About — DanceNotes

DanceNotes is a publishing project that leans into dance’s historically unsuccessful relationship with written documentation. If notation is an instrument for comprehension, preservation, and iteration, DanceNotes is an experiment in notation dedicated to refractory, malleable, and plural knowledges, and to re-contextualized genealogies of movement.

We publish a series of chaplets—a trio, a dyad, or a quartet—every couple of years. DanceNotes chaplets are published in limited editions and are available primarily on this website.

ON METHOD

DanceNotes also names a method of interpretation rooted in literary close reading traditions, and employed in collaborative study of the political dimensions of expressive action. A tenet of notating dance has been the cataloguing of bodies in motion for the purpose of establishing a universal lexical system. DanceNotes, then, proposes a shift: away from the universal, and toward a poetic-notational practice that starts with a broad understanding of embodiment as varyingly legible. We are interested in how gesture and language use abstraction to negotiate a work’s proximity to context, and in what happens when we station irreducibility as the basis of notation.

A pedagogical project, DanceNotes hopes to offer a method that others may take up to various ends for their own notational experiments. With the goal of cultivating and elaborating this method, and producing work for future publication, we host intermittent workshops, performances, and seminars with rotating leaders and topics. Some of these colloquia are documented on our evolving Work page.

COLLABORATIONS AND SUBMISSIONS

Central to the project is our relationship with the artists and writers we publish. As editors, we have been involved in the development of projects from their early stages, including collaborating with multidisciplinary artists to build conceptual frameworks for their visual and performance work (leading up to, including, and beyond the chapbooks they publish with us) and staging public movement fora, with the shared goal of developing capacious vocabularies for movement and gesture.

Originally founded in Los Angeles, we are now located in Oakland and Toronto, where our collaborations have adopted a more sprawling, unorthodox character. This has presented as many opportunities as it has limits, and this dynamic—between constraint and plurality; translation and source—we endeavor to thematize in our editorial process.

The editors warmly welcome queries from interested writers and artists. The chaplets we publish share two criteria: a referent, and a notational strategy. Beyond that, we are exited to see experiments in notation that take a range of aesthetic and disciplinary approaches. We work with writers at any stage in their career, and projects at any stage in their development—feel free to send us manuscripts, abstracts, workshop proposals, seeds of ideas, or other hellos.

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MASTHEAD

Co-Founders, Editors, and Designers: Sam Creely and Pia Sazani

Co-Conspirators, past and present:
Amanda Choo Quan, Anthony Storniolo, Ben Stillerman, Elise Co, Gabrielle Civil, Giovan Alonzi, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Jhani Randhawa, Kate Ladenheim, Melody Ling, Nanyi Jiang, Scarlett Kim, Teo Rivera-Dundas, Yiran Zhang, Yuxin Zhao.