Asia Pacific Dance Festival Conference

May 30-June 1, 2025
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and East-West Center

The Asia Pacific Dance Festival (APDF) Conference is held in conjunction with one of the premiere dance festivals in the region with a focus on dance in Asia and the Pacific. APDF showcases the uniqueness and quality of dance, dancers, and choreographers throughout this part of the world with classes, performances, workshops, outreach and ceremonial activities.

The Festival Conference provides opportunities for scholars, dancers, performing artists, choreographers, performance-based activists, critics, writers, arts administrators and organizers, students, faculty, and individuals involved in dance in diverse ways to share traditional and practice-based research and dance concerns with an international audience.

CONFERENCE THEME

Hulihia— a complete change, overthrow, to change

(ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi—Hawaiian Language)

In her poem, ‘A Prayer, Lifting,’ writer Kuʻulani Muise opens with the following introduction:

Hulihia is an integral energy in our cosmologies, a natural cycle in our land/sea/ sky/dreamscapes, and manifests, again and again, in our histories. In looking at these cycles, there is always a reciprocal and inherent energy . . . Implicit in every upheaval is the rising, is the flowering up of something new.

—The Value of Hawaiʻi 3: Hulihia, the Turning

• How does dance speak to or about change—past, present and future? What turbulences, overthrows, or upheavals has the dance world been responding to or has it seen as a field? What changes do not involve overthrow or turbulence?
• How has dance ignited social or political change? How does dance disrupt or uphold norms? In what ways can dance be framed as (social) ‘movement’?
• Have events of the past several years such as COVID and political movements brought dance and dancers together to form new kinds of communities, movements or missions, and if so, in what ways?
• How do traditional forms navigate times of radical change? What constitutes or is meant by ‘traditional’?
• How can indigenous knowledge inform our understanding of change and the creation of new movements?

All proposals must constitute new, original research and may be works in progress.  Priority will be given to proposals that address the conference theme. New original research that does not address the theme may also be accepted depending upon time availability.

PROPOSALS

PROPOSAL GUIDELINES

• Proposals must be submitted electronically via the APDF Conference portal: click here for the link.
• No emailed proposals will be accepted.
• The submission requires:
  • name, contact, affliation(s)
  • a brief biography (not to exceed 100 words)
  • abstract (not to exceed 250 words)
  • proposed format for presentation: paper, panel, roundtable, lightning paper, performance, workshop / lecture demonstration
  • video link for performance, workshop and lecture demonstrations proposals (not to exceed 5 minutes)
    • YouTube, Vimeo, or Google doc link to a short demonstration of previous work that is similar in nature.
    • Links can be unlisted publicly but may not be password protected.
    • Reviewers will view the first 5 minutes of the link only. If access to available technologies does not allow for extracting a 5-minute excerpt from a larger work, links should be cued to the timestamp where reviewers should begin viewing.
• Abstracts will be evaluated in a blind review process by the Program Committee. The Program Committee is unable to provide written feedback on submissions. Individual presentations are limited to 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion.
• If you require accessibility accommodations in order to participate in the proposal submission process, please contact us at APDF@hawaii.edu as soon as possible.

PRESENTATION GUIDELINES

• Individual presentations are limited to 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion.
• Panel presentations are limited to 45 minutes for presentation and 15 minutes for discussion.
• Roundtable discussions are limited to 60 minutes.
• Lightning papers are limited to 5 minutes with no more than 10 presentation slides.
• Performances will be limited to 15 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion. All works must be original works in progress.
• Workshop / lecture demonstration sessions will be limited to 30 minutes for presentation and 15 minutes for discussion.

For performances and workshops, no technical support is available beyond overhead lighting and sound play back.

REGISTRATION