ELSEHERE April 29 Special Edition for International Dance Day

On April 29, International Dance Day, ELSEHERE invites submissions for Re-position, a special open call dedicated to dance as lived experience, embodied memory, and human presence.
They welcome works that move beyond performance alone and reveal the interior, relational, and often unseen realities of dance.

Themes
1. Still Remember
The dancer’s body is never a perfect, untouched instrument. It is a site of repetition, endurance, adaptation, injury, discipline, and return. It carries what training has carved into it, what performance has taken from it, and what the will to continue has refused to let go of.
Even when opportunities are lost, even when the body is pushed beyond what should be asked of it, even when fear and hope coexist in unbearable proximity, something remains. The body still remembers.
For this theme, they are especially interested in works that engage:
- injury, scars, and physical aftermath
- recovery, rehabilitation, and altered relationships to movement
- the emotional and psychological cost of training and performance
- the body as witness to ambition, discipline, sacrifice, and survival
Submissions may focus on a single wound, a specific recovery period, a long-term bodily consequence, or a moment when your relationship to dance changed through pain, exhaustion, or persistence.

1. Dedicate To: Dance can also be an offering. It can be made for someone, toward someone, in memory of someone, or in relation to something that cannot be easily spoken through ordinary language. A dance may be dedicated to a person, a relationship, a grief, a place, an ancestor, a friend, a teacher, a lost future, a political horizon, or an abstract force that continues to shape one’s life. To remember why one turns to dance, and where one hopes that dance might arrive, matters just as much as the work itself. For this theme, they are especially interested in works that: are made as an offering, tribute, or act of address
2. hold a clear emotional or conceptual direction
3. reflect on the inner process of the choreographer or performer

4. name the intended recipient, whether literal or symbolic
   Please clearly identify who or what the work is dedicated to as part of your submission.

5. Beyond the Wings
   When the music stops, the lights go out, and the audience leaves, dancers return to another self. Not a lesser self, but a fuller one. The person who cooks, waits, jokes, grieves, commutes, obsesses, repairs, scrolls, cares for others, hides, dreams, and survives.
   ELSEHERE is interested in the dancer outside the role. Outside performance. Outside idealization. They want to see the habits, interests, contradictions, skills, routines, and private textures that make a dancer singular, and that quietly shape what becomes visible onstage.
   For this theme, they welcome works that explore:
   daily life outside dance

6. the relationship between profession, selfhood, and survival

7. hobbies, rituals, side lives, hidden skills, private habits, and personal texture

8. the part of the dancer that remains unseen, unperformed, or unrecognized
   This theme may be documentary, intimate, humorous, observational, poetic, or sharply personal.

Requirements

Submission Formats
ELSEHERE welcomes cross-media responses.
Submissions may be visual, textual, choreographic, documentary, conceptual, or hybrid in form.

Multimedia Submissions
Each submission must include a short written description of no more than 200 words.
Eligible formats include:
- dance works
- moving image works
- improvisational documentation
- previously created works that meaningfully respond to one of the themes above
- newly created dance films, ideally 3–10 minutes
- photographic works, 1–9 images
- static digital works (including drawings, posters, visual studies, or graphic pieces, 1–9 images)
Where applicable, English and Chinese subtitles are strongly encouraged.

Written Submissions
Up to 1000 words
Eligible formats include:
- short essays
- short prose texts
- poems
- choreographic concepts
- project notes
- reflective fragments
- proposals connected to one of the themes above
ELSEHERE welcomes writing that is direct, lyrical, conceptual, documentary, intimate, or formally experimental, as long as it remains clear and intentional.

Submission Guidelines
Please include the following with your submission:
selected theme
- Still Remember / Dedicate To: / Beyond the Wings
- title of the work
- name of the creator or contributors
- short written description if submitting multimedia work

Who Can Submit
ELSEHERE welcomes submissions from:
- dancers
- choreographers
- filmmakers
- photographers
- writers
- designers
- interdisciplinary artists
- researchers
- non-dancers responding from an outside perspective
Both professional and non-professional creators are welcome.
ELSEHERE is especially open to works that move across disciplines and resist fixed categories.

What ELSEHERE Is Not Looking For
ELSEHERE is not only looking for polished performance documents.
They are looking for works with interiority, specificity, and stakes.
Works that reveal something real.
Works that understand the body not only as image, but as memory, labor, relation, contradiction, archive, offering, and evidence.
They are especially drawn to submissions that:
- carry a strong point of view
- remain formally clear, even when intimate or experimental
- deepen rather than decorate their subject
- move beyond surface representation
- bring the dancer, or the body in relation to dance, back into focus

Application Instructions

Apply via the Open Call page:
https://www.elsehereglobal.com/open-calls/%23re-position

For questions: artists@elsehereglobal.com
(Use the submission portal on ELSEHEREGlobal.com.)

Follow @elsehereglobal for updates, featured artists, and future calls.