Second Annual Columbia College Chicago Dance Center Symposium Welcomes Proposals through August 9

Photo"Time Keeps Moving," choreographed by Kayla Hansen (December 2023 Choreographic Projects: We Would Like To Say...) Pictured left to right: Emma Close, Amanda Canino, Reese Marcus, Daniela Aranda
The Dance Center's 2024 Symposium “Experiencing Time/Embodying Rhythm” is co-curated by Lisa Gonzales and Darrell Jones.

The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago announces that it is now accepting proposals for its 2024 in-person Symposium on September 19 and 20. Practitioners, scholars, educators, students, and enthusiasts with and without academic affiliations are invited to submit proposals for embodied roundtables, cyphers, lecture-demonstrations, panels, papers, pop-ups, snack-and-chats, spontaneous synthesis, workshops, as well as interdisciplinary and innovative formats. 

“When you’re inside a rhythm, it entrains you, it imprints on you, it saturates along an infinite scale,” says Co-Curator and Associate Professor Darrell Jones who received an inaugural Platform Award from the Walder Foundation this past week. “We chose to make rhythm primary in this symposium to raise the question of how bodies, spaces, places, identities, relationships, and power constructs support and subvert experiences of time.” 

“Rhythm is movement and meaning,” adds Co-Curator and Chair of Dance Lisa Gonzales, “and rhythmic ingenuity through devising, combining shared space and time, makes connections across different ways of being in the body. This multiplicity reflects the distinctive attributes of the dance curriculum at Columbia College Chicago.”  

Proposals for sessions to take place at the Experiencing Time/Embodying Rhythm Symposium are due August 9, 2024, and selected proposals will be notified by August 19, 2024. Each selected session proposal will receive a $150 honorarium, and some selected proposals may be part of joint sessions curated by the program committee.

In addition to the sessions, the open-to-the-public symposium will feature two performance showcases kicking off the Dance Center’s 51st season and Dance For Health research study – a partnership with Rush University Medical College, City of Chicago Department of Family and Support Services, and Denmark’s University of Aalborg that is investigating how dance impacts quality of life for older adults. 

“We are looking forward to experiencing what multiple vantage points reveal about rhythm – a phenomenon that saturates everything and everyone – and discover what rhythms are poised to contribute to the continued evolution of dance,” says Dance Center Artistic Director Meredith Sutton. 

More information including topics and questions to consider in developing a proposal, submission requirements, timeframe, submission instructions, and more can be found at https://dance.colum.edu/rhythm-symposium

August 9: Proposals due 
August 19: Selected proposals notified

Recent News