Deadline: September 2, 2024

The depiction of dancing has been a part of animated image’s history since the beginnings of cinema with e.g. Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope glass disks from 1893 with one of them showing “a couple waltzing”. In 1929, Walt Disney created The Skeleton Dance as part of the company’s Silly Symphonies series. More experimental approaches to dance and animation resulted in Norman McLaren and Grant Munro’s playful animated short Two Bagatelles (1952), as well as the expressive images of Denis Poulin and Martine Époque’s CODA (2014). Not to forget “The Dancing Baby” from the very early days of the internet in 1996 by Michael Girard, Robert Lurye and John Chadwick.

Whatever example of dance in animation that comes to mind, we welcome contributions that approach this theme from any perspective. We are interested in exploring aesthetic, artistic, technical, historical and theoretical dimensions of how the conceptions of dance engage with animation. We dance in animation in the broadest sense possible and topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Description and visualisations of the ideas behind artistic collaborations between dancers/choreographers and animators/filmmakers.
  • Analysis of animated works that have dance as its main theme.
  • Historical accounts of the intersection between dance and animation’s pioneers and contributors.
  • Explorations and developments of machinery and technology that enable the creation of works on dance and animation.
  • Any theoretical discussion about interdisciplinary studies of dance and animation.  
Image series of the Dancing Baby from 1996 remastered by Jack Armstrong. Image published on Foundation and the text on image states: “copyright 1996 Autodesk, Inc. The Dancing Baby is reproduced and distributed with the permissions of Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved”.

Posts that are between 600 and 900 words discussing any aspect of the above topics are welcome. Please forward the text as a Word document, and contributors are encouraged to include clips, and at least one image to support their posts (less than 2 MB in size per image and sent as separate files). Please also include a short bio (100 words max) and 3 keywords. All permissions are the responsibility of the contributor.

Please contact co-editors Carmen Hannibal and Anastasiia Gushchina via blog@animationstudies.org with submissions and/or questions.