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Speculative Choreographies Logo with a blurred, purple-ish image of two dancers holding hands in a counter balance. Other bodies blur in the background.Speculative Choreographies:
Bodies, Economies, and Movement in a World in Flux

California State University, Long Beach
October 23-25, 2026

Submissions Now Open

Submission Deadline: February 10, 2026

This conference explores how dance speculates—how it reflects, resists, and reimagines—the forces that shape our contemporary world. These forces include migration and memory as well as media, markets, and the social choreography of bodies across borders, platforms, and stages. The conference site rests on what was originally the Tongva village of Puvungna, meaning "gathering place," a site featured in the Tongva/Gabrieleno/Acjachemen peoples' creation stories and stories of emergence. With its indigenous populations, diverse diasporic communities, deep histories of resistance, and global entertainment industries, Los Angeles and the conference location offer fertile ground for rethinking how dance is entangled with questions of value, visibility, and survival. 

In this post-truth moment, and in a region forged by spectacle, migration, media, labor, and ecological extremes, the 2026 DSA conference asks: How do bodies move through—with and against—systems of control, extraction, discipline, and erasure? What possibilities emerge when we imagine movement as an affirmative form of world-making?

Conference Co-Chairs: Colleen Dunagan (California State University, Long Beach), Arushi Singh (Chapman University), and Ariel Osterweis (California Institute of the Arts)

Read the full Call for Papers

Submission Guidelines

The 2026 Program Committee welcomes proposals for presentations in several formats, outlined below. Read the full submission guidelines and call for papers for more information.

  • HUBs: HUBs are meant to gather individuals around stated conference themes. Groups are curated through submission, meet for 2 or 3 days of the conference depending on HUB format, and are open to conference attendees as audience members. Applicants apply individually to participate in a Hub using the submission portal. HUBs will have facilitators. Hub participation counts towards a person's singular conference presentation. Read more about the 2026 HUBs below.
  • Gatherings: Gatherings run 90 minutes. This format takes a dialogical approach to collective thinking about tools and strategies in dance studies. We welcome proposals from teams of at least five facilitators who will lead discussions with session attendees. One member of the Gatherings group must submit the proposal and submission form, but the names of all members of the Gatherings group must be listed on the submission form. Note: this format replaces DSA's previous "roundtable" format.
  • Individual Papers: Paper presentations must be based on unpublished research or interpretation and must be designed for oral delivery within 15-20 minutes, including use of audiovisual aids. The programming committee will arrange individual paper submission into panels of three or four with a moderator.
  • Pre-formed Panels: Panels are 90 minutes in length and should consist of three 20-minute papers or four 15-minute papers on a related topic and 30 minutes for questions/answers. We also welcome panels that take a delivery response format, in which formal respondents comment on one or two presenters' work. Panel proposals should consist of a 300-word summary of the larger panel topic and individual paper proposals as outlined above for each presenter. The title of the proposed panel and the panelists' names should be included in the appropriate fields of the submission form. Only one member of the panel needs to submit the panel proposal. Proposed panels will not be assigned a moderator. If panels would like a moderator, they may include their own moderator with their proposal if they wish.
  • Movement Presentation/Workshops: Movement presentation/workshops (formerly called Lecture-Demonstrations) may run either 20 or 45 minutes. Presentation format incorporates spoken and performative aspects in dialogue (as commentary, illustration, disruption, or otherwise). Proposals should articulate: why the presentation best fits within this format; the time requirements and studio/space requirements (specifically whether a studio space is necessary); and the names of all presenters (including performers or demonstration assistants).
  • Screendances: Screendances should run no more than 12 minutes. Proposals should include a link to a trailer, full work (preferable), or excerpt of the work to be shown. The proposal abstract should articulate the work's research inquiry. Presenters will be grouped into performance panels or screendance showings, depending on the space available at the conference site, and the research inquiry being posed. There will be time for a facilitated Q&A with all of the presenters/performers at the end of the session. It should be noted that there are no submission fees, screening fees, or other fees or revenue for the presentation of dance works or screendances. There is no technical support for dance works.
Read full Submission Guidelines

2026 HUBs 

Our 2026 Conference will convene 10 HUBs around particular conference themes. Each HUB is hosted and curated by a DSA Working Group. Working Groups proposed HUBs in response to the Conference's Call for Papers, and the below HUBs were selected by conference co-chairs to be included in the 2026 conference program. For full details on each HUB, read our HUB Descriptions.

