Knowing in Motion. Dance, body, archive

Save the Date - We conclude the research project with a conference at the Royal Danish Library on 10 September 2025. Sign up

To deepen the understanding of dance as cultural heritage, the project investigates how dancers in dialogue with archival source materials may activate corporeal insights and traces from past dances. Moreover, we ask how these corporeal insights may become part of the archival institution.

Taking the embodied archives of the artists as a source of insight we examine questions of - among other topics - the bodily transfer of knowledge, archive building and temporality. 

The project draws on archival source material from three historical case studies. These are distributed across different choreographers, genres, and institutional frames for the artistic production:

• 1915 – 1925 Emilie Walbom, the first female choreographer at the Royal Danish Theatre.
• 1965 – 1985 Doug Crutchfield, jazz dancer, choreographer, and pedagogue with their own school in Copenhagen.
• 1989 – 1999 Micado danse Ensemble, independently producing dance company under the artistic leadership of Mikala Bjarnov Lage and Charlotte Rindom.

Integrating artistic and theoretical explorations, the project activates the embodied archives of the artists as a source of insight to examine - among other topics - the bodily transfer of knowledge, overlapping temporalities and participatory archive building.

In this project we ask, what we can learn from the corporeal knowledge of dance that rarely finds its way into the archival institution?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

External

• Anna Lawaetz (Royal Danish Library)