Spanish Dance, choreographed by Trisha Brown in 1973. Melbourne Festival

Performances are always transforming and reinventing themselves through the interactions that create them. Each one is a unique manifestation or expression of the experiences of the performer, their interpretation of the choreography and the audience. No two performances are identical. Understanding the dynamic nature of performance is integral to its preservation. To that end, how does performance in the archive exist and what are the challenges surrounding its preservation and access?

Consider Homemade (1966), a collaboration between Trisha Brown of the postmodern dance movement and artist Robert Whitman. It first premiered at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City in the spring of 1966. In this performance, Brown performs while wearing a projector on her back from which a 16mm film of her performing the same dance as she performs live is projected. While Brown moves, the projection moves around the performance space like a ghost, sometimes outside of the audience’s visual plane. Brown described her movements as “vignettes of memory.” Her movements are simple and taken from everyday life, such as tying a shoe, holding a baby, blowing up a balloon, “done so small they are unrecognizable,” as she put in her own words.

“I used my memory as a score. I gave myself the instruction to enact and distill a series of meaningful memories, preferably those that impact on identity.  Each memory unit is ‘lived’, not performed, and the series is put together without transitions that are likely to slur the beginning and the end of each discrete unit.  The dance incorporates a film of itself by Robert Whitman. A projector is mounted on the back of the performer and the film of the dance is projected onto the wall, floor, ceiling, and audience in synchronization with the ‘live’ dance.”

Quoted in Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961-2001

Mortensen, W. (n.d.). Photographs of Myrdith Mortensen [photographs]. William Mortensen Collection (AG 147, Box 14). Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona.

Homemade directly explores this issue of dance’s longevity (through its recording), while inviting reflection on the death and ephemerality of performance, since no two iterations of Homemade are alike. In the 1996 reprisal, which was presented at the 25th anniversary of the dance company, Brown reconstituted Homemade as a dance between her sixty-six-year-old self and her former self, aged thirty. Brown’s timing at sixty-six highlights the impossibility of realizing perfect fidelity to an original choreography in any one iteration. One can observe how the live version does not perfectly mirror the projected version. Thus, Homemade produces a new understanding of the role of memory in choreography, and of the artistic problems that surround the potential for revival, survival, and originality in an individual piece of choreography.

With new iterations of Homemade came new technologies. Whereas the 1966 version involved the use of a 16mm film projector, the 2012 version was made with a digital videotape. This version was not executed by Trisha Brown, but another longtime member of the dance company, Vicky Shick. While keeping Homemade’s original movements, this dancer reinterpreted the piece by exaggerating certain moves more than others.

Guest artist:  Vicky Shick performs "Homemade" (1966) choreography by Trisha Brown, presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music at the BAM Opera House on January 29, 2013. All Rights Reserved. Photo Credit:  ©Stephanie Berger.

As a dancer attempting to create the next rendition of Homemade, I am unsure if I would feel comfortable accessing Trisha Brown’s archive in a traditional finding aid-to-reading room setting. I would need a more intuitive system of information navigation. Brown choreographed many works during her life, but also turned to drawing and writing as an extension of her creative practice and did not differentiate her ‘works’ rigidly. If placed in the knowledge organization structure of the institutional archive there might be a tendency towards the creation of artificial divisions of her work that could potentially mislead or even erase the conceptual bridges she crafted from dance to drawing and to writing.

In a traditional archive, Homemade and its renditions of varying formats would most likely be arranged in certain hierarchies, by material type and/or chronological order. These modes of arrangement would take precedence over organizing the material in any other imaginative way that would offer access to dancers seeking to recreate Homemade. An alternative model to aspire to that would be beneficial to dancers would look something like Merce Cunningham’s Dance Capsules, whereby 86 of Cunningham’s major works were digitally preserved and linked to “an array of assets essential to the study and reconstruction of this iconic artist’s choreographic work.” Users can filter their searches by decade, composer, designer, duration, and dancers. This way, the archive not only serves the scholar writing a thesis about dance notation, but the dancer working on recreating a dance.

Trisha Brown, Untitled, 1973, graphite on paper

Prioritizing the academic researcher as the sole user of an archival collection will also presuppose the use of the archive within the dynamic of the reading room environment, where individual boxes are requested and reviewed in a quiet environment, sitting down. While a scholar might consult the archive to write a book about a dance company or performance artist, they study the archive as a finished product. This highlights a major difference between a traditional, straightforward, more paper-based archive and a performance archive, in that the purpose of returning to the archive for the dancer is often in order to reproduce or revive a performance. To do so, they would need to consult with the material in a collection with a method of engagement antithetical to a typical reading room. Dancers would not only need to curate the material (arrange individual pieces into an order that would help invigorate the dance from its static pieces e.g., photographs, illustrations, notation), but also physically perform the movements they are attempting to reconstruct or learn. Indeed, a NYPL staff member had mentioned at a Dance/USA conference how often they would see dancers pantomiming (as subdued as possible) the movements they see in the collections when they visit.

Carolina Meneses is a first year graduate student at the School of Library and Information Studies at UCLA, specializing in archival studies. Originally from Miami, she is interested in dance, performance art, food, and fashion and their intersection in the archive.