The 2026 HUBs are:

Read Full Hub Descriptions

 

Conference Co-Chairs

Colleen T. Dunagan is Professor and Chair in the Department of Dance at California State University, Long Beach, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in dance studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside. Her monograph, Consuming Dance: Choreography and Advertising (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines dance in advertising and its production of affect and its role in advertising’s modelling of subjectivity. Dunagan’s current research examines dance in relationship to Susanne K. Langer’s aesthetic theory and aesthetic capitalism, as well as the role of dancerly embodiment in horror films. Her research on dance in media appears in several publications, including Dance in U.S. Popular Culture (2024), Dance Research Journal, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (2014), Movies Moves and Music (2016), and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (2015). Her creative work encompasses dancemaking on both stage and screen.

Arushi Singh is a dance scholar, writer, educator, and performer from New Delhi, now based in Los Angeles. Her award-winning research intervenes in global conversations on performance, institutional theory, and political economy by centering the choreographic practices and cultural infrastructures of contemporary South Asia.

Her work contributes original theoretical frameworks that reposition dance as a critical methodology for understanding governance, labor, and world-making. Her recent article in Didaskalia advances the concept of infrastructural intermediality, reframing contemporary Indian dance as a site where aesthetic production is inseparable from the economic logics, spatial architectures, and curatorial protocols shaping the region’s visual-arts infrastructures. By theorizing choreography as a mode of navigating—and strategically reconfiguring—these institutional terrains, she demonstrates how artists mobilize movement as both critique and proposition, generating new forms of kinesthetic, political, and intermedial thought.

Her other writing appears in South Asian Dance Intersections, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, Dance Chronicle, Race & Yoga, and Tilt Pause Shift: Dance Ecologies in India, with forthcoming essays in The Oxford Handbook of Dance Praxis and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive. Across these publications, she brings together archival research, ethnography, institutional analysis, and movement studies to expand understandings of how performance circulates within shifting global and regional economies.

At Chapman University, Singh teaches courses in dance history and theory that bridge embodied practice with critical inquiry. As Editor-in-Chief of Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, she fosters editorial and curatorial practices that are porous, collaborative, and attuned to the evolving transdisciplinary and transcultural discourses shaping the field. She holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA.

Ariel Osterweis (she/they) is a scholar-practitioner of dance and performance. Osterweis has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley and is on faculty at CalArts, teaching courses in Performance Studies and Critical Dance Studies. Their book, Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity, is published with Oxford University Press (Oxford Studies in Dance Theory Series, 2024), and current book projects include Prophylactic Aesthetics: Latex, Spandex, and Sexual Anxieties Performed (University of Michigan Press, Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series), Disavowing Virtuosity, Performing Aspiration: Dance and Performance Interviews (Routledge), and Prince Moves (Oxford). Osterweis has danced and performed professionally with Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Mia Michaels R.A.W., Heidi Latsky, and Julie Tolentino. They were also a dramaturg for John Jasperse, Narcissister, and a.k. payne, and directed evening-length performances, Jérôme Bel and Talent Show at REDCAT. Upcoming projects include a performance lab called BODY SHOP and a collaboration with John Jasperse and Julie Mehretu. Osterweis is a queer, mixed-race, Korean-American parent of two teens and a tween.

 

Speculative Choreographies logo and design by Kat Ispache