Dance as a Gift

Abstract

This conversation was held on 19 February 2020 at the International Research Center ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ in Berlin shortly after Nanako Nakajima’s final presentation of her Valeska Gert Professorship. 1 Nanako Nakajima developed the Berlin version of the project Dance Archive Box with Dance Studies students from the Freie Universität Berlin. Initially proposed by theatre maker Ong Keng Sen, and conceived and facilitated by him, Daisuke Muto and Nanako Nakajima – and later Margie Medlin together with seven dance artists – the Dance Archive Box was initially launched with the Saison Foundation, Tokyo, in 2014, and exchanged and further developed in Japan and Singapore with artists of contemporary and traditional dance from the Asia-Pacific region. In the previous project, seven contemporary dance makers from Japan archived their works through their respective methods, each creating an archive box and then handing it over to another artist from a different background for re-performance. This time, Dance Studies students from the Freie Universität Berlin received these archive boxes from Japan and investigated how they could be used for recreation. There they found traces and documents of unknown dance movements: notes and drawings, pieces from costumes, sound recordings, or just one short letter. Dance Archive Box Berlin – a practical investigation into the archiving and reconstruction of movement – has been created through dramaturgical and performative explorations of the boxed material. In the field of Japanese contemporary dance, which has emancipated itself from the familial master-student relationship that long governed the Japanese system of passing on an art tradition, the project posed the following questions: how is it possible to separate a dance from the communal histories of the dance maker and to produce a Dance Archive Box as a creative common ground for all people? what does it mean to share a dance without sharing time with the dance makers themselves? how do we reconstruct whose histories for whom? what aspects of dance in the past should be passed on as an archive for the future?