The Artistic Drive of Jean Cébron
Dance Oral History in a Network of Change
Jean Cébron (1927-2019) was a dancer, choreographer, and dance educator.
Juan Allende-Blin 94 is a Chilean contemporary composer, scholar, and publisher.
These men were in their early twenties when they met in 1948.
Their creative collaboration started as Allende-Blin saw Cébron in Kurt Jooss’ politically charged “The Green Table” in Santiago del Chile.
Back in Germany in the 1950s, artists that were exiled during WW II like Kurt Jooss, were confronted with hostile cultural attitudes that remained in place after the Nazi regime. Against that climate, they persevered. In a recent oral history interview, Allende-Blin recounts their efforts to create art that captured and expressed contemporary sensibilities. Their drive and resilience during the 1960s paved the way to the blossoming of original forms of dance-making in Germany.
One of the challenges of documenting artistic production in connection with political and cultural change is making the network of relationships explicit. The mapping and networking of documents under open international standards is one approach to create visibility to developments over time. In this presentation,
Ricardo Viviani will propose a visual model and notation ontologies to present this study case. The goal is to leverage the power of semantic web to create Web3 applications to network knowledge in dance.
This presentation was given at the 2022 Dance Studies Conference in Vancouver, Canada.
#strategies_of_reconciliation, #transnational_activism, #queer_activism, #archive, #historiography, #semantic_web, #dance_knowledge_management
Euphorie und Aufbruch Timeline — Sorting and grouping of 99 Documents (Viviani 2020)
Type: Publication · Research / Historisation Project Date: September 2022 Context:Tanzen/Teilen – Sharing/Dancing: Jahrbuch TanzForschung 2021 Role: Ricardo Viviani – Author · Researcher · Project Collaborator Co-authors: Anja K. Arend · Thomas Thorausch Project:Euphorie und Aufbruch — A History of Dance 1959–1969 Publisher: transcript Verlag
Sharing the Material is Sharing the Knowledge / Tanzwissen teilen im Verbund documents an experimental approach to sharing and connecting dance-archival material across institutional collections. The chapter emerged from the research project Euphorie und Aufbruch, a collaboration between the Pina Bausch Foundation, the Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln and the Folkwang Tanzarchiv / Folkwang Universität der Künste.
The chapter begins from a basic problem of dance heritage: an archive cannot contain the whole of dance. What survives is always partial, shaped by the histories of collection, preservation, description and institutional selection. The project therefore explored what might become visible when material from different archives is brought into relation rather than presented as separate institutional holdings.
For the pilot project, a selection of 99 archival documents from the three participating collections was organized around relationships between people, works, events, places and time. The resulting digital environment used a chronological timeline as a principal point of access, while also making connections between heterogeneous materials more visible.
The chapter considers archival knowledge as something that can emerge through relationships among documents, people, works and historical circumstances. In this perspective, sharing material between institutions can also become a way of sharing knowledge and making previously separated holdings meaningful in relation to one another.
A central question concerns the particular demands of dance archives. Dance is not exhausted by the documents that record it: movement, practice, embodied knowledge and changing relationships are difficult to represent through conventional archival description alone. The project therefore explored conceptual models including CIDOC CRM and FRBRoo as possible structures for relating heterogeneous information across collections.
Oral History provided another layer of connection. Ricardo Viviani’s interview with composer Juan Allende-Blin brought personal testimony and experience into dialogue with archival records. Within the project, Oral History provided a perspective through which documentary material could be connected with lived historical experience.
The wider project also included an educational strand documented through Finding Your Own Voice. Historical photographs and other archival materials were used as impulses for observation, analysis and choreographic work. Students transformed observations from archival material into concepts and choreographic assignments, bringing archival research into a contemporary artistic context.
Taken together, the chapter presents the archive as an interconnected knowledge environment rather than as a collection of isolated objects. Its concern is not simply how to preserve material, but how relationships between collections, documents, people and experience can make different forms of historical knowledge accessible.
