The dancing body as a living archive

Vionnet, Claire; Becholey Besson, Christelle (2023). The dancing body as a living archive. Choreographic Practices, 14(1), pp. 73-84. https://doi.org/10.1386/chor_00058_3

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This autoethnographic video-essay is based on ‘The Shadow of Others’, a performance presented in the seven-story Sir Duncan Rice Library in Aberdeen (Scotland) in May 2017. Focusing on the phenomenology of the dancing body, the performance unfolded the complexity and richness of gestures. Departing from the assumption that a soloist moves with their shadows (gestures from previous dances), I argue for the plural shaping every singular gesture. Combining dance and anthropology, this video-essay revisits the notions of archive, repertoire and anarchive, and proposes a reflection on the intermingling of time, gestures, memory, knowledge and history. Arguing that the (dancing) body is a living archive, I use the metaphor of shadow as a linkage between bodies and movements. Drawing on performance studies and contemporary philosophy, the work emphasizes the way artistic creation generates knowledge, asking the value of embodied practices.

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