Three Case Studies of Artist-Driven Archives

Eiko & Koma: Choreographing Archives of Regeneration

Eiko & Koma began working together when they met at butoh cofounder Tatsumi Hijikata's studio in 1971. The pair soon set off on their own, dancing in Europe and North Africa before arriving in the United States in 1976, where they quickly became mainstays in the New York downtown dance scene. They are acclaimed for their slow-moving dances grounded in elemental concepts, like Grain (1983),Footnote ⁹ River (1996),Footnote ¹⁰ and Mourning (2007).Footnote ¹¹ Eiko & Koma began to explore archiving when they launched their Retrospective Project in Reference Otake2009.Footnote ¹² The three-year Retrospective aimed to examine their dances and archival materials from the past four decades for their continued or shifting resonances for contemporary audiences. The Retrospective produced an impressive amount of new work: museum and gallery exhibitions of photographs, sets, and screen dances; a new living installation; creation of new dances through revisiting choreographic material and musical collaborations; the revival of older works; and the publication of a catalog by the Walker Art Center (Rothfuss Reference Rothfuss2011). A redesigned website features a generous amount of full-length and excerpted video documentation alongside full-length media dances. Eiko Otake calls the website a “multi-media library, a virtual gallery, and a knowledge center where all activities of the Retrospective Project are archived, reported and shared” (Otake Reference Otake2012, 27).

Unlike a typical art retrospective, which serves as a capstone on an artist's career, Eiko & Koma conceptualized their Retrospective Project as a midcareer opportunity to look back in order to understand how to move forward. At the meeting launching the Project, the term “pro/retrospective” was used, and although it was not employed during the Project itself, the way the word links future/past indicates how Eiko & Koma were actively engaging the Retrospective as part of their creative practice. Looking back enabled them to see what they had abandoned and what they were still doing after so many years. The Project, Eiko wrote, “allows us to remember what we were thinking and find out how we think about it now” (Eiko & Koma, “About our Retrospective,” n.d.). It also allowed them to explore whether possibilities remain within their earlier works for further exploration and to reaffirm their commitment to some of their long-term themes. In this way, the duo's Retrospective was not just about reviving old pieces, but was explicitly about creating new work out of old dances. But most of all, the project was at its heart an active engagement of the artists with their own choreography and archival materials, rather than, for example, a curator creating a narrative of the body of work.Footnote ¹³

The choreographers' Retrospective differed from retrospectives commonly found in the visual arts realm in length and scope, lasting three years and encompassing a number of different exhibitions in addition to performances, rather than featuring one definitive exhibition that tours to a series of museums. This is in line with Eiko & Koma's practice that eschews a single definitive performance in favor of constant regeneration of dances. In a sense, Eiko & Koma's choreographic practice, even before the launch of the Retrospective, involved a constant recycling and renewal of their own bodily, choreographic, and material archives. Their Retrospective Project explicitly engaged what they called “regeneration,” in which they investigated how particular pieces have changed given their own changed bodies and contexts; they then either performed the work from that new perspective (for example, White Dance [1976] and Night Tide [1984])Footnote ¹⁴, or they sought out what of the original work still felt urgent and essential and used that to make a new work (for example, Raven [2010]).Footnote ¹⁵

At the Eiko & Koma: Time is Not Even, Space is Not Empty exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2011), costumes and set pieces on display were also in active use over the course of the exhibition for performances in the gallery, theater, and courtyard, challenging the idea that objects in museums are not to be touched (see Photos 1–3). Then, after they had been returned to the display, the items could evoke in museum visitors' memories of the live performance and, in a sense, keep those performances active. The Residue: Installation by Eiko & Koma exhibition at the New York Public Library's Astor Gallery (2011), on the other hand, was the first time that Eiko & Koma designed an environment in which their bodies would not be performing.Footnote ¹⁶ Residue’s centerpiece was a freestanding “Tea House,” constructed of canvas, feathers, rice paste, and other materials that linked it to the dance Raven (2010) and the month-long living installation Naked at the Walker Art Center (2010). The Tea House welcomed visitors to enter, rest, and reflect on a small digital video projection of Eiko & Koma at the center of the structure, while a series of video viewing “wells” that surrounded the Tea House invited visitors to immerse their upper bodies into the structure in order to see the video projected at the bottom. In the absence of Eiko & Koma's performing bodies, these structures put museum visitors' bodies in (mediated) relationship with the work.Footnote ¹⁷

Photo 1. Eiko & Koma: Time is Not Even, Space is Not Empty at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Photo by the author.