Archival Material:
Published German chapter; project documentation; visual research materials; timeline documentation; selection of 99 archival documents; Oral History interview with Juan Allende-Blin; Finding Your Own Voice teaching materials; related research notes.
Type: Publication · Research / Historisation Project · Archival Activation 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
Euphorie und Aufbruch — A History of Dance 1959–1969 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 project explored ways of connecting archival collections and making relationships between dispersed materials accessible through a shared digital environment.
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. A selection of archival materials from the participating collections was brought together to create a shared historical view rather than separate institutional narratives.
Archival Activation
A selection of 99 archival documents — 33 from each participating archive — formed the basis of an interactive chronological timeline. The project made relationships between people, works, events, places and time more visible across the participating collections.
The project also addressed a broader question for dance archives: how can archival structures represent an art form whose primary material is movement, and how can historical relationships become accessible without reducing dance to isolated documents?
Visual Research
Euphorie und Aufbruch Timeline — Sorting and grouping of 99 Documents (Viviani 2020)
Visual organization of the archival material became an important part of the research. The documents were also approached through comparison and juxtaposition, allowing historical relationships, aesthetic developments and recurring patterns to become visible in ways that complement conventional textual description.
This visual approach treated the archive as a field for observation as well as documentation. It supported attention to the movement and artistic qualities that may be difficult to communicate through text alone.
Oral History
The project also explored digital models for connecting heterogeneous archival information, including CIDOC CRM and FRBRoo. Oral History added another layer to the archival record through an interview with composer Juan Allende-Blin.
The interview connected personal testimony with the documentary record and contributed another perspective on the people, works and circumstances represented in the project.
Finding Your Own Voice
Within the project, Ricardo Viviani taught the semester-long course Finding Your Own Voice at Folkwang Universität der Künste. Students worked with historical photographs and other archival material and used their observations as impulses for contemporary choreographic work.
The course took place remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students submitted their work as video, creating a further context in which archival observation, choreography and the moving image could be brought together.
Archival Material:
Project documentation; timeline material; selected archival documents; visual research; Oral History interview with Juan Allende-Blin; Finding Your Own Voice teaching material; publication material.
In this workshop, the professional choreographer and oral-historian Ricardo Viviani together with Sarah Walker, a fellow oral-historian will explore in which ways the awareness of non-verbal communication elements influence the outcome of an interview.
We are always communicating with our bodies. From postures to the placement of the body in space, these elements are constantly sending messages. By being aware of which non-verbal elements are important to observe, the interviewer can help the narrator feel more comfortable. A narrator that feels comfortable with the situation is freer to talk.
Of great importance are also the signals sent by the interviewer during an interview. Appropriate clothing that respects and eases the power structures at play during an interview, postures, gestures, help to engage the narrator. The body of the interviewer is just as important as the body of the narrator.
The analysis of video interviews can also benefit from the knowledge of non-verbals. Spoken language can acquire different colors and weights according to the complex interplay of non-verbals. Most oral-historians can adjust transcripts accordingly. This workshop will help to describe how these non-verbals are at play during the interview, thus helping to articulate the reasons for adjustments.
The workshop will consist of a theoretical introduction, examples that will be played out by the workshop leaders, followed by simulating situations and analyzing them. A group exchange of experiences will round-up this session.
Type: Presentation · Oral History Date: 17 October 2019 Context: Oral History Association Annual Meeting, Pathways in the Field: Considerations for those Working In, On, and Around Oral History Location: Sheraton Salt Lake City Hotel, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA Panel: Oral History in Artistic Mediums Role: Presenter · Researcher Affiliation: FernUniversität in Hagen
Panel Participants:
Ricardo Viviani
Kenneth Horowitz
Daniel Horowitz Garcia
In the winter of 1980/81, I was awarded a scholarship to study at a dance studio located at 400 Lafayette Street in New York City. The name of this studio was Dancerschool. The studio was part of the life work of Dennis Wayne, a star dancer of the 1970s. His company was called “Dancers”, just the word “Dancers”. The simplicity of that name indicates that what they do should suffice. The art speaks for itself.
