Mapping Touring: Remediating Concert Dance Archives

On my computer screen is a map of the United States. I can zoom out for a broader (though still two-dimensional) view of the world, or zoom in to examine individual states or cities, but the default map centers the continental United States. Below the map are fields to select date parameters and the names of dance troupes such as Les Ballets Russes and Denishawn, among others. I set start and end dates, select Denishawn, and click "Play during the specified time." An aqua-colored line begins to snake across the screen, and white bubbles pop up as the line shifts and redirects, bouncing from location to location on the map. I pause the animation and click on one of these bubbles. A new window opens displaying information about that data point: the troupe name and what they performed on which dates and in which location. I close the pop-up window and resume the animation.

This is the animated route view of Mapping Touring, an in-progress digital humanities project that uses concert dance programs held in library special collections to document and track the appearances of concert dancers, choreographers, and dance troupes during the first half of the twentieth century as they toured domestically and internationally. Of particular concern for the project is representing the dates of performances, cities and venues, and repertory performed for the purposes of spatial and comparative analysis. Although the project does cull from existing itineraries complied by other scholars, the primary historical sources from which Mapping Touring is built have largely not been digitized, and much of the labor involved thus includes traveling to archives and special collections, photographing documents, and extracting key performance data for inclusion in a database. To date, this project has employed thirteen student researchers in this pursuit,¹ and pulled materials from nine physical and online special collections.² Although the intentions behind Mapping Touring are global, there is at present a strong U.S. bias in the project, due to my own familiarity and access to archival collections.

This article serves to introduce the project and lay out some of the larger questions around engaging digital methodologies, namely digital mapping and spatial analysis, in the field of dance studies. Mapping Touring is based on preexisting physical collections, and thus I see this work as part of the archival turn in dance. As indicated in the article title, Mapping Touring remediates artifacts held in archives and reimagines them for online delivery and research, in particular through the forms of the database and map.³ In addition to being informed by ongoing work in the digital humanities, my conceptualization of Mapping Touring grew out of an interest in the culturally informed revisionist histories produced by dance scholars in the 1990s and 2000s. As I will discuss later, Edward Said's (1983) comments on how theory travels in academic contexts have also been particularly influential in my understanding of how dances travel, and with them, theories of embodiment embedded in dance repertory. Mapping Touring makes visible the possible avenues and trajectories along which theories of embodiment may have been disseminated through the phenomenon of dance touring. Though Mapping Touring cannot represent the movement content of the dance works touring troupes performed, by mapping the extent of dancers' travels, it does bring their global circulation into greater relief.

For the purposes of illustration, I focus throughout the article on the joint efforts of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn to offer possibilities for this type of computationally enabled analysis. I analyze Denishawn's touring from 1923 to 1928, which encompasses their so-called Far East tour, as well as the U.S. tours leading up to and immediately following their time abroad. St. Denis had a career as a soloist that included international appearances before she met and joined forces with Shawn, who auditioned to be her partner for ballroom dance numbers in 1914. They married soon thereafter, established a dance school in 1915, and toured nationally and internationally with their pupils as Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, and their Denishawn Dancers until 1931 when St. Denis and...