Staging the Ethnographic of Dance History: Contemporary Dance and Its Play with Tradition

Abstract

Reconstructing and citing historical dance pieces as well as making the dance stage a site for archiving dance performatively have become major trends in contemporary dance (as this issue of DRJ demonstrates). Contemporary choreographers have left behind the incessant striving to create new movements and instead are engaging in dialogue with the past. While the “avant-garde” in Western stage dance was once perceived as embodying the “new” and was believed to be different from dance forms considered marked by tradition, these demarcations are now being challenged by both dance historians and artists (Franko and Richards 2000; Burt 2003). What's more, reenactments increasingly destabilize distinctions between the artistic and academic fields as they highlight the performative nature of “doing history” and present modes of research that involve lectures, texts, and documentation in a stage setting. As such, the past is a playground for the present—a notion of history that is also encouraged academically by a critical historiography that reflects on the narrative structures implicit in doing dance history (White 1990; Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer 1999). History as well as the act of memory are now considered a process that “constitutes, stages, re-stages, and constantly modifies its object while simultaneously creating new models and media of commemorating” (Fischer-Lichte and Lehnert 2000, 14; my translation).