The title Just Call Us Dancers comes from this memory. It is therefore both a reference to that particular moment in my own formation and a question about what can be communicated by the practice itself, before it is translated into explanatory language.
Just Call Us Dancers — Oral History in the Performing Arts was a presentation about Ricardo Viviani’s pathway from dance and choreography into Oral History and about the methodological questions that arise when oral history is applied to a predominantly non-verbal art form.
The presentation was deliberately personal. Using slides that included images from Viviani’s early years as a dancer, it traced a path that began with his unexpected discovery of dance while studying Biology at the University of São Paulo. During university strikes, he encountered a dance group forming in the Faculty of Architecture (FAU). The group, composed of amateur dancers, chose the deliberately grand institutional name Corpos de Baile. What began as a moment of curiosity became a professional artistic trajectory.
A year or two later, Viviani entered the Escola de Comunicações e Artes — Escola de Arte Dramática (ECA-EAD) at the University of São Paulo to study Theatre Direction, as a dance programme was not available there in 1979. His teachers directed his attention toward non-verbal communication, giving him a way of thinking about performance beyond spoken language.
This formation took place during the Brazilian Military Regime. Viviani observed how music, theatre and dance could contain several layers of meaning and how artists developed forms capable of communicating around censorship. Learning to create and read these layers of meaning became useful to him as a choreographer and remained part of his artistic practice.
The presentation then followed the longer development of this interest: from early choreography and a continuing attention to non-verbal communication, through years of artistic practice and further study, to Viviani’s later decision to investigate these questions more systematically.
Alongside his work as a choreographer, Viviani returned to formal study through Cultural Sciences (Kulturwissenschaften) at FernUniversität in Hagen. He regarded this as continuing education rather than a break from his artistic practice. Through these studies he encountered Oral History and recognized a methodological correspondence with questions he had carried through his artistic life: how can knowledge embedded in lived practice be investigated, articulated and placed within a historical context?
The presentation argued that dancers can be unusually difficult interview subjects because dance contains forms of knowledge that are not primarily verbal. Studio communication can be pragmatic, affective, metaphorical and inseparable from movement. The challenge for the interviewer is therefore not simply to ask dancers to explain what they know, but to create conditions in which aspects of their experience can become narratable.
A related question concerned the role from which knowledge is acquired. In an institutional dance environment, dancers experience creative processes according to their position within the theatre structure. Their memories therefore contain not only individual recollection, but knowledge shaped by their particular role, relationships and responsibilities.
The presentation also introduced the idea that apparently simple biographical questions can open onto much wider historical contexts. A question such as “How did you start to dance?” may begin as a personal biography and lead toward histories of education, cultural identity, political circumstances and artistic formation. The interview becomes a space in which these unexpected connections can emerge.
One example from Viviani’s Oral History work concerns a dancer’s account of learning ballet in Dublin during the 1970s. What begins as a question about entering dance opens onto questions of cultural identity and the experience of studying ballet within a context shaped by the colonial relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom. Such moments demonstrate how the apparent simplicity of a life-history question can reveal wider historical structures.
The presentation therefore positioned Oral History not simply as a means of collecting memories, but as a form of inquiry in which the specific knowledge of the interviewer and the artistic field can help open questions that might otherwise remain inaccessible.
Archival Material:
Presentation slides; presentation PDF; conference programme; research notes; related Oral History interview material; documentation of subsequent work on non-verbal communication in interviewing.
Conference submission — Common Dance, Uncommon Stories, Dance Studies Association Conference 2019
Type: Presentation · Individual Paper Date: 9 August 2019 Context: Dance Studies Association Conference Dancing in Common Location: Evanston, Illinois, USA Role: Presenter · Researcher Affiliation: FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany
Common Dance, Uncommon Stories — Oral History epistemology for dance explored how Oral History might be approached within the particular conditions of dance practice and a dance artist’s archive.
