This text is based on a lecture given at the Positions: Dance #4. Creating Access – Diversity symposium, organised by Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, October 21 - 23 at the PACT Zollverein centre for the performing arts in Essen. The aim of the conference was to prompt a critical discourse on the definition of dance, the interpretation of dance history and the reflection in dance research as well as the perception of the dancing body and the dancer’s movement from an intersectional perspective.
Over the course of the last 30 years, the archival turn has influenced various disciplines such as anthropology, philosophy and cultural theory as well as many forms of art.1 The archival turn can be defined as a network of concepts emphasising the purpose and aim of the archives in relation to political and institutional power while simultaneously redefining the possibilities presented by the archival notion, allowing for more fluid, more pluralistic concepts that better reflect the diversity of societies.2
The concept of the archive as a form of gatekeeper of relevant knowledge in a society is an idea derived from Western, European and American traditions.3 It has since been criticised for excluding not only other knowledge-building structures, such as non-curated, non-written or non-tactile forms, but also for keeping out a large part of society, mainly non-white, non-male – those who do not hold the power.
Starting from the ongoing conceptual and practical work for a new TanzArchiv Berlin, I will point out how developing the concept of the TanzArchiv intertwines with the theoretical implications of the archival turn, negotiating how a new TanzArchiv Berlin can be an archive for the whole scene – open to everyone, reflecting in new ways on knowledge about dance and of dance makers, and the knowledge produced in dance and movement.
In 2018, as part of the Runder Tisch Tanz (or Round Table Dance) participatory process, a continuous one-year discussion involving more than 200 artists, actors from the field of dance, research etc. took place with the aim of negotiating work conditions within the field of dance in Berlin. Questions raised during this process surrounded funding structures, mediation strategies, diversity and inclusion, one such topic being the question of how to transfer knowledge of dance into the future.
Since October 2020 a group of five experts4 from the field of dance practice, dance theory, dance journalism, dance documentation and dance archiving has been working on turning the world upside down, starting to rethink from scratch the form an archive for dance should take: thinking from the perspective of who is represented and who is representing, what representation and participation might look like and what forms and structures of collaboration might follow.
I will present the results of this research in the following text and will try to derive from them six imperative action areas: the dimensions of the future dance archive.
It is in the archive that our presence is captured and its traces read relationally in time. And it is also in the archive that history can be encountered as subjective memories and that subjective memories are shaped as collective histories.5
First of all, we need to admit that archives have excluded and likely always will exclude individuals, collectives, and social groups with their memories, their knowledge, their experiences – this happens no matter how hard you try to present them through pragmatic archival processes that structure knowledge, be it sorting knowledge objects, indexing objects and events, or bringing knowledge into order.
There is no way of entirely avoiding these processes within a single archive. The only way to approach this issue is by constantly building new archives (and naming them as such) that try to find new ways of sorting information (which may again exclude other facts or individuals), try to include new groups, behaviours and knowledge and thus constantly create a tension between existing archives and (not yet) created archives. The constant reinvention of the archive, the procedural archive which might eventually become long-term, seemingly everlasting, which is then questioned again – must be the aim if we are to work against exclusive and discriminatory processes.
There’s no such thing as the perfect archive. How can we know how best to create new archives, then? The fact is we don’t. What we have to do is to speculate, negotiate, try out, experiment.
In 2019 Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam created the Speculatief Design Archief (Speculative Design Archive), trying to uncover the value of both acknowledged masterpieces and forgotten treasures. Questions asked in the creation of this archive included: What will we save for the future, and what will be forgotten? Why will it be forgotten? Who will decide what will stay, and on what criteria will this decision be based?
Similarly to the memory of dance, the collective memory of design is scattered, often recreated, reused – sometimes neatly organized in the aftermath, but more often extremely disorganised.
Through the temporary nature of the Speculatief Design Archief project, Het Nieuwe Instituut had the opportunity to investigate many potential solutions for the Dutch Design heritage, invite numerous actors (institutional, individual, governmental) in the field of design to participate and thus to focus on the question of safeguarding within the area of art heritage in general.
What we seem to need is a speculative dance archive. Knowledge within the field of dance does not (or does not only) lie in texts – it is comprised of bodies, memories, gestures, movements, interpersonal relationships. The question of what to collect in such a dance archive cannot be answered easily. We need to collect everything that makes up the art of dance – memory, movement, object! We cannot know what will be important to someone one day. We cannot decide how not to exclude someone or something. Every decision may lead to exclusion. We must try to go in new directions, find new dances, create new dances for a new Archive. More is more!