Photo 2. Eiko & Koma's costumes on display. Photo by the author.

Photo 3. Eiko & Koma perform Caravan Project in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Photo by the author.

This significant museum and gallery exhibition component of the Retrospective was not just about incorporating live performance practices into the visual arts exhibition space, nor about simply adapting visual arts practices for performing artists. Rather, Eiko reflected that using a visual arts approach to a performing arts body of work gave them “both a broader and deeper framework with which to engage audiences in their career” (Eiko & Koma “Retrospective Project,” n.d.). In other words, the project was aimed at increasing access to their work and creating new audiences for it, and museums provided one way to do that. Similar to outdoor performances in public squares, a regular flow of visitors to a museum meant that many people could happen upon Eiko & Koma's work—and even their performing bodies—in a way they never could in a theater. For example, the living installation, Naked, drew almost 8,000 people, including some who came specifically to see the dancers, and many others who came to see another exhibition or just to visit the museum in general. In this way, many people who would not have specifically sought out a dance performance had an experience with Eiko & Koma's work; their archival work actually made their dances more accessible to audiences, rather than reserving the archives for a privileged few.

While Eiko & Koma's Retrospective Project encompassed their entire body of work, the archival projects of Bebe Miller Company and Jennifer Monson make no claim to comprehensiveness. Miller's project engages primarily with work since 2001 through specific bodies and their history with the Company and the choreography. Monson's project focuses on one particular iteration of a long-term project. In both cases, their archives provide a partial view into the processes of a larger body of work, drawing attention to the ways that archives are never comprehensive and are always selective. And yet despite this focus on a more specific time period, as I will show below, their archive projects nonetheless produce a discourse of their choreography that is aimed at being both accessible to and usable by a broad audience.

Bebe Miller: Choreographing Archives of Storyness

Bebe Miller started her acclaimed postmodern dance company in New York in 1985. For the past thirty years, she has made dances grounded in improvisation that are deeply engaged with the human condition. “Storyness” describes for Miller the way her dances make meaning. In an interview with the author, Miller says, “Storyness is a topic that I keep on talking about in our work, but it isn't so much a story to tell, but that we are involved in the re-telling” (Miller, interview with author, January 9, Reference Miller2014). In recent years, Miller has become interested in what she calls “an archive of our practice.” She observes, “For most of us the point of doing all of this … I mean our life is more in the studio than on stage, it is the continuing creative conversation” (ibid.). This has led to a focus on documenting what Miller sees as the heart of their work: the creation and rehearsal process, which not only is not visible on stage, but which also typically is not centered in traditional repositories although traces of the process such as sketches, notes, and rehearsal footage may end up there. Miller shares, “the Company commissioned ourselves to somehow document a sense of [our] own perspective” (ibid.). Two recent projects, the dance A History (2012)Footnote ¹⁸ and the free digital book, Dance Fort: A History (2015), are archival projects that use the live performance and the digital medium as two ways of exploring the storyness of the Bebe Miller Company's work. For Miller, the archive is not in the raw materials but in the process through which those materials are generated, rehearsed, danced, and redanced. In other words, it is the very storyness of the work, the process of retelling it or remapping it, that shapes her artist-driven archive. By focusing on the work's “storyness,” Miller emphasizes the artistic process rather than the work as a finished product.

This approach is distinguished from the official Bebe Miller Company archives, which are housed in the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute in the Ohio State University's Special Collections. In fact, the ability or impetus to form artist-driven archives does not seem to hinge on the existence of an official repository as they are very different projects. The Bebe Miller Company repository at the Ohio State University was established almost by chance. When Miller was moving to Columbus from New York, she mentioned to a member of the Ohio State dance faculty that she would have to give up her storage space and get rid of some of the company's materials; the Ohio State University's Special Collections offered to take the materials and helped her ship them out. Miller does not give a lot of thought to that repository now. She told me, “I don't go back to the archive. It's there. But it is not for me to go ‘Oh what did we think about and do?’ You know, we lived it” (Miller, interview with author, January 9, Reference Miller2014). In this statement, Miller seems to favor her own embodied experiences and those of the Bebe Miller Company over the repository materials. It is this kind of thinking that prompted Miller to create a new kind of digital archive that could begin to express those embodied experiences. The result was the digital book, Dance Fort.

