Living Archive. Nyota Inyoka’s Archive: Traces of the Ephemeral and Ancient Dances Reenactment

Abstract

The French National Library keeps since 1983 the personal archive of the dancer and choreographer Nyota Inyoka (Fonds Nyota Inyoka). This archive comprises twenty-eight boxes of documents, besides costumes belonging to the dancer, which are constitutive as material of enormous value for the necessary recovery of this figure that has fallen into oblivion in the history of dance. This article aims at providing a first approach to the Nyota Inyoka Archive by ramifying the study in two directions. On the one hand, it allows us to articulate some keys to her choreographic proposal and her theoretical conception of dance. On the other hand, it enables us to broaden the reflection towards the relationship between the archive and the dancing body. Nyota Inyoka's repertoire revolves around ancient cultures that refer mainly to traditions from ancient Egypt and South and Southeast Asia. Thus, the archive takes on an important presence linked to the discipline of dance in a double sense. Firstly, the ephemeral nature of this art favors the archive to become an essential element for dance research. Whilst if we take into consideration the choreographic process of the dancer based on visual sources from Egyptian and Asian art, her body is constituted as a living archive. In this sense, I will offer a reading of Nyota Inyoka’s work as a kind of avant la lettre reenactment of ancient dances.