The Body as Archive, the Archive as Body
- Submitting institution
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De Montfort University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 33117
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- Multi-component output: collection of creative and critical work on related topic, collectively greater than the sum of their parts.
- Open access status
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- Month
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- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- This multi-component output comprises three practical and one written component. The meta-aim of this research interrogates the dancer’s use of memory and experience as a corporeal archive to generate improvised performance, and its relation to archives of artefacts. The outputs span three sub-projects: Hourglass (2015-2020); Body of Knowledge (2016-2017) and Please Do Touch (2018-2020), and build upon my longstanding research into improvisation and memory, which includes previous REF submissions.
Aims:
1. To challenge the tradition of archives containing only tangible artefacts.
2. To investigate the role that corporeal archives play in choreography
3. To interrogate how archives document and generate performance
4. To develop strategies for drawing on/from the body
Hourglass is a solo performance commissioned by Dance4 in response to artefacts from the opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), and specifically a choreographic score by Lucinda Childs (1975). Questions about accessing archives supported me to retrieve, document and share memories by drawing on my costume mid-performance, thus blurring the distinction between memory; body; artefact; archive; documentation and generation. The book chapter evidences my approach to recalling memories through drawing on the body.
The research shifted into an inter-institutional collaboration with dance artist-academics Rachel Krische and Lisa Kendall (Leeds Beckett University), culminating in Body of Knowledge and Please Do Touch. Together they produced five performative outputs in which they access and share personal memories/experiences through conversation; reminiscing; stand-up acts; singing and dancing, thus rendering our corporeal archives tangible in improvised performance.
All outputs are concerned with accessing and making memories explicit during performance, with a particular emphasis on memory in relation to personal artefacts/archives and the interplay between the two.
Findings address new strategies for drawing from the body; making memories tangible in performance-making, and the use of archives to document and generate performance.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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