The Life of a Dance: Double Take Part II

Abstract

The documentation of dance regularly asserts a false concept. This is that dances can be fixed, like a text, script, a painting or even a musical score. Dance academics and organisations like ballet companies and the trusts that claim to protect and preserve the heritage of specific choreographers, struggle with this idea. Focussed far more on outputs than production, they decontextualize dance by ignoring its context: the working process. Notwithstanding the problematics of this assumption about the archival form of such material, that the tokens of the types that Wollheim (1968) posits as necessary are simply too flexible to be captured as definitive, this in itself presents a creative opportunity.This is not to say an account of a dance is impossible, but to suggest there are conditional features that need taking account of, and to question the artistic validity of ossified reproduction. This paper posits this working process as played out in performance as well as the confines of rehearsal, and gives as a practical example the performance of a work by the same dancers across a thirty year time frame, presented in sync with original video material.