Cultural Self-Determination: Construction and Representation of Music and Dance Practices in Public Domain Performances
- TIME: 26-30 May 2025
- PLACE: Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music, Riga, Latvia
- DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 1 December 2024
Call for Papers
Public domain performances of music and dance practices (e.g. concerts, festivals, multimedia) are important tools of cultural construction and representation. Their efficacy depends on how they help the interactive process of the multisensory exchange of symbols between performers and audiences for coordinating and shaping meaningful experiences. When decision-makers of public domain performances consider performers simply executors of their ideas rather than equal partners, a trend towards standardisation, which runs against the cultural diversity of everyday life, is particularly evident. Therefore, issues arising between performers and decision-makers, including those of construction, stratification, equality, and ethics in everything from the processes of performativity to the composition of the stakeholders, become crucial also for questions of cultural self-determination in public domain performances.
This symposium is intended as a platform for the elaboration of practice models of music and dance performances that strengthen the cultural self-determination rearticulated as part of a sustainable, community-based process rather than solely as narrowly constructed political or legal entitlements. The three needs of the self-determination theory are basic to this discussion: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Self-determination is furthermore a condition that is asserted and acted upon. From this perspective, initiatives based on the potential of partnerships between academia and society in the field of cultural self-determination become significant for the issue of stewardship rather than ownership and also of resilience as a strategy to help sustain a community’s expressive culture. Thus, the construction and representation of music and dance practices in public domain performances take on particular significance within the cultural self-determination processes.