In 2011 Miller, dancers Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones, and dramaturge Talvin Wilks began working on a digital archive that could reflect their multiple perspectives. The name “dance fort” brings up images of a solid and safe place, but also a site of childhood play made of pillows, blankets, and imagination. Early on, the Company described their Dance Fort as:

A web-based portal designed to share with a broad audience what it feels like to be inside a dance in the making. We imagine Dance Fort as a technological play-space, part installation, part eBook, part website. Containing cross-referenced research materials “danced,” viewed, spoken and shared, Dance Fort will serve as a richly interactive archive of BMC's creative processes and function as a documentation template for other dance artists, ultimately shifting the paradigm of an artist's archive from artifact to artwork. (Bebe Miller Company “Projects,” n.d.)

As the Dance Fort concept germinated, the idea came up to make a dance that grappled with some of the same issues. Miller says it was “not so much ‘let's make a piece about the archive,’ but you know, while we were looking back why don't we make something new?” (Miller, interview with author, January 9, Reference Miller2014). A History stages the process of the Company dancing its own history and dancing with that history via revisited movement scores (particularly from the 2001 dance, Verge Footnote ¹⁹), audio recording, projected text and video, and indeed members' own bodies. “We set up a situation where Angie and Darrell [in the process of] improvising look for themselves, look for bits of an early work. And so it's like kind of re-encountering that moment of not only physical position and proximity, but then you are also entering into the memory of the studio itself and what else was going on” (Miller, interview with author, January 9, Reference Miller2014). This sense of entering into relationship with somewhere you have been before is the “storyness” that Miller spoke of earlier. The resulting dance, A History, was, according to the Company website, “designed to invite audiences into what dance making feels like, sounds like, thinks like,” and “can be viewed as both the evidence and performance of a creative process” (Bebe Miller Company, “A History,” n.d.). The archive is in the bodies here and now, just as it is in the choreography and the documentation. While critics were of mixed opinions about whether the danced archive was a successful piece of choreography,Footnote ²⁰ in this article I am less interested in the reception of the works and more in the ways they might impact thinking about archiving and archives. Indeed, the crux of my argument about Miller's archival work here is precisely that she foregrounds the process of dancemaking as the focus of her artist-driven archive. This is not to say that choreographic process is not reflected in other dance archives; evidence of choreographic process is often included in archival collections in the form of scores, notes, rehearsal footage, costume sketches, etc. The difference is that in artist-driven archives these kinds of materials have been choreographed in a particular way. In Miller's case, she does more than just make available evidence of her choreographic process; she uses that material to put forth a view of the company's work as choreographic process.

In terms of archives, storyness suggests revisiting and drawing out the processes that produced the dances of Bebe Miller Company. One of the ways company members explicitly did this during rehearsals for A History was to invite the presence of what they called an “embedded archivist.” Rachael Riggs Leyva, a Dance Heritage Coalition Archival Fellow and then OSU PhD student, accompanied Miller, Wilks, and the dancers to a two-week residency at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in summer 2011 for what Leyva called “an experiment to see how dance companies and choreographers might use an archivist creatively to support their work” (Reference Leyva2015, 206). During the residency she recorded conversations, made transcripts, catalogued audio and video files, and, as Miller put it, “looked at how we did what we did” (Miller, interview with author, January 9, 2014). Leyva documented her time in the studio on a blog that was made available to the general public and wrote about the process in her PhD dissertation (Leyva Reference Leyva2011, Reference Leyva2015). Thus, even as archives and the idea of storyness formed the basis for A History, new archives were being generated from that very process.

