Inheriting Dance's Alternative Histories

Abstract

In 1975, German choreographer Kurt Jooss created his last dance, Dixit Dominus, for Swedish-based Indian dancer Lilavati Häger. After Rani Nair reconstructed what is often seen as a “minor” work, she then created Future Memory (2012) to engage more directly with her inheritance, from caring for the personal things and stories that surrounded the piece to re-working its promise of dancing between European and Indian forms. Working outward from my position as dramaturg and historian for this project, this essay addresses the potential and precariousness of contemporary dance's experiments with redoing history at the intersection of multiple contested legacies.

Fremdes Erbe: Nelisiwe Xaba and German Dance Heritage

“…(Photo by Fred Koenig) 1. For another project that aims to rethink dance heritage in its geopolitical implications, see Rani Nair's performance Future Memory (2012), a collaboration with dance scholar and dramaturge Kate Elswit on Kurt Jooss's solo for Lilavati Häger, Dixit Dominus (1975) (Elswit 2014).…”

Mapping Touring: Remediating Concert Dance Archives

“…An archival sensibility in dance opens onto questions of preserving dances and dance practices through embodied archives and media technologies, and the transformations that result in reenacting or otherwise re-presenting dance archives. Included among these trends, which I will not fully elaborate here, are the ways contemporary artists plumb the gestural and movement archives of modern dance repertory or their own choreographic careers in projects of reenactment and reperformance (Lepecki 2010; Elswit 2014; Franko 2017), as well as the use of social media platforms as vernacular archives through which documentations of past and present dances circulate (Bench 2016).…”