Digging up the past: Some thoughts about preserving or reconstructing dance works By Linda Caruso-Haviland

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Prepared for a symposium presented by Dancefusion on the reconstruction of Women of Troy by Mary Anthony and the accompanying video documentary Age and Passion, Philadelphia, July 25th, 2006

Every dancer at some time has practiced the preservation of dance. Whether by entering into the process of accumulating the detailed or qualitative elements of a technique, or in repeating a sequence of movements for class, rehearsal, or performance, we have all engaged in recalling, remembering, reconstructing, and preserving dance. Some of us have also further practiced preservation by documenting rehearsals and performances of newly made or reconstructed or restored works, or by documenting the artistic histories of the work through interviews and conversations with choreographers or dance artists in an effort to keep these works and their memories alive and accessible to other artists, students, fans, or scholars.[note 1] Some work with companies or students, offering dancers opportunities to put on dances and gestures of past and contemporary choreographers, thus enabling them to experience a unique historical connection to a choreographer's work while re-embodying and re-presenting the work for new audiences. One way or another, we're all familiar with both the difficulties of remembering and reconstructing dance as well as the tremendous rewards.

Dancefusion company rehearsing the reconstruction of Women of Troy, by Mary Anthony, Philadelphia 2006; from left to right: Mary Anthony, and Dancefusion dancers Janet Pilla, AT Davenport, Christine Taylor, Jennifer Rose.

But beyond the stage and studio, there are also philosophical issues that attend these processes of reconstruction and that are often inextricable from aesthetic and practical problems. Whether a dance was first made five minutes, five months, five years, or five centuries ago, all present some similar challenges. Although a full discussion of these issues could occupy a much larger space, here are eight questions or problems—and few answers—for your consideration.

1) Can we trust our memories? The problems of memory are well documented in fields ranging from politics, to psychology, to history, to autobiographical writing, and beyond. Writer Barbara Kingsolver sums it up by reminding us that "memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin."[note 2]

Is the memory that we have of a dance a true or accurate memory? Is it reinvented, re-imagined? Is it both? Dancers also frequently call upon another sort of memory, a physical, neuromuscular phenomenon that has been well researched and is often called body memory, motor memory, muscle memory, or, more formally, procedural memory or neuromuscular facilitation. Most of us who dance or who have danced know exactly what we mean by body memory—our bodied selves in motion recalling, digging up that which eludes the more mental or verbal exercise of memory. Indeed, many of us swear by it. Yet having said that, a need for caution also arises. Remembering through our bodied selves is a skill unevenly distributed among dancers and even the surest of bodied memories can be faulty, forgetting over time or changing as our bodies change.

Memory of any sort may be a powerful tool, but it is likely that no instance of it is completely reliable: desire as we might to recreate the identical twin of work long gone, we might just have to settle for a more distant kindred spirit.