To move forward, we must hold space for methods that may appear informal, hybrid, oral, or embodied. We need to embrace writing that is not yet polished, voices that are uncertain but urgent, and perspectives that sit outside the frame of what is often called "rigorous" or "peer-reviewed." Rigour, after all, is not always loud—it can be quiet, intergenerational, or even whispered across time and place.
The terrain of dance studies will only expand if we are willing to let go of the fixed pathways that define who contributes and how. For many, the first barrier is not language alone—it is the silent architecture of exclusion: a lack of access to institutional libraries, to supportive peer communities, to time, funding, or even the psychological permission to imagine oneself as a scholar.
Inclusion is not a sentiment—it is a structure. If we truly want to centre unheard voices, we must build support systems that make participation possible. This means investing in translation—not just of language, but of context. It means creating mentorship opportunities that are reciprocal rather than extractive. It means asking whether our platforms are reaching the people we claim to include—or whether they still exist behind invisible thresholds of access.
Access is not solved by open calls alone. It requires intentional outreach, flexible formats, and a rethinking of what counts as “finished” work. It means making room for hesitation, for partial articulation, for the knowledge that arrives through dance, breath, ritual, or community—long before it becomes theory. We do not simply need more writing. We need deeper attentiveness—to where that writing comes from, what it risks, and what it hopes to preserve or provoke.
Dance studies is not a settled field. It is a moving body, and we are responsible for making sure that its momentum does not flatten complexity, but rather opens us toward nuance, ambiguity, and a broader spectrum of participation. Inclusion and access must not be treated as themes, but as foundations. As we reimagine the space of dance scholarship, let us remain committed to the delicate, often difficult work of making room for new knowledge—and new nuances.
JEDS 2024
Across five essays, scholars contextualise their sustained study of dance with references to the dancing body as a site of knowledge, creating metaphors and signalling resistance. Dahye Lee examines the transmission of Korea’s traditional dance as intangible material from body to within the frame of “corporeal translation”. Paavni Dhanjal’s paper delves into the idea of aesthetic citizenship through the works of three Asian choreographers which challenge conventional norms associated with hyper-nationalist identities in India, United Kingdom, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. Kristina Luna Dolinina probes the scope of neoclassical North Indian Kathak dance in India, Lithuania, and around the globe while aiming to balance authenticity with shifting boundaries of practice and choreography. Yukina Sato writes about choreography and collaborative embodiment research examining the burden of representing the Japanese female body on stage and in the USA. Masoom Parmar, the author of this issue’s invited essay, muses on Sufi mystics and storytellers whose practice have inspired and have been obscured in the history of Kathak. These articles consider a breadth of aesthetic notions and cultural politics surrounding the performance and reception of dance of Asia.
To reiterate, JEDS is an annual double-blind peer reviewed online journal which is active for more than a decade now, the journal’s first set of articles were published on 2013 in an online platform with the initiation of World Dance Alliance-America and the support of Texas Women’s University. During COVID pandemic, the website struggled to survive and suffered a great loss to all of our data. After the pandemic, the journal has independently started hosting a website with the help of World Dance Alliance- Asia Pacific, www.jedsonline.com (ISSN 2309-267X) which annually publishes articles with a focus on dance, movements, performances. Collating issues from 2021 and 2022 together, JEDS continued to cultivate dance scholarship with care.
On behalf of the editorial board, we would like to encourage young scholars once again. Since its first issue, JEDS has held the hands of first-time authors and mentored emerging scholars. We expect more scholars from the Southeast Asian and East Asian countries and from the non-English speaking world to contribute in the coming issues. We share WDA’s ethos of searching for untold and retold danced narratives evoking current and dormant ambitions of being, moving, dancing, co-existing.
On that note, let’s coevolve · cohabit · collaborate.
