Tracing Dance – Dancing Traces: Participatory and embodied approaches to dance archives and archiving
Astrid von Rosen, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
astrid.von.rosen@arthist.gu.se
Drawing on recent research at the University of Gothenburg and University College London, this paper surveys and theorizes the challenges faced by academics as well as practitioners outside the university who engage with historical traces of the often downplayed or excluded independent dance. It looks at initiatives encouraging greater exchange between the university, independent dance groups and individuals, as well as archival institutions, and relates them to broader postmodern and post-custodial conceptualizations of the archive and archiving in the digital age. This means that concepts such as archival multiverse, records continuum, and multiple provenance, which address the infinite character of archives and archiving and emphasize pluralization of contexts and perspectives (Gilliland 2016, McKemmish 2011), are addressed and problematized in relation to dance traces.
Departing from the positivist and unimaginative understanding of traces as simple containers of so-called facts (Balme 2010) yet without compromising scholarly rigour, and challenging but not denouncing the interpretivist paradigm, the paper opens up for participatory approaches to dance archives and archiving. Collaborative/participatory practices usually carry positive connotations and are associated with “anything involving people” (Cornwall 2008:69, Flinn and Sexton 2013:2) but are notoriously hard to define. Within the context of researching and creating dance history and more specifically engaging with visual, multimodal and embodied traces of past practices, the paper expands the participatory approach to include material objects (such as photographs) understood as potentially active participants in the exploratory endeavour. It is argued that the activity of dancing with traces and being danced by traces, can provide access to “an endlessly creative, transformational archive” (Lepecki 2010:20), renegotiate roles, and define, challenge and change power imbalances and injustices (Flinn and Sexton 2013:2).
With reference to photographic archival traces from the 1980s, moving image traces produced during the project Dance as Critical Heritage: Archives, Access, Action (2013–15), and practices of memory traced into the body as archive in multiple ways, the paper explores participatory and embodied approaches to dance archives and archiving. It concludes by arguing for a methodological ambiguity (von Rosen 2016) and presents a flexible, creative and scholarly model or framework to help researchers grapple with multifaceted traces and to facilitate their thinking and making of a more engaged, participatory and democratic dance history in an increasingly digital world.
Last updated: 30 January 2017