How do we move from an archival universe dominated by one cultural paradigm to an archival multiverse; from a world constructed in terms of “the one” and “the other” to a world of multiple ways of knowing and practicing, of multiple narratives co-existing in one space?6
The archival multiverse is a term introduced by a research team led by editors Anne J. Gilliland, Sue McKemmish and Andrew J. Lau that describes interdisciplinary – including multi-perspective – archival concepts that also embrace incommensurable cultural expressions, understandings and epistemologies. As an important starting point and source for the team’s publications, the knowledge and transmission methods of indigenous communities in the Americas and Australia/Oceania allow for an enhanced perspective on the notion of knowledge transfer, on the transmission of experiences and the movement of thoughts. The idea of how knowledge is part of a society, a community, a state needs to be examined anew.
Rooted in the theories of the Enlightenment, the Western tradition of aiming at a unification of knowledge7 and concentrating on a certain linearity in truth-finding has influenced the perception, construction and working methods of the archive in these spheres. Therefore, there is an urgent need to reinvent the archive, to include a range of forms of knowledge, which sometimes even contradict each other. New forms of recognition, empowerment and visibility are possible when professional academic forms of analysis stand side by side with practical community knowledge, with written records, with intangible practices and routines, with bodily movement.
In her TED talk “The danger of a single story” Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie says: How (stories) are told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Acknowledging the necessity of different perspectives and recognising who we are when telling a story (retelling, documenting and archiving), is an important step.
Since 2012, representatives of the independent archives in Germany, known as the archives of movement – though here it is political movement that is meant, not dance – have been meeting regularly to discuss how to interconnect their work. Numerous smaller and bigger archives that sprang up out of the upheavals of the 1960s in Germany – environmental initiatives, queer and feminist movements, opposition to the GDR, peace movements – to document the active protest work, forming collections of notes, flyers, posters. These groups exchange ideas on archiving methods, legal implications, digitisation. The “archives from below” always existed in parallel to the established state and community archives. These smaller archives with drastically smaller budgets (if any) that focused on similar issues helped them very pragmatically to agree on a form of knowledge transfer to keep their collecting process going until the present day.
These two examples/notes come from very different perspectives on the questions of representation and involvement and can also be interpreted as signifying the importance of collaboration within the archive.
Knowledge on dance, quite similarly to the example of Adichie, is usually not contained in one person, the archivist – the person in power. Rather, knowledge needs to be found in different groups, collectives, societies. It lies in between relational forms. The acceptance of different ways to approach knowledge in dance through forms of collaboration also allows us to accept a decentralised structure of intertwining working methods.
Furthermore, collaboration around how to maintain an archive creates the chance of sustainability for the archival work as done in the “archives from below”. Only if the exchange on archive structures is vividly active is it possible to also keep smaller archival structures alive (though funding will, of course, always be another key issue).
The concept of the TanzArchiv Berlin includes drafting a working process at the intersection of archival work and artistic practice. During the last year, the TanzArchiv has tried to build up a network of Archive Accomplices8 working on various projects in the field of dance archival practice, researching from different practical and academic perspectives. The network will continue to grow as an important part of the new TanzArchiv, constantly introducing new perspectives on the question of what a dance archive should look like.
Speaking of networks: in their ongoing project Touching Margins, dance artists and scholars Sasha Portyannikova and Nitsan Margaliot, who are both Archive Accomplices for TanzArchiv Berlin, work together with various artists and researchers9 whose own artistic research projects concentrate on exploring the edges of narratives in dance history. Topics being examined by the participating artists include overlooked artists and teachers, underrepresented dance heritage and non-western dance traditions.
The core characteristics and working methods of the project – the long duration, longevity and plurality of the research, procedural methods which allow researchers to search and rethink, to explore and to dismiss – enable the participants to rediscover forgotten or underrepresented forms of dance characters and techniques, schools and ideas by also changing their own expectations and knowledge about dance. Undoing and redoing, rethinking and recreating the archival work constitute necessary steps towards new forms of archives and knowledge transmission.
To do these things from the point of view of the dance artist seems like an obvious step in establishing a dance archive, given that such an archive should always be centred around this art form. However, it is still uncommon to invite the artist to be involved in their indexing within the archive. In addition, artistic intervention in the archive, where it does occur, is still a rather rare peculiarity in terms of the everyday archive work: a “nice to have”, as it were. Nevertheless, the presence of the artist in different stages of the archival process is badly needed and should form the basis of every art archive.
