Conference: Methodical Approaches to Music and Dance: Exploring the Field of Heavy Metal and Its Genre Boundaries (8.-9.09.2022)
International Metal-Conference:
Methodical Approaches to Music and Dance: Exploring the Field of Heavy Metal and Its Genre Boundaries.
8.-9. September 2022,
University of Siegen, Germany
Music and dance are connected intimately and especially in popular music cultures dance plays a vital role. Even though academic attention so far has rather attended to forms such as tap dance, salsa, hip hop or various forms of electronic dance music, heavy metal is no exception in this respect: It has developed characteristic, music-related bodily practices. At concerts, the music is accompanied by common movements like headbanging and moshing and even more unconventional forms such as conga lines or ‘folkloristic’ circle dances can be found. The boundaries to other music genres are not rigid but porous. The conference wants to pursue this many-facetted phenomenon and discuss how music and dance relate to each other as aesthetic practices in heavy metal. Two thematic focal points are especially of interest, the first of which are methodological questions. The second field the conference focuses on is the variability of dance forms across different genres and the gray and messy areas in between them. We do not conceive of heavy metal as isolated phenomenon that is simply marked by its difference to other music. Instead, heavy metal can be understood as a highly differentiated music culture that comprises numerous subgenres which interact with further music cultures in various ways.
Keynotes
Sherril Dodds (Boyer College of Music and Dance, Temple University, USA), author of, among others, Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance (2011) and co-editor of Bodies of Sound: Studies Across Popular Music and Dance (2013)
Gabriele Klein (Universität Hamburg, Germany), author of, among others, Electronic Vibration. Pop Kultur Theorie (22004), Is this real? Die Kultur des HipHop (52014) and co-editor of Methoden der Tanzwissenschaft (22015), and Dance [and] Theory (2013)