TanzArchivLeipzig – Disappearing Content and Traces of Past Events

Abstract

The TanzArchiv Leipzig (TAL) presents itself as a precarious archive of dance that blossomed in dubious political times. It was founded when East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a country during 1949–1990, in which art and culture were valued as national currency ( Bourdieu 1986 ; Lohman 1994 ). Although the archive had lost its domicile as an Institution of the GDR (1989) as part of a larger Institution of the Academy of Arts (Akademie der Kunst), then it continued to act as a research centre in the Institute of the House of Literature (Haus des Buches), then renting its own premises as a foundation thereafter (ca. 1993–2010) and finally, is currently stored since 2011 as the TAL collection in the Special Collections department in the Albertina Library, at the University of Leipzig ( Reinsberg 2002 ; Ruiz [2002] ; 2018). The archival collection embraces a large collection of ‘traces’ of dance content such as manuscripts, dance scores, film, sound and image artefacts as well as objects, publications and a variety of ephemera. However, its fate as an archive of a country that no longer exists, and the question of the preservation and circulation of its content make it an ambiguous and challenging dance archive to examine in full. In this article I will focus on the description and structure of the archive, the dissemination strategies Documenta Choreologica1and Kurt Petermann's passion for dance transmission, through his letter correspondence within and without East European countries during the Cold War ( Boehme 1948 ; Dafova 1996 ; Guilbert 2007 ).