Our lecture demonstration centers on the preliminary outcomes of the research project ‘Knowing in Motion. Dance, body, archive’ (2023-2026). In this project we ask, how choreographic knowing that is corporeally archived in professional dancers may be activated and made more concrete; how these insights may deepen our understanding of choreography’s contribution to arts and culture today; and how the corporeally expanded insights into choreographies past and present can become a part of the archival institution.
The project’s focus is on method development. To this end, the research involves archival studies, theoretical incursions, as well as the embodied investigations of a diverse group of dancers. The different approaches come together in workshop laboratories that are co-curated by the research team and a small group of dance artists. The methodological explorations involve various forms of engagement with the archival remains of choreographic works from the previous century. The lecture demonstration is based on the first of three workshop laboratories in which we worked with choreographic remains of Emilie Walbom’s works for The Royal Danish Ballet in the years 1905 – 1928.
Approaching the research from complementary perspectives, Karen Vedel centers on the dancers’ corporeal competences and traces of prior dancing as means with which to explore the potential of ‘non-exhausted’ potentials in the choreographic material. Franziska Bork-Petersen focuses her investigation on dance costumes as a resource for activating the embodied knowing of the differently trained dancers. The presentation involves the sharing of visual documentation as basis for dialogue on questions, such as
• The role of different archival formats and materialities in the transfer and activation of knowing in dance
• Originality, authenticity and the notion of ‘composite bodies’
• Method development that points towards rethinking archival practices in dance