Even though the Dance Fort idea preceded the development of A History, the dance provided the focus around which the digital book was designed; Miller describes the digital book as “a map of how we got there that somebody else could enter” (interview with author, January 9, Reference Miller2014), enabling readers to follow creative pathways from the perspectives of Miller, Wilkes, Hauser, Jones, video artist Lily Skove, and creator of the installation for A History Maya Ciarrocchi. By choosing how to navigate between the sections of the e-book (“Preface,” “Tracking the Process,” “Angie-ness,” and “Darrell Drive,” see Photos 4a–4c) and among new texts, documents of rehearsal schedules and notes, video interviews, rehearsal and performance video, readers can experience the dancemaking process even as they create their own connections and routes among the materials. The result is an intimate and vital experience, live in a theater and on the tablet in one's hands, of the Bebe Miller Company's artistic process (as) archive.

Photos 4a–c. Screenshots from Dance Fort: A History. Courtesy of Bebe Miller and the Ohio State University Affordable Learning Exchange.

Jennifer Monson: Choreographing Archives of Place, Experience, and Systems

For Jennifer Monson, dance is itself already an archive of place, experience, and systems. Monson began making experimental dance in New York City in 1983, often based in improvisation and dealing with issues of identity. Since 2000, Monson has focused her choreographic research on particular ecological systems. For example, BIRDBRAIN was a six-year, multisite navigational dance project that followed migration patterns of pigeons, gray whales, ospreys, ducks, and geese. After the completion of the project, Monson realized that she had accumulated significant embodied knowledge that some of the dancers and project partners did not have. She had also generated through BIRDBRAIN a great deal of information about these in-flux ecological systems that was external to her body, such as video documentation, flyers, etc. A decade later, she created Live Dancing Archive (2012) in order to grapple with how to make all of that information accessible. She decided to focus on the 2002 Osprey Migration, “an eight-week dance research project following the migration of ospreys along the Atlantic Flyway from Maine to Venezuela” (Live Dancing Archive, 2013, “About the Archive”). Live Dancing Archive includes three components: a dance performance, an online digital archive, and a video installation, all sharing the same name. Through this project, Monson created new archival forms that allow her to make the knowledge and experiences collected about ecological systems and particular places through her own dancing body and through other bodies and materials accessible to a broad audience.

For the 2012 dance component of Live Dancing Archive, Monson learned selected movement material from over 50 hours of video documentation of the osprey migration. She learned not just her own dancing, but other participants' as well. Much of the movement had been improvised in relationship to particular locations and conditions, with each dancer bringing his or her own particular movement proclivities and bodily structures into play. By staging her attempt to reembody dancing (hers and others') that was generated ten years previously in relationship to a series of places that are themselves in constant flux, Monson emphasizes the impossibility of archives to repeat or fix dances. She says:

I knew I wanted to critique video as a way of archiving a dance … the idea of absence came up for me over and over again. As I, as carefully and thoroughly as I could, learned this material from the video, both of myself and other people's bodies, I realized, you know my body's 12 years older, I couldn't do the same things, the landscape wasn't the same, there was an impossibility of restoring the dancing and that is something that I find very resonant with the impossibility of restoring ecological systems. (Monson, interview with author, March 12, Reference Monson2014)

Along with movement learned from video, Monson also incorporated improvisation into the live dance component of Live Dancing Archive to mark the sense that there is constant change and something new being created, not just lost. She says, “both dance and landscapes are ongoing, they're not fixed, they're always unstable, they're always changing” (ibid.). So, in addition to identifying dance itself as already an archive of place, experience, and systems, Monson also notes how the process of archiving her dance reflects some of these larger systems as well, for example, revealing the loss inherent in archives or the impossibility of fixing something that is always in flux.

While the live dance reflects on the knowledge generated and lost by dancing bodies, the digital component of Live Dancing Archive Footnote ²¹ is Monson's way of sharing the information gathered during the osprey migration that is external to her own body, such as photographs, programs, and other documentation.Footnote ²² “My body holds some things,” she says, “but looking back at it, I wanted to make an archive that would be available to other people who might not be so interested in dance per se but who would be interested in the ecological shifts that had happened over the past ten years” (Monson, interview with author, March 12, Reference Monson2014). Monson's movement practice provided a framework for the web-based digital archive. So even though her aim was to make the materials available to people who are not necessarily interested in dance, she nonetheless asks the archive users to engage with the material through an approach grounded in dance improvisation. For example, the archive home page cycles through images, and a “random object” button invites visitors to jump into the materials without knowing exactly where they are going. Visitors are also able to browse by object type, people, places, terms, events, and collections and to put together their own pathway through the materials, rather than being held to an original order, as is the standard in traditional archival practices (see Photo 5).Footnote ²³ Monson observes, “The kind of creative ways that the body or the choreography puts things together, is so embedded in our [dance] world and I feel like it needs to be articulated and pulled out more” (Monson, interview with author, March 12, Reference Monson2014). The digital archive is her attempt to do just that.

