971.4
Inscribing Dance: From Embodiement to Digital Media
The ephemeral aesthetic of dance, in comparison to other art forms, contains no tangible corpus. It’s matter - body and motion in live performance - are transitory and defy any attempts to record the practice in order to create an accurate transcription and permanency.
Since the beginning of the 21st century the accessibility and proliferation of digital media has influenced the way we document and archive the practice. On one hand, it has contributed to recording unique traditional dance forms that are considered to be in danger of disappearance due, mainly, to socio-political and ecological disturbances. However, though video recording contributes to preserve intangible cultural heritage through the documentation of the interpretation of dance works, it cannot be taken for the work itself (as is the text of a play in theatre or the score for music). Further, this accessibility of information through technology, this “visibility in excess”, is questioned both by practitioners and scholars; it can create a cultural bias, contributing to the contamination by cultural assimilation and globalization of a specific practice – to a certain extent, erasing what makes it unique.
Using specific examples of traditional and contemporary dance practices - the body as the first site of inscription of kinesthetic knowledge, text-based documents, audio and visual recording - this paper will attempt to shed light onto the different methods of inscribing and documenting dance, taking into account the sensory distribution of the different mediums. What is lost? What remains? And how does this sensorial translatability, from cells to pixels, generate alternative propositions to the documenting and/or re-enacting of dance/choreographic works?