This project arose from the idea of collecting videos of my friends dancing, since I sometimes see them dancing in a social context and wish to have recorded them and even try and embody their views. The idea of archive is approached through film and performance, using other bodies’ knowledge, transferring into my body and recording it. To accentuate this transference, I chose to ask my non-dancer friends to improvise for me, a dance trained and educated body.

 

I am interested in noticing what happens when I try to imitate my friends’ movements. I ask them to choose a song to dance to and to wear what makes them feel comfortable, in order to try to access their individuality and authentic way of being and moving, which is a very complicated request. Subsequently, I attempt to learn their ‘authentic’ way of moving. This is the point when I wonder about the role of identity and heritage in authentic behaviour. I ponder about what past experiences are being brought into each person’s movement and how much of this intangible heritage is affected by different cultures, education and other surrounding aspects. Additionally, the concept of authenticity will be challenged. Should anything performed by the non-dancers be considered authentic? This is a complex and subjective question, which in fact, tangles with a consequent question: Can the imitated movement performed by the dancer be considered authentic?

 

This transference of movements from one body to another is tackled as a translation process, where the adaptation of the initial movement to the dancer’s movement is allowed and sometimes even encouraged. So, in a way, individuality is included in the interpretation of the copied movement, which might entail a degree of authenticity. This liminal moment of translation became one of the main points of focus of this project. In the context of literary translations, transferability categories are contemplated in order to distinguish communicative equivalence between the original and the translated texts (Saule & Aisulu, 2014). Similarly, in this project, one is be able to observe and compare the original movement and the translation of that movement into another body.

 

There is a double way of archiving in this project, one through performance, which might be considered ephemeral, and the other through video, a more conventional way of archiving. The natural ephemeral quality of performance is restructured by the recording through video. Does the capacity of detecting authenticity change between watching a live performance or a filmed one? How do I translate in my own terms the information or movement produced by a non-dancer?   How much do I allow myself to accommodate and adapt the initial movement created by my friends to my body? What are the effects of translation on the authentic quality from the initial movements? These are some of the questions that might be raised while observing this archive of movements and translations, alongside questions relating to archiving heritage. Could each of these videos be considered a sample of each of these people’s intangible heritage? If so, why is it important to have them categorised and organised in this type of archive? Some of these last questions have been around since the end of the 20th century, when Western museums started being perceived differently, and as a consequence criticised (Lopez y Royo, 2002), and I am not aiming to find the answers through this project. Nonetheless, these are the sort of questions that helped me generate this work and that guided me into an endless research and analysis of the project.

 

Currently, Albert E. Dean (an artist) and I are organising a collaboration which embraces this project. We are thinking of ways of projecting the videos two at a time (one of participant next to my version of that dance) alongside portraits of each person involved in the project. Albert is in the process of painting a portrait of each person, and for that he asks everyone to bring an object they wish to be represented with, reconnecting to the idea of individuality. The idea of layered transference and translation is once again approached but this time through the medium of oil painting on canvas and other various materials.

 

This project will be accomplished alongside DD&A, a contemporary art organisation, since Albert is one of the founders of the organisation, as well as, one of the artists already involved. DD&A is aiming to manage innovative exhibitions with artists who are at the beginning of their careers and this project seems to belong to this kind of approach.

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 Bibliography

 

• Lopez y Royo, A. (2002). South Asian dances in museums: culture, education and patronage in the diaspora, Dance in South Asia: New Approaches, Politics and Aesthetics Swarthmore College, Paper Published in Conference Proceedings.

• Saule, B. & Aisulu, N.  (2014). Problems of translation theory and practice: original and translated text equivalence. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences (pp. 119 – 123). Elsevier Ltd., Toronto.