Abstract
This chapter focuses on a practice-research project, Body of (as) Knowledge, that promotes the body as a corporeal archive and considers what it means to document/generate and re-call/re-configure histories through embodied practice. It seeks to privilege the dancing body as a living resource of archival information and examines how a re-calling of embodied memory provokes the emergence of new performance encounters. The chapter points readers to a digital holding space that serves as a repository for documentation of Body of (as) Knowledge. Recognising the inherent contradiction of an online artefact of this living, embodied project, the authors have dictated that the holding space has a finite lifespan of 45 years. This time-sensitive, online archive challenges the traditional notion that ‘the archive [is] that which endures’ (Roms, Archiving Legacies: Who Cares for Performance Remains? In Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, ed. G. Borggreen and R. Rune Gade, 45. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013), and the authors discuss the tensions that have emerged through their attempts to capture and document their corporeal archives.
Body of (as) Knowledge was supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
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Notes
- 1.
Dance4 has a unique national voice in the development of new discourses, knowledge and practices that are informing the future of the dance and choreographic field from its home at the International Centre for Choreography in Nottingham, UK. As a strategic agent for dance, Dance4 provides local, national and international leadership, working in partnership with venues, local authorities, education, creative industries and other providers to connect the exploration of new territories in dance and choreographic practices, to the widest possible audience.
- 2.
Subsequent performances have taken place at The Modes of Capture: The Capturing of Process in Contemporary Dance-Making conference, University of Limerick, Ireland, 22 June 2019; and in Cultural Exchanges Festival at Leicester Gallery, De Montfort University, Leicester, 28 February 2020.
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Doughty, S., Kendall, L., Krische, R. (2020). The Holding Space: Body of (as) Knowledge. In: Whatley, S., Racz, I., Paramana, K., Crawley, ML. (eds) Art and Dance in Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44085-5_6
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