The presentation considered how people involved in dance may hold different experiences of the same work, and how these experiences can become part of its historical record. It focused on the relationship between embodied knowledge, oral narration and memory, with particular attention to the roles people occupy within theatrical dance.
The idea of the “paradoxical body” provided one point of departure: the body transformed through choreography carries traces of experience that may not be fully accessible through conventional documentation.
The presentation also considered the specific character of speaking about dance. Language in and around the studio can be pragmatic, affective or metaphorical, and can remain closely connected to movement and context. The interview was therefore approached as a situation in which dance experience can become a historical narrative.
Time and memory formed another part of the inquiry. The experience of a dance event and the later moment of the interview are not the same. The presentation considered how these different temporal positions shape the narratives through which dance is remembered.
Type: Publication · Documentary Film · Oral History Date: 2017 Context:Pina Bausch + New York, part of the series Geografia da Arte Role: Script Writer · Researcher Production: Producing Partners NYC in collaboration with the Pina Bausch Foundation Broadcast: Arte1, Brazil Locations: New York · Chicago · Woodstock · Wuppertal · Essen
Pina Bausch + New York explored the formative relationship between Pina Bausch and New York through archival research, Oral History and conversations with artists and people connected to her experiences in the United States.
The project was Ricardo Viviani’s first major project at the Pina Bausch Foundation after joining the institution in 2016. It brought together his new role as a researcher at the Foundation with experiences from his own history as a dancer and choreographer in the New York dance environment.
Viviani had first met Pina Bausch personally in New York after performances of Viktor at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Bausch stayed with dancer Manuel Alum at his loft in TriBeCa, together with her son. Viviani was part of Alum’s performing circle and had known him since his own years at Jacob’s Pillow.
This encounter revealed connections between Viviani’s own formation in the New York dance scene and Bausch’s formative experiences in the United States. When the documentary research began, these intersections became a starting point for tracing the people, places, teachers and artistic encounters connected to Bausch’s early development.
Research
The research extended across a wide range of dance and performing-arts archives and personal networks. Viviani worked with the archives of the Pina Bausch Foundation and the Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln, as well as collections and institutions in the United States including the 92nd Street Y, Jacob’s Pillow, the New York Public Library’s Dance Collection and the archives of Juilliard School.
At the 92nd Street Y, where Pina Bausch had danced in New York for the first time, Viviani encountered an institution that was also part of his own history as a choreographer, having received a grant and presented work there. At Jacob’s Pillow, he returned to an archive and community he had known since 1980, when he was a scholarship student there, and worked with longtime archivist and curator Norton Owen.
The research also included conversations with dance scholars and critics including Mark Franko and Deborah Jowitt, as well as tracing places, people and artistic networks connected to New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Viviani also drew on his own study with Alfredo Corvino and his knowledge of the New York dance environment.
Oral History
The documentary developed an Oral History-based account of Pina Bausch’s formative relationship with New York. Interviews and archival research brought together memories of artists, teachers, collaborators and other witnesses, allowing aspects of Bausch’s early artistic development to be reconstructed through personal testimony and historical sources.
The resulting material provides a record of experiences and encounters that are not always visible in conventional accounts of Bausch’s biography, including the teachers, artistic communities and cultural environments that she encountered in New York and the United States.
Production
The opportunity to produce the interviews arose through an independent coincidence. Rolf Salomon Bausch received a request to collaborate with a New York production company developing a series about artists and geographical places. This led to a collaboration between Producing Partners NYC and the Pina Bausch Foundation.
Interviews and filming subsequently took place in Chicago, New York, Woodstock, Wuppertal and Essen. Although the production company was based in New York, the resulting series was produced for the Brazilian cable channel Arte1.
Producing Partners, led by Tatiana Issa and Guto Barra, was responsible for the production on the New York side.
Archival Material:
Film and production documentation; research notes; Oral History interviews; archival research material; correspondence and production material where preserved; related documentation concerning Pina Bausch’s relationship with New York.