Photo 5. Screenshot from Live Dancing Archive. Courtesy of Jennifer Monson.

The three-hour video installation component of Live Dancing Archive, created by Robin Vachal and displayed as part of the New Museum exhibition, Performance Archiving Performance (2013), is another attempt at archiving a way of knowing based on embodied practice. Vachal created the installation out of the same fifty hours of video documentation from which Monson culled movement for the live performance. But unlike the performance, which has a specific beginning and end, gallery visitors can determine how long they spend in the installation and how often they return (if at all). Monson describes it as “like going on the migration. You sit quietly and you space out … be in this space where there's the sound of ocean and these bodies dancing far away, you don't really have to pay attention, it just kind of absorbs into you. … It's different from what the [live] dance can do and it's different from what the [digital] archive can do” (Monson, interview with author, March 12, Reference Monson2014). How Monson discusses her work is resonant with how Mathew Reason thinks about live performance and archives. Reason identifies in many archival and reconstruction efforts such a desire to “save” live performance, but challenges the assumption that these practices “allow access to an authentic memory of past performances” (Reference Reason2006, 83). Even though archives were traditionally premised on the principles of “accuracy” and “objectivity,” Reason points out that archival practices actually participate in transforming the dance.Footnote ²⁴ Rather than being interested in an “accurate” record of the performance (or information that would lead to an accurate restaging of the performance), he seeks an accurate experience of the performance. By highlighting choreographic processes such as improvisation and the impossibility of precisely repeating past performances in her live, digital, and installation archival practices, Monson seeks to draw out not only the processes employed by the dancers during the osprey migration, but more precisely the experiences of the ecological systems.

Instead of an opposition between the live, the digital, and the archive, Monson's Live Dancing Archive project links them together. By using the same name for all three aspects of her project—live, digital, and installation—Monson urges her audiences to consider each of the facets individually alongside one another. How is a live dance already an archive? How is a digital archive with photos, video, journal entries, workshop plans, programs, and schedules live dancing? How is a three-hour video installation more than just an archive of live dancing? Is the video itself dancing live? And yet, Monson is careful to distinguish exactly what she is archiving, saying, “I'm archiving ecological systems. I'm not so much interested in archiving dance … I'm really arguing that dance is its own way of producing knowledge about ecosystems and collecting data” (Monson, interview with author, March 12, Reference Monson2014). In other words, the dance is no longer just about the steps, the costumes, the set, the lighting, and the music; rather, it is about the dancing bodies that come to know and hold information about a whole ecological system. For Monson, dance's relevance extends well beyond the stage as a way of archiving other larger processes. Her focus on “place, experience, systems” helps us understand that dance archives are not limited to what can be preserved in one location or collection; the archives are necessarily larger even as they remain contingent and specific.

Accessibility and Generativity Versus Preservation

The three artist-driven archive projects described above in their performance, digital, and exhibition iterations all have in common a focus on using the archive to increase audience access as well as to generate additional performances, both by the artists themselves as well as by the audience. In each of these cases it is increased circulation of the choreography over multiple media (web, digital book, museum spaces, etc., in addition to performance spaces) that enables larger numbers of people to have an experience with the choreographer's work and that also provides the artist herself with multiple novel (to her) stages on which to make and present the work. Indeed, Harmony Bench identifies the focus on the importance of accessibility (rather than ontological issues of absence/presence) and circulation (rather than performance versus documentation) as a major change ushered in by the rise of digital archives (2017, 157). Bench even sees the proliferation of performances prompted by increased circulation as an effect of the digital. Although for Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company, and Jennifer Monson the digital is just one aspect of their archives along with performance and gallery installations, the governing logic of digital archives, as identified by Bench, does seem to dominate across all three modes.

