Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By Rebecca Pappas
Dancing gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no
paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to
be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you
feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.
-Merce Cunningham
The Legacy Project
In 2009 Merce Cunningham and the Merce Cunningham Dance
Foundation announced the first of its kind Legacy Project. The project
was an attempt to prepare for the ongoing life of Merce
Cunninghams works and company following his death, which, came
just six weeks after the announcement.
The project consisted of three major parts:
a) The Legacy Tour A two-year world tour during which the
company would, and has, performed a wide variety of Mr.
Cunninghams older and recent works, including a number of
New York performances, which Mr. Cunningham hoped, would
cost only $10.
b) Dance Capsules - A massive archiving project involving the
creation of digital capsules for as many of Cunninghams
major works as possible. These capsules, which are currently
being created, will be, a digital package containing complete
documentation of a Cunningham work, including performance
videos, sound recordings, lighting plots, dcor images, costume
design, production notes, and interviews with dancers and
artistic staff (www.merce.org 2012). These capsules will then
be licensed (along with certified re-constructors) for a fee to
professional companies or schools who want to learn and
restage Cunningham works.
composers, and visual artists whose work can be more easily stored,
disseminated, and studied into the future. If dance and the repertoire
were seriously analyzed in their own right, there might not be such a
need to turn ourselves into archives.
Practice Makes Perfect
Prior to this contemporary impulse to archive, dance has
historically been passed body to body. In her history of ballet, Apollos
Angels, Jennifer Homans writes:
Memory is central to the art, and dancers are trained, as the
ballerina Natalia Makarova once put it, to eat dances to
ingest them and make them part of who they are. These are
physical memories; when dancers know a dance they know it in
their muscles and bonesThus ballet repertory is not recorded
in books or libraries; it is held instead in the bodies of the
dancers (Homans 2010: xix).
Technique has, classically, been the tool for transmitting this memory.
As an archive, technique contains and organizes the traces and
residues dance leaves behind, and out of which it forms againIt is
what Paul Connerton calls an inscribing practice (Hamera 2002:
65). In daily technique class the values and memories of a form are
passed down through repetition and discipline. In her article, An
Answerability of Memory: Saving Khmer Classical Dance, Judith
Hamera suggests that technique turns the body into an archive for a
dance form and consequently a set of cultural memories. Hamera
bridges the gap between the archive and the repertoire by theorizing
that dance causes the body to become a manuscript of cultural
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Haunting Solutions
In discussing memory and Cambodian dance technique, Judith
Hamera provocatively suggests that technique can be a haunting,
replacing the individual body with an ideal body that disappears
personal narratives and tragedies and simultaneously reveals cultural
histories (Hamera 2002: 77). In her article she is concerned with how
technique is carried forward even in the face of the immense personal
and cultural trauma of the Khmer Rouge. She suggests that only the
body could carry on this work of transmission in a culture where
documentation and writing might equal entrapment or death (Hamera
2002: 70). Yet, I think this model of haunting is instructive for our
inquiry as well.
In dance practice and performance we are giving our bodies
over, allowing an idea or person larger than ourselves to enter us and
carry us through the heightened state of performance. Carolyn Brown
articulates this feeling of possession in her memoir and reviewers
reference it frequently in discussing a wide variety of dance works.
What if this possession, rather than the costumes or programmes or
inert legacies of performances was what was carried forward as the
key to remembering dances and dance makers? This is the case in
many non-western tradition, where remembering is recognized as an
explicitly performative act and certain individuals are endowed with
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the task. Why cant it also be taken up as a model for Western concert
dance?
I want to end by discussing Andre Lepeckis article, The Body as
Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances, which presents
a contrasting notion of what an archive can be. He defies Taylors
bifurcation between a dead archive and a living repertoire,
establishing the body itself as an archive that defies fixity. The body,
Lepecki states, can be an archive that contains, and occurs at, the
moment of convergence between the past and the presents. It is an
archive that celebrates the disappearance, fallibility and decay of
humanness rather than the enduring nature of the material world. In
its constitutive precariousness, perceptual blind-spots, linguistic
indeterminations, muscular tremors, memory lapses, bleedings, rages,
and passions, the body as archive re-places and diverts notions of
archive away from a documental deposit or a bureaucratic agency
dedicated to the (mis)management of the past (Lepecki 2010: 34).
Lepecki is suggesting that a bodily archive can be a truer and more
complicated way of storing and re-storing performance, than a
traditional one.
He proposes that in re-performance and restaging we can
return to and grow the creative possibilities that works presented
when they were first created. Rather than planting a work in the past
and using an archive to preserve it, or even restaging it with an eye to
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WORKS CITED
Brown, Carolyn. Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Tears with
Cage and Cunningham. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2007.
Hamera, Judith. An Answerability of Memory: Saving Khmer
Classical Dance. TDR 46, No. 4. Winter 2002: 65-85.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today
29, No. 1. Spring 2008: 103-128.
Homans, Jennifer. Apollos Angels: A History of Ballet. New York:
Random House, 2010.
Lepecki, Andre. The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the
Afterlives of Dances. Dance Research Journal 42, No. 2. Winter
2010: 28-48.
www.merce.org, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 2010.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2003.
Thomas, Anne Elise. Practicing Tradition: History and Community
in an Appalachian Dance Style. Western Folklore 60, No. 2/3.
Spring/Summer 2001: 163-181.
Vaughn, David. Archives of the Dance (2): Building an Archive:
Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Dance Research: The
Journal for the Society for Dance Research 2, No. 1. Spring 1984:
61-67.
Whatley, Sarah. Archives of the Dance: Siobhan Davies Dance
Online. Dance Research 26, No. 2. Winter 2008.
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