Materiality, Immateriality and the Dancing Body: The Challenge of the Inter in the Preservation of Intangible Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Since the turn of the millennium we have witnessed the beginnings of a growing number of projects that bring fresh attention to questions surrounding the documentation and dissemination of the processes and products of dance and wider performance practices. New kinds of digital inscriptions and tools for capturing and rendering movement are now available to access and study dance in innovative ways, raising questions about authorship and the extent to which dance is an evolving, mutable process mediated via many different encounters. These meetings may be between dance makers, audiences, galleries, theatres, programmers and with experts from different scholarly disciplines and subject domains. Many of these initiatives intentionally traverse analogue, digital and embodied methods of transmission and offer alternative ways to think about how dance is visualised, remembered, interpreted and transformed. Choreographers and performance makers are also drawing from practical and intellectual enquiries into the materiality and immateriality of the dancing body as source for making work. As a consequence, choreography, as a conceptual and practical process, is continually changing, informed as much by the integration and exploitation of digital technologies in the making, documenting and preservation of the work, as by the individual proclivities of dance artists.