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Artists are often archiving – through practice, creative processes, writing and notation, via online platforms, through teaching. Sometimes a choreographic artist has an archival practice that is a part of their creative work. Sometimes an artist’s archival work meets museum archives for various reasons, and that is the encounter addressed in this section of the Resource.
In contrast to a museum art collection, which tends to focus on collecting singular artworks, an archive tends to manage a network of material that surrounds an artist's work or practice, such as documentation or ephemera, notebooks and letters. Archives are usually research driven and public access can be restricted. They are typically drawn upon for curatorial or historical research, and sometimes, also for exhibition purposes.
There are many ways a choreographic artist’s archive can enter the museum. The main reasons for a museum to archive a choreographic work are:
There are also corporate records that are created and archived as a matter of course by the museum including correspondence and contracts that artists may be unaware of. These are often legally mandated.
The choreographic artist’s archive is likely to be a collection of materials that have come together during the course of an artist’s practice and include notebooks and notes about the work, correspondence, and grant applications. This is different from a collection of singular artworks in a museum collection, where you might encounter and work with a conservator. However, in the art museum the archive and collections often speak to each other and work together. The individual components of the archive are related to each other and specific works of art through the way they are stored both physically and digitally as metadata or digital versions. When dealing with choreographic works, the distinctions between specific works of art and the archive are even less clear than they usually are. This might be because the works are only referenced in the archive and not in collections and exhibition histories. It might also be because of the interdependence between archival materials, the documentation of a work and the work itself.
Dance and choreography demand alternative approaches in archival practices to best keep the active, changeable, transient and live aspects of these forms alive in the archive. And archives can be helpful for the preservation of choreographic works that intersect with the museum. Archivists might have a different kind of working relationship with an artist than a curator or conservator as they can often collect artists’ archives who are not in the curatorial collection. Archives might also provide an alternative to a performing arts library or collection for an artist.
For the archivist, dance can change the way they think about and treat archival materials Because the primary material in such cases is often performers and choreographic processes, embodied knowledges become central and require novel ways of enlivening and preserving the ephemera attached to those bodies and processes. This can provide an opportunity for the innovation and expansion of museum practices.
An archivist might want to consider alternatives to Western concepts of the archive rooted in manuscript material. What might First and Indigenous Peoples’ knowledges and understandings of memory, history and legacy bring to the intangible cultural aspects of dance and choreography archives? What might the thinking of choreography in the archive bring to archival practices as a whole?
A fictional example of an archival approach to choreography in the museum.
A fictional example of an archival approach to choreography in the museum.
A fictional example of a situation where a choreographic artist housing their archive in a museum.
A fictional example of a situation where a choreographic artist housing their archive in a museum.
