A new Quebec magazine for contemporary dances? A 70-page specialized magazine, mainly focused on criticism, printed on good old paper with one issue a year, in the midst of a media crisis, while magazines are dying one after the other? The bet of Moveo, which is aiming for its first publication next September, is audacious. Guts? “You have to try to do it to see if it can be done,” replies the editor-in-chief, Marco Pronovost, with a smile.
Dance is the only artistic discipline that does not have its review in Quebec. “It was the Society for the Development of Cultural Enterprises (SODEC) that gave us the idea, to fill this gap,” says Mr. Pronovost, who is also a dance commissioner for the broadcaster Tangente. “We think it can be a tool to unite the community. We are a few weeks away from the public unveiling of the call for papers, and a crowdfunding campaign for the first issue”, all the funding for which will be private and from this campaign. Moveo hopes for public funding for its second issue next year.
The editorial team therefore has its work cut out for it, and will have to get it up quickly. It is made up of artist Claudia Chan Tak, performer and curator Jane Gabriels, art researcher Véronique Hudon and Laurane Van Branteghem and Élisabeth-Anne Dorléans, both also curators for Tangente with M. Pronovost . “Almost everyone has publishing experience,” says the editor.
Moveo will talk about “current dances”, specifies Mr. Pronovost, including traditional dances that are still practiced on stages and in studios. There will be interviews, discussions between creators, an international segment, and a section that will go through astrology to shed light, from this angle, on different profiles of dance people in Quebec.
Dance reviews will also fill the pages, reviews that would be made “in a safe space, as much for their authors as for the creators”. How ? The answer, still unclear, revolves around “building an ecosystem around the magazine, bringing people together, after the last few years when the virtual has taken up a lot of space, meeting face-to-face, and through the materiality of a paper journal, a materiality [qui est] important in dance.
Intergenerational, intersectional, interdisciplinary
“We are also going to leave the dance to talk about the collaborators, by looking at the lighting, the costumes, the sets”, continues Mr. Pronovost. Everything will be in French, for an environment that is very bilingual and where discussions quickly switch to English through a kind of politeness and recognition of international movements and the nomadism that are still a feature of dance.
“We want to provoke debates of ideas, around aesthetic and artistic issues. Dance is an environment where people find it difficult to get involved, in concrete terms, in the discussion of ideas. Half of the magazine will be done by the editorial team, the rest by call for texts. It is a magazine that will be intergenerational, intersectional and interdisciplinary. We want diverse points of view. In the same way that we are working on decolonization in dance and on stage, we want to decolonize writing: we are going to invite people, illiterate people, people with disabilities, people who speak foreign languages, to write too, and frame them. »
The sales of Moveo will be done directly, through social networks and through placement with dance presenters. Moveo is aiming for a first print run of 200 or 300 copies. The intended audience ? “Clearly people in the middle, and more. »
The team also wants to offer collaborators who write in its pages ideal remuneration, although it has not yet quantified it, to “help improve the working conditions of dancers by offering them other income opportunities”. Can one text per year really make a difference on the conditions of dancers? Here is the smile, both ambitious and “we-won’t-know-if-we-don’t-try-it”, which returns. “We give ourselves two years to see,” concludes Marco Pronovost.
We think it can be a tool to unite the community. We are a few weeks away from the public unveiling of the call for papers, and a crowdfunding campaign for the first issue. Marco Pronovost »