Brazilian Journal of Dance Research

This special issue is the result of a partnership between Revista Brasileira de Estudos em Dança (Brazilian Journal of Dance Studies), Dance Chronicle Journal, and the III International Seminar on Dance History, which addressed the same subject between 2024 and 2025. Together, these three initiatives seek to bring together critical perspectives on the teaching of dance history in different parts of the globe, demonstrating that, on the one hand, we have research dedicated to showing that different traditions, figures, and institutions have contributed over time to the perpetuation and global dissemination of dance practices originating in the global north; there are also local historiographies dedicated to understanding dance heritages that have established paths parallel to Western modernity; as well as the advent of decolonial and de-colonial studies, mainly in the global south, which have taken it upon themselves to combat and resist dance platforms that claimed to be universally valid. On the other hand, the field is still hesitant to debate what and how these historiographical revisions of different dance pasts reach the classroom.

Understanding the past as a constitutive element of the present and the projection of possible futures, the texts in this dossier are an invitation to rethink the tools, content, methods, and curricula we use in classrooms dedicated to dance history, in order to assume responsibility for and recognize the significance of how we currently teach future generations about dance's pasts.

This edition was funded by the Paulo Gustavo Federal Law's Call for Training Initiatives in Goiás.