Which brings me to my last point: archives are always highly subjective. If we recognise this fact, it becomes easier to accept dynamic structures of the archive which may be questioned by anyone and which allow for participation.
Understanding archives not as keepers of goods, but as social and discursive spaces, paves the way for diversified archives. These spaces allow us to unlearn common knowledge, to try out, to participate. But what does participation mean in this case? To loosely translate Renate Höllwart (one of the authors of the publication “Sich mit Sammlungen anlegen”10, a play on the German words meaning “to create” and “to fight against”): “Participation means coming up with approaches that succeed in developing knowledge across the hierarchies of common knowledge production.”11
The chance to transform the archive through this additional fifth dimension, the audience, (the first four being: artists, activists, researchers and archivists) as a social place puts archives in a new position, recognising the need to redevelop all institutions of memory – museums, libraries and galleries alike – so that people and the public will be part of their knowledge production.12
In this context, participation presumes that the audience of the archive is in a position of not only passive but also active involvement, between observing and interacting with the archive, between receiving and also giving knowledge. It is a core element of the archive’s “being in the world”, its contemporaneity and its relevance.
1 For a comprehensive introduction to the various implications and effects of the “archival turn” see: Gilliland, Anne J.; McKemmish, Sue; Lau, Andrew J.: Research in the archival multiverse, Monash University Publishing, Clayton Australia 2016. This document is accessible as an open document: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/31429.
2 Ibd., e.g. p. 25, p. 45, p. 577, and more.
3 Ibd., p. 31
4 The experts are: Doris Kolde, Claudia Feest, Claudia Henne, Alex Hennig and myself. Together with the Berlin dance associations Zeitgenössischer Tanz Berlin and Tanzbüro Berlin, we are developing an initial concept of the future TanzArchiv Berlin. The Berlin dance scene has also been involved in this process through a number of public meetings.
5 Gianachi, Gabriella: Architecture, Memory, and the Archive; in: Archive everything. Mapping the everyday; The MIT press Cambridge USA, 2016, p. 60.
6 Quote from Archival Multiverse (see above) citing the article: “Educating for the Archival multiverse”, Gilliland, Anne J.; McKemmish, Sue; Lau, Andrew J.: Research in the archival multiverse, Monash University Publishing, Clayton Australia 2016, p.9.
7 Gianachi, Gabriella: A brief history of the Archive; in: Archive everything. Mapping the everyday; The MIT press Cambridge USA, 2016, p. 1.
8 The Archive Accomplices of the Berlin Dance Archive, who were found partly through an open call and partly by direct invitation, are: Andrea Keiz, Kirsten Maar, Irene Sieben, Christopher Drum, Nitsan Margaliot, Sasha Portyannikova, Anna Chwialkowska, Teresa Fazan, Antonia Gersch, Agata Siniarska, Netta Weiser, with the support of Jette Büchsenschütz.
9 The group is constantly growing. Starting with the project “Touching margins”, it involved Peter Pleyer, Laurie Young, Przemek Kamiński , Elisabeth Hampe, Michiyasu Furutani, Christelle Ahia Kamanan, Kasia Wolińska and Agata Siniarska, in 2020, and then continued with the NPN-funded project “Moving margins” in 2021 (Amelia Uzategui Bonilla, Bianac Mayasari Figl and again Christelle Ahia Kamanan, Kasia Wolińska , Agata Siniarska)
10 Höllwart, Renate: Eine Beziehung mit offenem Ausgang. Sammeln als Versammeln, Vermitteln, Verlernen, in: Martina Griesser-Stermscheg, Nora Sternfeld und Luisa Ziaja (eds.): Sich mit Sammlungen anlegen. Gemeinsame Dinge und alternative Archive. De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2020, p. 160.
11 Original quote: “Teilhabe meint hier nicht das bloße Hinzufügen von neuen Zielgruppen, sondern vielmehr die Entwicklung von Ansätzen, denen es gelingt, Wissen quer zu den Hierarchien der gängigen und vorherrschenden Wissenproduktion zu entwickeln.”
12 See Renate Höllwart’s text for a comprehensive proposal in regard to a “new museum”.
Christine Henniger is Project Manager of the Media Library for Dance and Theatre and coordinates the areas archive and practice as well as cultural heritage in the performing arts at the ITI. She previously worked at the HfS, the FU Berlin, the University of Hildesheim and at the Dachverband Tanz, after studying Philosophy and Linguistics at the HU Berlin. She was a DAAD scholarship holder in Uppsala and St. Petersburg.
