Archives and the Bodily Dimension of Traditional Dance Knowledge

For a dance researcher, audiovisual recordings are the most informative part of archives. For various reasons, in Estonia, re-embodiment of traditional dances has been based more on verbal descriptions and less on film and video. Nonetheless, some analysis has been done by today, and some findings on individual, local, and temporary variability of traditional dancing in different parts of Estonia exist, and some clips have been published. Despite of availability of archival video recordings, folk dance teachers usually prefer verbal descriptions, which leads to the loss of a great deal of detailed information. In the article, I explore some of the reasons for this situation, based on my own teacher practice and a case study inquiry among teachers of high school girls’ dance groups involved in the process of the 12th Youth Dance Celebration in 2017. In this project high school girls’ groups were proposed to learn Ristpulkadetants (Crossed Sticks Dance) in an unusual way – as a supplement to verbal descriptions, an archival movie clip was provided to teachers as source material. This made it possible to investigate teachers’ interest in the use of film, as well as the facilitating or hindering factors of actual use. About a fifth of the involved teachers expressed an opinion that archival recordings contain information not yet verbalized in descriptions and could help them in adding new qualities to the bodily dimension of their own and their students’ dance. As a result of the study, it can also be said that archive videos of a traditional dance are not that available to folk dance teachers as they would like them to be.