Speculative Choreographies: Bodies, Economies, and Movement in a World in Flux

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

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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)

Submissions closed Monday, February 16, 2026.