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AUDIO INTRO

Here you’ll find materials about choice-making—what to keep, who keeps it and how to keep it—along with information about how we might map an artist’s creative practice. You’ll find references to aspects of creative practice that are available outside, or even alongside the product—the dance—itself.

ARCHIVAL THINKING

Dana Whitco, Angie Hauser, and Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Jacob's Pillow:

How are we viewing the archive?

Video

Ishmael Houston-Jones:

The process of my practice seems so fragile and elusive to the idea of archive.

Writing

Dayna Hanson, Seattle:

[We] think about media as being inherently archival, and inherently lasting; and we work in live forms that are inherently ephemeral. So [...] there's something rich and unexpected to me about these digital forms like Snapchat or like Instagram Live that expire so quickly [...] That's somehow good, maybe. Maybe it's placing a [value] judgment.

Video

Bebe Miller, NYC:

There’s now a very different horizontal platform in the idea of archiving... The immediacy of the archive now—broadcast it, be done with it, let it be absorbed into the artistic mindset of the culture—even at the beginning of conceiving of the idea/event/artwork. In that difference between the vertical and horizontal, on a fascial/body level, is there a difference in the work we make, do we need to support both axes or yet a new direction?

Meeting Notes

Ann Carlson, NYC:

The search for the right word [...] is interesting. “Archiving is really not quite right….” What I hear in the search for the word, and also in the fascia, is value; trapping, mapping understanding value. You’re also immediately saying "the lifetime of this effort that I’m putting out in the world, what is its resonance?” I love the looking for the word that is the thing, the embodied connection…what is fascia? It changes, responds differently between body and bone, it’s self-supporting… Something about the word resonant, resonant meaning perhaps – what we are, what we do… I love the reach for the word. The horizontal and vertical thing, it’s the present-moment awareness that the song will keep going.

Meeting Notes

Reggie Wilson, Jacob's Pillow:

Is this for our own dramaturgy? Is this for another choreographer’s dramaturgy? Is this for historians?

Video

Dana Whitco, Jacob's Pillow:

That choreography could be thought of not as the creation of steps that have its own sort of logic, but that it is a wayfinding technique In the world.

Video

Claudia La Rocco:

There is often anxiety around documentation.

Writing

Ginger Farley, Chicago:

Is there a way to enlist [funders] in learning from this process…

Video

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Jacob's Pillow:

...as the archivist, as the curator, as the maker, I'm just showing you my ways in which I'm maneuvering through certain materials.

Video

Bebe Miller, Seattle:

Did we grow into this archiving of process? 30 years ago we only documented performance even though all that process was there. We have learned to love it and want to share that. When we stop wanting to do that, share that ephemeral aspect of what we love about process? What else is there? Our attention to process is a kind of thing.

Meeting Notes

Writing

Dayna Hanson:

…documentation has become more of an aesthetic pursuit…

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Raja Feather Kelly, Seattle:

Would other/newer ways to archive, change the way work was made?

Meeting notes

Bebe Miller, Seattle:

…there's something about the immediacy of [social media's] dispersal of information...

Video

Judy Hussie-Taylor, NYC:

Intersection between what are we doing, what are we saving, what are we collecting, what are we not doing—always at play in our work at least on the curatorial side. We’re making interventions, we’re making choices. What we all feel every day: whatever it is we value is under attack, in so many ways. A war on certain kinds of value systems. Maybe this is different than how/what we archive but these choices point to what we value.

Meeting notes

Raja Feather Kelly, Seattle:

What’s the nature of what we’re archiving? What are the layers important to us? Then the curator and teacher of dance history in me zoomed out further: What are the politics of inclusion? Who and what might be missing? … Who do we want to be in conversation with, now and 100 years from now?

Bonnie Brooks:

…over time these platforms have become largely digital…

Writing

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Jacob's Pillow:

I'm archiving this as a performative proposal and speech and transmission and community-building and mirroring improvisation...

Video

Nena Couch, Jacob's Pillow:

There are different ways that we choose what to keep.

Video