MusicTheatreDance is the flagship journal of the Music Theatre Dance Association.
This free, open-access, peer-reviewed journal is a multi-disciplinary space for investigations at the intersections of music, theatre, and dance, as well as the intersections of music, theatre, dance, and other disciplines. Seeking to disrupt traditional disciplinary boundaries, this multimodal journal plays host to both conventional scholarly essays and digital scholarship that takes other forms.
We welcome your questions at musictheatredancejournal@gmail.com
Read the inaugural issue (0.5) of MusicTheatreDance (Summer 2025)
Call for Submissions
MusicTheatreDance: The Journal of the Music Theatre Dance Association
Issue 1 (2027) “Imagine it”
Editors: Stephanie Lim, Kathryn Edney, Hye Won Kim, Vicki Hoskins, Shiraz Biggie, and
Adrienne Oehlers
Imagine it: Scholarship as performance. Performance as practice. Practice as inquiry. Inquiry as
pedagogy.
The Music Theatre Dance Association (MTDA) is pleased to announce a call for content for the
first full issue of its flagship publication, MusicTheatreDance, intended for release in 2027. This
free, open-access, peer-reviewed journal will be a multi-disciplinary space for investigations at
the intersections of music, theatre, dance, and other disciplines. Seeking to disrupt traditional
disciplinary boundaries, this multimodal journal will live online, playing host to both conventional
scholarly essays and digital scholarship that takes other forms.
Join us in imagining what MusicTheatreDance Journal can be. We call upon you, the scholars,
educators, and practitioners in and across the performing arts, to help us envision how to break
down the barriers in traditional scholarship and the communities in which we co-exist. We invite
you to join us as we seek to open boundaries between fields of study in the arts, de-silo the
material, and innovate the structure. We ask, how can this journal serve as a host to expand the
edges of our fields and reach across the “in-betweens” to serve the varying needs of the wide
range of the authorial voices in our communities? What form should scholarship take? What are
the containers for scholarly rigor and thought and how can we expand and support all ideas?
We imagine a journal where a conventional 7,000-word article sits alongside choreographic
analysis, a video essay, a conversation between practitioners, an interactive digital piece, an
artist’s notebook, or a speculative work—each reviewed according to criteria appropriate to its
form rather than asking for everything to fit into the same mold.
MusicTheatreDance seeks submissions across the full range of content and form, including
traditional academic scholarship, artistic work, pedagogical scholarship, and other forms of
research which may or may not address the theme of this first issue, “Imagine It.” Our journal is
poised to be a forum for timely, engaged, and innovative scholarship that fosters conversation
across the field. We welcome both traditional and experimental forms of scholarly engagement
that will ultimately guide the shape and scope of our three editorial sections. The editorial team
offers these general categories for your submissions in the hope that the originality in form and
content widens our own conceptual ideas of what our journal can be.
As a starting place, your submissions can range from longer-form, more traditional, peer-reviewed article contributions (in the range of approximately 5,000-7,000 words) to non-text
based submissions that engage with and build upon scholarship in the field. We are actively
seeking less formal, shorter-form contributions, including and especially experiments in form
and works-in-process. We are also soliciting a medley of traditional book and performance
reviews, as well as less conventional and/or hybrid forms, such as interviews, dialogues,
roundtables, letters to the field, commentaries, practice-as-research and pedagogical
reflections, rehearsal or field documentation, annotated images, conference reports, and archive
and media reviews.