Dance Archival Futures: Embodied Knowledge and the Digital Archive of Dance

This chapter responds to recent innovation into the documentation and preservation of dance. Examples such as Siobhan Davies Replay, Motion Bank, Synchronous Objects and Digital Dance Archives make inroads into the knowledge available in the dancing body through incorporating aspects of movement exploration and selection, which enable the tracing of the dance-making journey. These examples still depend upon the physical body as a means for grounding the technology but as these components remain video based and do not capture the traditional context of space and collectivity associated with dance-making and performance, they remain incomparable to the lived, experiential processes of the body. This chapter re-considers modes of preservation and the expansion of knowledge tropes that are now frequently preserved in alternative archival platforms via the digital. Through scrutiny of archival principles and processes that are rooted in ideologies of knowledge value and hierarchy, this contribution explores how new modes of documentation bring new meaning to archives of performance.

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