Dance as Documentary: Conflictual Images in the Choreographic Mirror (On Archive by Arkadi Zaides)

For almost twenty years, contemporary dance has been engaged in a necessary process of conceptual and self-reflexive experimentation, investigating the nature and boundaries of performance, challenging its own conventions and exploring the various ways of “making dance” in such an expanded field. This self-reflexive moment has been largely commented on (see, for instance, Lepecki 2006) and, by analyzing the new reflexivity, I have also been among the commentators (see Pouillaude 2007). This conceptual trend, which in its time was necessary and fruitful, seems to be moving toward a more direct relationship to “extra-choreographic” realities. Here and there appear some attempts to open the choreographic stage to a direct presentation of historical and social events, generally violent or even tragic, in order to articulate the kinesthetic knowledge and the choreographic procedures in our contemporary political existence: Samedi Détente by Dorothée Munyaneza (2013) offers a danced testimony of her tragic experience of the Rwanda genocide as a survivor child; Wagons Libres by Sandra Iché (2012) investigates the representations of the Lebanese political situation after the assassination of the historian and journalist Samir Kassir, founder and editor of L’Orient-express; Monument 0: Haunted by Wars (1913–2013) by Eszter Salamon (2014) reenacts some popular and tribal dances of the twentieth century, originally performed in war contexts and for bellicose purposes. All these attempts involve a relation to their subject that might be described as “documentary.” Not only do they rely on accurate documentary sources and materials, which can be presented (or not) during the performance, but they also consider themselves as kinds of documents or, at least, as ways of presenting documents and experimenting with them in performance.

Paradoxically, this new documentary trend of contemporary dance partially derives from the conceptual trend itself. Histoire(s) by Olga de Soto (2004), projecting filmed interviews of spectators who attended the premiere of Le Jeune Homme et la Mort by Roland Petit at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1946, was perhaps the first “documentary video-performance” (as Olga de Soto characterizes her own work in its subtitle) created in the dance field. Providing an investigation of the traces left in some spectators’ minds by that emblematic work of European postwar choreography, de Soto interrogated the ontological status of a dance work through probing the work’s specific ways of surviving in the subjective and bodily memory of spectators. Another way of making dance “documentary” is to concentrate on dancers themselves, an approach initiated by Jérôme Bel’s series of (auto-)biographical solos, Véronique Doisneau (2004), its Brazilian version Isabel Torres (2005), or Cédric Andrieu (2009). In these three solos, despite the absence of documentary materials (there is no video, photography, or recording), the documentary aspect emerged from the way the performer told her own story, showing some dance excerpts as documentary evidence of what she was narrating about her life, about the dance institution, or about working as a dancer. In both cases (de Soto and Bel), if dance was able to become “documentary,” this was only because dance was still dealing with itself. Dance could document nothing but itself, and its documentary potential would strictly derive from its “reflexive turn,” as a side effect or, maybe, as an unintentional consequence.

The shift I would like to point out with works such as Samedi Détente, Wagons libres, or Monument 0: Haunted by Wars is that the documentary potential of dance is nowadays applied to extra-choreographic realities and that this opening toward the “outside” can also be read as a desire to escape from the self-indulgent dimensions of the “reflexive turn” and to engage dance in a more direct relationship to the real and the political. Nevertheless, it is obvious that documentary and reflexive purposes are still interwoven in contemporary performance: first, some choreographers are explicitly working on both sides of the equation, for example, Eszter Salamon whose latest work, Monument 0.1: Valda & Gus (2015), seems to rejoin the genre inaugurated by Bel and consists in an (auto...