Editors’ Note

This special issue, titled “In and Out of Norden: Dance and the Migratory Condition,” focuses on dance moving in and out of a specific location in the world—more specifically the geopolitical region in Northern Europe known as “Norden” in the Scandinavian languages. In the context of dance, the concept of migration has always been relevant. Professional dancers, teachers, and choreographers have been travelling people, and in many cases this professional mobility has neither been voluntarily nor casually chosen. But more generally, whether for economic, political, religious, or other reasons, the mobility of people in the world has been an important factor in the diasporic patterns of all dance genres and forms. In the context of dance scholarship, the issue of migration was brought to the fore when, in 2008, two separate publications highlighted the issue. The essays in the winter issue of Dance Research Journal focused on “ways in which the experience and conditions of migration inform dance performance and reception” (Scolieri 2008, v) in the context of Mexican danzas chuscas, taxi dance halls, and works of choreographers such as Jerzy Starzyriski, Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, and Bill T. Jones. In Migrations of Gesture (Noland and Ness 2008), the contributors addressed ways in which gestures migrate from body to body, from one medium to another, and between cultural contexts of dance practices such as ballet and classical Indian dance. Characterizing the notion of “migration” as opposed to “gesture,” Ness stated that migration denotes a kind of movement that necessarily covers ground. “While a gesture may involve no change of the gesturer’s place whatsoever, migrations, by definition, are movements that progress through territory, in and through realms that, regardless of their actual size, are relatively vast with respect to the entities doing the traveling” (Ness 2008, 260). More important, the chapters in Migrations of Gesture highlighted that migration may occur in the actual world as well as in a virtual realm such as filmic worlds or the Internet. The years surrounding 2008 were actually a time in which the World Wide Web was increasingly discussed—not least at the annual Web 2.0 Summit 2004–2011 (originally known as the Web 2.0 Conference) in San Francisco, California, US. In line with these discussions, dance scholar Harmony Bench introduced the concepts of “Screendance 2.0: Social Dance-Media,” identifying “viral choreographies” as specific dancing in viral videos in which social media users contribute with re-performances of specific choreography (2010). Thus, focusing on ways in which technologies facilitate the circulation and transmission of movements and gestures, Bench pointed to the importance of encounters between bodies and media technologies as an important factor of a general migratory condition.

Needless to say, the first decades of the new millennium have seen an increasing interest in gaining a comprehensive understanding of the opportunities and challenges presented by international migration. By means of methodological approaches from the humanities and social sciences, scholars are looking into the patterns, causes, and effects of international migration, asking questions such as the following: How will global warming affect human mobility in the future? What has been the fate of refugees seeking to escape the conflicts in Northern Africa and the Middle East? At the same time, a growing amount of regional studies have connected insights across academic disciplines in an attempt to understand how and why economic and political processes and outcomes are contingent upon regional and local circumstances. In the context of this present issue, it ought to be highlighted that we as guest editors represent members of the former research group Dance in Nordic Spaces, which was formally established in 2007 in connection with the larger research program Nordic Spaces that ran until 2012 (O’Connor, Fauve-Chamoux, and Wahlén 2014). The group included dance scholars from Denmark (Inger Damsholt and Karen Vedel), Finland (Petri Hoppu and Inka Välipakka), Norway (Egil Bakka and Anne Fiskvik), and Sweden (Lena Hammergren and Mats Nilsson). The outcome of the work carried out by the group within the framework of the larger project was published in two separate edited collections, one of which was included in...