Digital media and digital social networking have fundamentally influenced how information is gathered and shared in the early twenty-first century. No longer does one need access to specialized cameras, film, and screening equipment; a smart phone and an internet connection are all one needs to record, share, and watch high-quality rehearsal video, interviews, and performance documentation. Indeed, Miller pointed to this in our interview (January 9, Reference Miller2014), specifically mentioning the availability of new tools and technology as the impetus to expand her work beyond the stage, noting that she finds these new technologies allow her to ask similar questions via new avenues. As a result of the increased availability of technology, it would appear that top-down, hierarchical structures have been replaced by more lateral networks that emphasize open access. In this context, the viability or success of any given item is judged not by specific aesthetic standards but by the number of “hits,” or frequency of access, that are to a significant extent governed by algorithms, paid advertising, paywalls, and the like. In the digital era, then, the fear of disappearance has been replaced by the possibility of watching over and over again. By extension, the role of the digital in the current archival focus is also significant. Diana Taylor observes that digital technologies and practices do not replace archives or repertoires, but rather impact how we know both (Reference Taylor2012).

Sarah Whatley has written extensively about the digital archive, Siobhan Davies RePlay (SDRP), which she worked on from conception to launch. The “choreographic archive” includes searchable digitized text (programs, fliers, articles, etc.), images, and video. Whatley argues that by making a choreographer's rehearsal process available, digital archives broaden expectations for what an archive includes and does (Reference Whatley2013b). She also suggests that digital archives enable relational encounters between audiences and choreography that were heretofore not possible under a model that assumed the authority of the archive and the passivity of the audience as its foundation (Reference Whatley, Borggreen and Gade2013a). Even after Siobhan Davies RePlay’s (SDRP) launch, Whatley continued to analyze its uses and effects, including the impact of the archive and the archival process on Davies's own choreography (2014). Whatley later went on to create Digital Dance Archives (DDA) as a portal for archives like SDRP. She then commissioned two choreographers to create choreographed and written responses to DDA (Reference Whatley2013c), a process that participated in the proliferation of performance via the digital archive seen across social media, albeit in a less spontaneous manner.Footnote ²⁵ Through this body of work, Whatley has analyzed many key issues of digital dance archives that artist-driven archives share, even in their nondigital forms.

In addition to calling to mind the qualities of digital archives, Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company, and Jennifer Monson's projects each resonate with the focus on restaging, reperformance, and reuse of the archives that has been especially prevalent in Europe (but that has had its practitioners in the United States, too), in which each body of work and each choreographic encounter with it offers a new discursive formation of the dance archive. Ann Carlson's Ash and Artifact: What the Body Knows (2011)Footnote ²⁶ and David Gordon's The Matter 2012 (2012)Footnote ²⁷ are examples of projects in which artists relearn, restage, or reformulate their own repertory.Footnote ²⁸ There are also numerous projects in which dancers create new work out of another artist's archives including but not limited to Sara Wookey's reDANCE project (2010–16),Footnote ²⁹ in which Judson Dance Theater works are engaged by dancers of a later generation; Martin Nachbar's Urheben/Aufheben (2008),Footnote ³⁰ a conceptual dance reconstruction of Dore Hoyer's Affectos Humanos (1962/1964)Footnote ³¹; Rosemary Butcher's “reinvention” (2010)Footnote ³² of Allan Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959)Footnote ³³; Fabian Barba's A Mary Wigman Dance Evening (2009)Footnote ³⁴; Beth Gill's study of Trisha Brown's Newark (1987)Footnote ³⁵ in New Work for the Desert (2014)Footnote ³⁶; and Trajal Harrell's work both with the legacy of Judson Church (Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church, 2010)Footnote ³⁷ and his engagement with butoh cofounders Tatsumi Hijikata (Used, Abused, and Hung Out to Dry, 2013)Footnote ³⁸ and Kazuo Ohno (The Return of La Argentina, 2014).Footnote ³⁹ Each of these projects, as well as each of the three case studies discussed here, is a rearticulation of the archive as generative rather than preservative. Each exhibition staged by Eiko & Koma, every Retrospective performance, every reedit of a video for the website proliferates their dances further, rather than preserving them. André Lepecki described this relationship between archives and choreography as being about new possibilities discovered precisely through the process of performance itself. Arguing that the “will to archive” in dance is inherently connected to a will to reenact dances, he clarifies: “One re-enacts not to fix a work in its singular (originating) possibilization but to unlock, release, and actualize a work's many (virtual) com- and incompossibilities, which the originating instantiation of the work kept in reserve, virtually” (Lepecki Reference Lepecki2010, 31). Although Lepecki was writing specifically about contemporary reenactment of dances, there is some resonance between what he is arguing about the relationship between reenactment and archiving and the artist-driven archive projects I have discussed here. That is, the artist-driven archives show Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company, and Monson working with their own material to open up its possibilities in ways that allow not only themselves but also a broader audience to discover new pathways through and beyond the original dance works.

