photo: ***Time Keeps Moving*** by Kayla Hansen, photo by Julie Lucas, for the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago.

Experiencing Time/Embodying Rhythm Symposium

September 19-20, 2024

Call for Session Proposals

“Rhythm is crucial — we can ride it, hang behind it, get in front of it or go around it. We need to understand the pulse. In African aesthetics, the percussive attack has a snap or a pop to it, the strut or swagger has a beat”

— Dr. Thomas DeFrantz

Call for Session PROPOSALs

We invite practitioners, scholars, educators, students, and enthusiasts to submit session proposals for cyphers, movement sessions, panels, paper presentations, workshops, and more to be considered for the Experiencing Time/Embodying Rhythm Symposium taking place in person September 19-20, 2024 at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago.

There is no denying the presence of rhythm in our everyday. From the imperceptibly tiny to the improbably vast, rhythm plays along an infinite scale as a structure, a construct and interpretation of time, as practice, routine, ritual.

Rhythmic patterns and cadences in movement, music, and language spawn multiple forms and genres and as many ways to perceive them. How it looks isn’t the full story. From the poetic foot to the musical beat to the body’s relationship to pulse and phrasing, rhythm is movement and meaning.

Certain dance forms and bodies are considered more dominant in their relationship to rhythm. Often positioned as an essential attribute of people of color, the choice to make rhythm primary in this Symposium is to raise the question of how do bodies, spaces, places, identities, relationships, and power constructs support it? What corporal geographies subvert it? From the individual to the community, from the simple to the complex, rhythm is the thread.

Rhythmic ingenuity through devising, combining shared space and time, and making connections across different ways of being in the body, are distinctive attributes of the dance curriculum at Columbia College Chicago. For the 2024 Symposium, Co-Curators and Dance Associate Professors Lisa Gonzales and Darrell Jones invite session proposals on rhythm across disciplines. What will multiple vantage points reveal about this phenomenon that saturates everything and everyone?

Dates and Deadlines

· June 17, 2024 — Call for Sessions posted

· August 9, 2024 — Submissions due (grace period through August 12, 2024)

· August 19, 2024 — Notification of acceptance

· September 19-20, 2024 — Symposium

Submit

Format

The program committee welcomes session proposals in several formats outlined below. Alternative formats are welcome. Practitioners, scholars, educators, students, and enthusiasts across all disciplines are encouraged to submit proposals.

Paper presentations (maximum 20 minutes)
Workshops (maximum 40 minutes)
Embodied roundtables, cyphers, or panels, (maximum 1 hour)
Lecture-demonstrations (maximum 1 hour) 
Interdisciplinary and innovative format proposals are highly encouraged.

A $150 honorarium will be provided for each accepted session.

Topics to consider

Perceptions of Rhythm

Timing vs. Rhythm: Duration, Phrasing, Meter, Metaphor, Pulse, Breath

Rhythmic Patterns and Cadences Spanning Multiple Forms, Genres, Disciplines

Resistance and Reception

Black Dance or Dancing While Black

Neuroscience of Rhythm

Attuning the Dancing Body

Rhythmic Pluralism in Pedagogy and Performance

Experiencing Time and Embodying Rhythm in Cultural Forms and Practices

Other...

Requirements

Name, affiliation if any, and email address
Proposal/abstract/title: 250-500 words
Brief bio (150 words)
Photo (full color – headshot or action shot)
CV, resume, and/or link to online work samples
All materials must be submitted in English.

Questions to consider

If you need guidance developing a session proposal, we encourage you to consider the following questions:

Where is rhythm most prominent – what spaces support rhythm, what spaces subvert it?
How does rhythmic complexity inform different ways of being?
What does it mean to come in and out of rhythm?
Rhythm can be interpreted and experienced on an infinite scale – how do we consider both scholarly and embodied approaches?
What does it mean to acknowledge/embody rhythm from a culturally specific perspective?
Where are we finding and creating new rhythms so as not to repeat old ones that don’t serve multiplicity or complexity?
When you’re inside a rhythm, you feel it (the timing, the environment), it entrains you, it imprints on you, it saturates. What secrets do rhythms house?
Cardiac arrhythmia is when the heart lacks a regular rhythm. What does it mean for a society or community to have arrhythmia? Are there ways to establish regular interpersonal pulse rates? How can irregularities lead to positive innovations for the body politic? How can rhythms help us reconnect and contribute to a path towards healing? 
How are rhythmic hierarchies determined in consideration of one’s cultural identity and perspective?
What rhythms are poised to contribute to the continued evolution of dance? 
Because what happens in the public sphere materializes in the educational space, what rhythmic inclusions need to happen in curriculum and pedagogy to lead to innovation on stages and pages?
In relationship to the above point—what responsibilities do we have to rhythms we bring into the academy?

Additional Details

Symposium sessions will take place from 10:30 am to 6:00 pm on Thursday, September 19 with one 11:00 am to 12:30 pm session on Friday, September 20.
Each session will include both physical and verbal explorations and inquiries along with a minimum of 15 minutes for group synthesis and reflection.
The program committee will pair complementary proposals into a shared session. Each selected proposal will receive an honorarium.
Radical formats are welcome.
The main language of the conference will be English.

Submission

Submission due date: AUGUST 9, 2024
(Grace period through August 12, 2024)
Notification of acceptance by August 19, 2024