Keeping time in dance archives: moving towards the phenomenological archive space

Dance is one of the most public art forms; outside of improvisation, private practice and rehearsal, dance usually requires an audience. The creation and performance of dance takes place in liminal space, in the passage of time, within performers’ bodies, within the experiential exchange between the audience and the performers. The time-based phenomenology of dance is a challenge for dance archivists. It is also a challenge for the potential users of a dance archive to understand how or what from the experience of performed dance can be saved or preserved. In this article, I look at the ongoing debates in ballet and contemporary dance communities about the value of attempting to archive dance, resistance to attempts to essentialize their art-form into archivable formats and whether what the dance world recognizes as an archive is what the archive world would recognize as such.