While the artist-driven archives created by Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company, and Monson—and indeed the reperformance projects just described—do constitute materials for creative use in the artists' own present, as a collection of documents they are inherently unstable and short-lived. For example, while Bebe Miller Company's digital book may make A History more accessible to audiences today—if I did not see the dance live, or even if I did, I could still have a personal experience with it—but it is not a format conducive to the long-term preservation of the work. Within a decade or two, online archives will be defunct, joining other obsolete or no longer accessible formats that already clutter archives. Indeed, Bench states it eloquently, noting that these archives “overcome the ‘ephemerality’ of performance only to succumb to the ‘obsolescence’ of digital technologies” (2017, 156–57). The access, circulation, and proliferation of new work afforded by digital archives and other associated practices seem to be inversely related to preservation. This begs the question if the digital is still, in any useful sense, an archive if it tends towards obsolescence. Alternatively, does it instead call the definition of archive itself into question by drawing attention to the inherent instability of all media?

Institution-Driven Discursive Formations

As indicated in the previous section, the digital era has enabled a focus on issues of accessibility and circulation. Bench warns, however, that this apparently democratizing trend is in fact still subject to neoliberal forces. She writes:

Here, Bench draws attention to the changing stakes of archives. Artist-driven archives, with their emphasis on self-representation, broader sharing of artistic work, and opening up the possibility of creation to the audience, would seem to be operated at odds with market forces. In fact, the development of the three artist-driven archives I have discussed here was strongly influenced by specific institutions and funding streams. The idea that a choreographer's archive should be part of his or her artistic work can be traced directly to the Center for Creative Research (CCR). Founded in 2005 through funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and based at Wesleyan University before moving to New York University in 2011, CCR sought to bring movement artists and research institutions together, initially through long-term residencies for its Founding Fellows at institutions like Wesleyan University. Crucially, CCR also provided the space to artists—including Eiko Otake, Bebe Miller, David and Ain Gordon, Ann Carlson, and others—to meet and talk, with no pressure to produce an artistic product. Beginning in 2009, CCR began to explore questions of artist-driven archives as part of a project called ARTchive, which aimed to “catalyz[e] new discourse about archival praxis as a dynamic, non-linear research activity compatible with both the ephemeral nature of dance and its process, and the digital environment” (Center for Creative Research n.d.). Central to this discourse are projects initiated and developed by choreographers themselves as part of their creative output while they are still actively working, not a separate institution such as a trust or a repository aimed at preserving the dances once the choreographer is no longer making work.Footnote ⁴⁰

Notably the ARTchive project began in 2009, the same year the Cunningham Dance Foundation's Legacy Plan was announced. At the time, the Legacy Plan sparked increased discussions about documentation of dance, restaging, and legacy; issues that are not synonymous with yet implicate dance archives. Circulated shortly before Merce Cunningham's death and created in anticipation of needing to prepare for a time when the nonagenarian would no longer lead the company, the Legacy Plan was notable in the dance world: a two-year tour to allow audiences one last time to see a large part of Cunningham's repertoire performed live by dancers who had worked directly with him, a transition period for the company dancers and staff, the creation of digital “Dance Capsules,” and the maintenance of the repertoire in the long term through the Merce Cunningham Trust. Not only did the Legacy Plan bring into stark contrast those companies or choreographers who did not have a similar plan (for example, Pina Bausch who died a month before Cunningham), it also provided a model for others such as Trisha Brown, who retired from her company in 2013. The same time period also saw issues focused on archives and legacy in Dance Research Journal (2012) and Dance Chronicle (Reference Brooks and Meglin2011a, Reference Brooks and Meglin2011b), and a job call from The Ohio State University seeking a “scholar who will advance contemporary notions of the record.” These discussions in the larger dance field around terms like “legacy” and “archives” only served to intensify an ongoing ontological, epistemological, and logistical debate among scholars, archivists, and artists about if and how dance may be archived.Footnote ⁴¹

