Mobilising Heritage: Dance, Theatre, and Performance in the Age of (In)Tangibility

This turn toward the intangible and communal dimensions of heritage exposed deep tensions between preservation and change, expert authority and bottom-up participation, or institutional policies and bodily practices. These frictions are particularly visible in dance and the performing arts, where heritage is literally embodied, enacted, and reimagined through practice. In what this special issue terms the age of (in)tangibility, the performing arts are recognised as intangible heritage precisely as they are rendered tangible through documentation, digitisation, and policy frameworks, revealing a constitutive tension between embodied, relational knowledge that exists only in practice and the material, institutional forms through which heritage is named, governed, and sustained.