Dance Archives in an Online Environment: The Impact of Digital Media on the Preservation of Dance History

Abstract

The archival strategies offered through the Dance Collections Danse (DCD) online database (based in Toronto) illuminate the emerging impulse to educate practitioners about archiving systems for the purpose of facilitating a more immediate organization of materials and information by the companies, choreographers, and dancers themselves. These strategies emphasize the importance of immediacy to the preservation of projects in theatrical dance, not only to avoid historical backtracking but also to generate a “living” history and a sustainable method for presenting contemporary movements in theatrical dance as they arise. While the move to digital archiving evokes the desire to preserve dance as a fundamental part of Canadian arts and cultural heritage, it also presents challenges vis-à-vis negotiating the most effective way to document this ephemeral art form in both development and production. This paper sets out to interrogate the relationship between dance archiving, the preservation of dance history, and digital media.

The Rhythms of Scholarly Publication: Suggestions to Enhance Bibliometric Comparisons Across Disciplines

“…Some works are “small circulation ephemera” (e.g., zines as described by Brown et al, 2021 ), and archiving and cataloging these works may be antithetical to the ethos in which they were created. In other cases, ephemera are cataloged and preserved (e.g., Esling, 2013 ), but those archives are not widely used in academic evaluation. For comparisons across disciplines to characterize the scholarship of faculty members in academic units, evaluators must move from asking “what journals does this database contain?” to questions such as “what knowledge dissemination types are pertinent to these disciplines?” and “do the types of knowledge production common in this discipline become quantifiable artifacts?”…”

Digitizing and Cataloguing Dance Collection Danse's VHS tape collection

“…The CIDD is a nationally distributed database that allows, not only DCD, but other dance companies and artists to organize, catalogue and preserve the various items in their collections. 116 In order to expand available information about Canada's dance history, 117 in 2016 CIDD software will allow users to upload records to a master database hosted by the DCD web site. 118 Here, dance research catalogue records can be accessed from all over the world.…”

Mapping Touring: Remediating Concert Dance Archives

“…Another trend in dance's archival turn that is closer to the terrain in which Mapping Touring operates is the creation of so-called artist-driven archives, for which dance artists direct or deeply participate in building digital archives around their bodies of creative work (Whatley 2013; Esling 2013; Candelario 2018). Dance researcher Sarah Whatley describes creating an online, “born-digital” archive around UK choreographer Siobhan Davies's work.…”

“…Building an online archive includes the additional labor of verifying the accuracy of automated processes, such as geographical coordinate assignments, 4 as well as maintaining the site, since digital platforms change with such frequency that websites and digital tools rapidly become obsolete (Chun 2016; Bench 2019). As Natalia Esling has observed in evaluating online dance archives, digital environments are “impermanent but accessible, transient but productive” (2013, 32). I agree with Esling's pairing of the impermanent and transient with the accessible and productive, since even a short-lived online archive can reach a broad audience who may not have the resources to travel to a physical collection, if they are even aware of it.…”