It is no coincidence that all three of the artists addressed in this article have been involved either with CCR or “Planning Artist-Driven Archives,” the name the project took on when it was transferred to the Dance Heritage Coalition (DHC) in 2013.Footnote ⁴² With its tag line, “advancing a vision of archives as a vital component of dance-making,” the project has been influential in encouraging noted choreographers to shift their thinking about archives from documents of dances to a way of understanding their own body of work and its creative processes (Artist-Driven Archives n.d.). CCR, and then DHC, capitalized on the increased attention to dance archives and legacies to direct funding to selected choreographers and companies.

Institutional support from CCR and DHC provided both the impetus to archive and the space, time, and funding for choreographers to imagine what their archives could be.Footnote ⁴³ As an example of the concrete ways these organizations have had an impact on the thinking of individual artists, CCR founder Sam Miller is the one who first proposed a Retrospective Project to Eiko & Koma. Similarly, Eiko & Koma's Archive Project would likely not have happened without the DHC's inaugural moves and funding. Eiko & Koma were one of 23 companies chosen by the DHC for an archive assessment in 2010 and one of just seven “significant single-choreographer companies” chosen for a more in-depth archive inventory (Smith Reference Smith2012, 251).Footnote ⁴⁴ This process included the writing of a scholarly assessment,Footnote ⁴⁵ along with work to “improve storage and organization, and make long-term plans for their archive” (252). When I spoke with Miller about how her thinking about her relationship to her archives developed, she credited the time and space and inspiration provided by CCR and DHC gatherings. In addition, her company also benefitted from a relationship with DHC, namely, through an archive fellow who served as an “embedded archivist” during a rehearsal process.Footnote ⁴⁶ This is in addition to her relationship with the Ohio State University, where she was on the faculty as distinguished professor until she retired at the end of 2016. In addition to housing a more traditional repository of Bebe Miller Company's materials, OSU also provides rehearsal space and connection to funders that have been vital for Miller's own work with her archives.

The Planning Artist-Driven Archives project held a series of focus groups in 2013 with an expanded group of artists, including Jennifer Monson, who was already engaged in her own archival work. The focus groups addressed questions such as:

• • How can archiving become part of the creative process, rather than merely documenting products?

• • How can artists' intentions, methods, and working process be captured and preserved?

• • How can artists creatively re-purpose or re-contextualize their legacy materials and envision their legacies through the construction of archives? (Artist-Driven Archives n.d., “Focus Groups”)

The three projects I discussed above engage primarily with the first two questions and are on the whole not explicitly concerned with questions of their own legacies. However, by creatively engaging with their own processes and bodies of work and by sharing those broadly through performance, installations, and digital materials, they are in fact impacting what their legacies will be.

As significant as this new trend in archival practices could be, there is the possibility that it only serves to reify an understanding of choreography based on Western models of single-choreographer companies. After all, by engaging in processes of selection of companies and choreographers and by steering the investigation of the possibilities of a new way of archiving, the enabling institutions CCR and DHC and funding streams, primarily from the Mellon Foundation, are still acting in Derrida's (Reference Derrida and Prenowitz1996) terms as archons, arbiters of what is worth knowing and understanding. By proposing an agenda of open-access archives (influenced, no doubt, by trends in digital archives) and more particularly of using an archive as a springboard for new work, CCR attempted to expand what statements a dance archive is capable of making or, as Foucault put it, what can be “said” in the context of the archive (Foucault Reference Foucault and Smith1972, 130). In other words, CCR imagined the possibility of an artist-driven archive and then employed artists to manifest that imagining in ways that suit the artists' unique bodies of work.