Choreographic Practices

'Words and Dance'

Intellect - Vol 8 Issue 1.

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We are delighted to bring to your attention the newest issue of Choreographic Practices Vol 8/ No 1 which is available in print and online.

Guest edited by Robert Vesty (Middlesex University), 'Words and Dance' focuses upon the place of words in choreographic practices. The theme was inspired by a week-long event entitled Space and Words for Dancers,  led by dancers/poets Julyen Hamilton (Spain) and Billie Hanne (Belgium) and hosted by Chisenhale Dance Space in London (July, 2015). Reflections upon this event are included in the issue in the form of a creative and multi-voiced collection entitled 'Artefacts'.

Robert Vesty writes in his editorial that:

'This special – Words and Dance – issue of Choreographic Practices... is concerned with not just how words look or sound on the page, stage and elsewhere, but how a dancer’s animate exploration of language can create particular opportunities to crack open words and reveal our playing with them as a deeply contingent and remarkably fleshy affair.

In the context of this issue, words are taken to mean linguistic formulations that usually manifest as spoken, or voiced, in performance. In the instances accounted for across these pages, they materialise in labyrinthine ways - as quotidian speech, as instruction, as mediated, as objects, as affects, as unfinished business (think of the fricative beginnings of a word yet to be fully formed), as-strings-of, as phrases, as sense and non-sense, as and when, and as, for the most part, poetry.'


In line with the ethos of Choreographic Practices we include discursive, creative and artistic materials that each, in their differing ways, investigates and illuminates the theme of the issue.

The full list of articles is as follows: