Euphorie und Aufbruch — A History of Dance 1959–1969
Period: 2018–2021
Location: North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Role: Researcher · Oral Historian · Project Collaborator · Educator
Partners: Pina Bausch Foundation · Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln · Folkwang Tanzarchiv / Folkwang Universität der Künste
Project
Euphorie und Aufbruch was a collaborative research and development project involving three dance archives in North Rhine-Westphalia: the Pina Bausch Foundation, the Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln and the Folkwang Tanzarchiv. The three-year pilot project explored new strategies for connecting archival collections and making their materials accessible through shared digital technologies.
The project focused on the period from 1959 to 1969, a formative decade in the development of dance and the artistic environment surrounding Pina Bausch. Rather than presenting the holdings of the participating archives separately, the project sought to establish connections between materials held in different collections and to make these relationships visible through a shared digital environment.
Archival Activation and Knowledge Structures
A selection of 99 archival documents — 33 from each participating archive — was organized through relationships between people, works, events, places and time. An interactive chronological timeline provided the principal public entry point to the material.
The project also raised questions specific to dance: how can an archival system represent knowledge about an art form whose essential material is movement, and how might existing heritage standards be extended to accommodate dance-specific forms of knowledge and description?
Visual Histories and Research
A further aspect of the methodology was the creation of visual overviews of the archival material. Rather than approaching the documents exclusively through written descriptions and chronological narratives, the project experimented with arranging and grouping the material visually so that relationships between documents, people, works, events and movement practices could become perceptible.
This approach was intended to stimulate forms of observation and thinking that are not primarily dependent on language. In working with dance archives, visual organization can support the recognition of movement qualities, compositional relationships, aesthetic developments and recurring patterns that may be difficult to articulate through conventional textual description alone.
The visual overview of the 99 selected documents became an important part of the project’s research methodology. The sorting and grouping process made the archival material itself into a field of visual investigation, allowing historical developments and relationships to emerge through comparison and juxtaposition.
For Viviani, this forms part of a broader practice of Activating visual movement appreciation: developing the ability to look at archival traces of dance not only as historical documents, but as carriers of movement, aesthetic and embodied knowledge.
Oral History
The project investigated the use of CIDOC CRM and FRBRoo as conceptual models for connecting heterogeneous archival information. The aim was not simply to digitize documents, but to create structures through which archival materials could be related, searched and interpreted across institutional boundaries.
As part of the project, Ricardo Viviani conducted an Oral History interview with composer Juan Allende-Blin. The interview provided an additional layer of interpretation to the archival material, connecting documents, people and historical circumstances through personal testimony and experience.
Oral History thus functioned not only as documentation, but as a means of generating new perspectives on the archival record and bringing historical knowledge into dialogue with the present.
Finding Your Own Voice
Within the project, Ricardo Viviani also taught a semester-long course at Folkwang Universität der Künste entitled Finding Your Own Voice. The course explored how archival material could become a resource for contemporary choreographic practice.
Students worked with historical photographs and video material from the 1960s, learning to observe and articulate aspects of dance including composition, spatial organization, stage design, costumes, movement vocabulary, performance qualities and individual choreographic signatures.
From these observations, the students extracted concepts and principles that became impulses for their own choreographic assignments. The archival material was therefore not treated simply as historical evidence to be studied, but as a source from which new artistic work could emerge.
The course took place during the COVID-19 pandemic and was conducted remotely. Students submitted their choreographic work as videos, creating an additional opportunity to investigate choreography for the camera and the relationship between choreographic thinking and the moving image.
Outcome
Euphorie und Aufbruch demonstrated how archival collections can become active sites of research, interpretation and artistic practice. By connecting collections through shared technological structures, introducing Oral History and using historical material as a stimulus for contemporary choreography, the project explored forms of Activating Archives in which archival knowledge can generate new connections and new practices.
The project also identified the need for further development of dance-specific ontologies, conceptual models and tagging systems capable of representing the particular forms of knowledge associated with dance.
Publication
Arend, Anja K.; Thorausch, Thomas; Viviani, Ricardo. Euphorie und Aufbruch. A History of Dance 1959–1969, in Jahrbuch TanzForschung 2021. transcript Verlag.
DOI: 10.14361/9783839462379
Bibliography
- Euphorie und Aufbruch — A History of Dance 1959–1969. Project website.
Project information - Euphorie und Aufbruch — Timeline.
Interactive timeline
Keywords
Activating Archives · Dance Archives · Dance History · Oral History · Archival Research · Knowledge Technologies · CIDOC CRM · FRBRoo · Digital Humanities · Dance Heritage · Choreographic Research · Composition · Embodied Knowledge · Archival Activation · Pina Bausch · North Rhine-Westphalia