April 29 Special Edition for International Dance Day

Re-position

Returning the gaze to the dancer

Dance is not only what appears under stage light.

It is also what the body remembers, what time leaves behind, what discipline reshapes, what longing survives, and what life continues to carry long after performance ends.

For this special call, we want to shift the focus.

Away from spectacle alone. Away from applause as the only measure. Away from the finished image of dance as something polished, distant, and complete.

Instead, we want to look again at the dancer as a human being.

At the body behind the performance. At memory, pain, devotion, fatigue, tenderness, contradiction, humor, survival, and daily life. At what remains when the curtain falls, and at what was always there before it rose.

On April 29, International Dance Day, ELSEHERE invites submissions for Re-position, a special open call dedicated to dance as lived experience, embodied memory, and human presence.

We welcome works that move beyond performance alone and reveal the interior, relational, and often unseen realities of dance.

Themes

1. Still Remember

The dancer’s body is never a perfect, untouched instrument. It is a site of repetition, endurance, adaptation, injury, discipline, and return. It carries what training has carved into it, what performance has taken from it, and what the will to continue has refused to let go of.

Even when opportunities are lost, even when the body is pushed beyond what should be asked of it, even when fear and hope coexist in unbearable proximity, something remains. The body still remembers.

For this theme, we are especially interested in works that engage:

• injury, scars, and physical aftermath

• recovery, rehabilitation, and altered relationships to movement

• the emotional and psychological cost of training and performance

• the body as witness to ambition, discipline, sacrifice, and survival

Your submission may focus on a single wound, a specific recovery period, a long-term bodily consequence, or a moment when your relationship to dance changed through pain, exhaustion, or persistence.

2. Dedicate To:

Dance can also be an offering.

It can be made for someone, toward someone, in memory of someone, or in relation to something that cannot be easily spoken through ordinary language.

A dance may be dedicated to a person, a relationship, a grief, a place, an ancestor, a friend, a teacher, a lost future, a political horizon, or an abstract force that continues to shape one’s life. To remember why one turns to dance, and where one hopes that dance might arrive, matters just as much as the work itself.

For this theme, we are especially interested in works that:

• are made as an offering, tribute, or act of address

• hold a clear emotional or conceptual direction

• reflect on the inner process of the choreographer or performer

• name the intended recipient, whether literal or symbolic

Please clearly identify who or what the work is dedicated to as part of your submission.

3. Beyond the Wings

When the music stops, the lights go out, and the audience leaves, dancers return to another self. Not a lesser self, but a fuller one. The person who cooks, waits, jokes, grieves, commutes, obsesses, repairs, scrolls, cares for others, hides, dreams, and survives.

We are interested in the dancer outside the role. Outside performance. Outside idealization. We want to see the habits, interests, contradictions, skills, routines, and private textures that make a dancer singular, and that quietly shape what becomes visible onstage.

For this theme, we welcome works that explore:

• daily life outside dance

• the relationship between profession, selfhood, and survival

• hobbies, rituals, side lives, hidden skills, private habits, and personal texture

• the part of the dancer that remains unseen, unperformed, or unrecognized

This theme may be documentary, intimate, humorous, observational, poetic, or sharply personal.

Submission Formats

We welcome cross-media responses.

Submissions may be visual, textual, choreographic, documentary, conceptual, or hybrid in form.

Multimedia Submissions

Each submission must include a short written description of no more than 200 words.

Eligible formats include:

• dance works

• moving image works

• improvisational documentation

• previously created works that meaningfully respond to one of the themes above

• newly created dance films, ideally 3–10 minutes

• photographic works, 1–9 images

• static digital works, including drawings, posters, visual studies, or graphic pieces, 1–9 images

Where applicable, we strongly encourage English and Chinese subtitles.

Written Submissions

Up to 1000 words

Eligible formats include:

• short essays

• short prose texts

• poems

• choreographic concepts

• project notes

• reflective fragments

• proposals connected to one of the themes above

We welcome writing that is direct, lyrical, conceptual, documentary, intimate, or formally experimental, as long as it remains clear and intentional.

Submission Guidelines

Please include the following with your submission:

• selected themeStill Remember / Dedicate To: / Beyond the Wings

• title of the work

• name of the creator or contributors

• short written description if submitting multimedia work

Who Can Submit

We welcome submissions from:

• dancers

• choreographers

• filmmakers

• photographers

• writers

• designers

• interdisciplinary artists

• researchers

• non-dancers responding from an outside perspective

Both professional and non-professional creators are welcome.

We are especially open to works that move across disciplines and resist fixed categories.

What We Are Looking For

We are not only looking for polished performance documents.

We are looking for works with interiority, specificity, and stakes.

Works that reveal something real.

Works that understand the body not only as image, but as memory, labor, relation, contradiction, archive, offering, and evidence.

We are especially drawn to submissions that:

• carry a strong point of view

• remain formally clear, even when intimate or experimental

• deepen rather than decorate their subject

• move beyond surface representation

• bring the dancer, or the body in relation to dance, back into focus

Why This Call

Because dance is too often reduced to visibility.

To virtuosity.

To performance at the moment of its completion.

We want to make space for something else.

For the body that remembers.

For the work that is dedicated.

For the life that exists beyond rehearsal and beyond the stage.

This call is an invitation to return to the human center of dance.