Reading gesture: Katherine Dunham, the Dunham Technique, and the vocabulary of dance as decolonizing archival praxis

Visceral Data for Dance Histories

“…At the same time, it is important to note that being part of multiple communities or generations of Dunham's company is just one of many ways to think about continuity; for example, certain figures such as Glory Van Scott and Julie Robinson, who have emerged as central to preserving the Dunham legacy, are less visible from this perspective. Likewise, this doesn't include anyone beyond the company, whereas Joanna Dee Das points out that today, "In the absence of regularly performed choreography, Dunham's legacy more noticeably lives on through the Dunham Technique" (2017:199; see also Sutherland 2019). This is why we talk about potential lines of transmission for embodied knowledge; by tracing which performers shared the stage together across different periods of time, we call attention to just some of the many possibilities of exchange that may have been enacted within this dynamic movement community.…”

‘These are not just pieces of paper’: Acknowledging grief and other emotions in pursuit of person-centered archives

“…The emotional dimensions of archives are referred to by those who consult them 8 and are beginning to be more openly acknowledged by the professional archivists who care for them, 9 but within the archival studies discipline, there has been little direct study of emotions generally or of grief specifically in archives; some notable exceptions 10 include Tonia Sutherland's analyses of the treatment of Black bodies in archival representation 11 ; Ferrin Evans' (2022, pp. [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] work on grief and recordkeeping in the context of two global pandemics 12 ; Samantha R. Winn's exploration of the anticipatory grief involved in memory work during climate crisis 13 ; Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez's account of experiencing 'suspended grief, or grief experienced, witnessed, and re-lived throughout an archive, and the mutual or secondary grief archivists may experience when processing collections about traumatic events and experiences' 14 ; Gabriel Solis's writings on grief and records of mass incarceration and state violence 15 ; and the work of scholars like Jamie A. Lee, Michelle Caswell, and Nancy Liliana Godoy (among others) on the affective impact that records can have in communities. 16 My own research has also focused on grief and its implication in and impact on recordkeeping, 17 exploring how recordkeeping is involved in grief work and can function as a means of continuing relationships with those we have lost and of enacting care and love.…”

“…As Hariz Halilovich notes, early archival theory, drawing from 'positivist traditions', invoked and encoded ideas of 'objectivity, neutrality, impartiality and personal detachment -that is, everything that is the opposite of subjective, emotional and affective'. 20 More recently, however, archival scholars and professional archivists have begun to think about the different types of emotional labor associated with making and keeping records 21 ; about the different ways experience and emotion 'gesture' 22 in records; about types of knowledge about records that are lost when affect is not taken into account 23 ; and about the inherently affective impacts of some types of records on those who use them, work with them, and/or are documented in them. 24 Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor suggest that affective labor has always been part of archival work despite its lack of recognition and call for it to be resituated 'at the center of the archival endeavour'.…”

“Our ancestors passed this down to us for a reason”: information practices of ballet folklórico dancers in Mexican-American communities

“…With a few exceptions, Library and Information Science (LIS) scholarship has largely neglected dance as a research topic and has thereby left open the question about the possible connections between dance and information phenomena. Most authors who have researched dance (Hajibayova and Buente, 2017; Oke, 2017; Sutherland, 2019) have examined it in the contexts of knowledge representation and archival preservation practices primarily. For example, Hajibayova and Buente (2017) analyzed vocabularies used for representing and organizing Hawaiian culture and focused their discussion on the Hawaiian hula dance; Sutherland (2019) examined dances to thematize the concept of “gestural documents.” Oke (2017) reflected on what makes dancing so difficult to archive, finding that it is created and performed “in liminal space, in the passage of time, within performers' bodies, within the experiential exchange between the audience and the performers” (p. 198).…”

“…Most authors who have researched dance (Hajibayova and Buente, 2017; Oke, 2017; Sutherland, 2019) have examined it in the contexts of knowledge representation and archival preservation practices primarily. For example, Hajibayova and Buente (2017) analyzed vocabularies used for representing and organizing Hawaiian culture and focused their discussion on the Hawaiian hula dance; Sutherland (2019) examined dances to thematize the concept of “gestural documents.” Oke (2017) reflected on what makes dancing so difficult to archive, finding that it is created and performed “in liminal space, in the passage of time, within performers' bodies, within the experiential exchange between the audience and the performers” (p. 198). Research such as the Oke study (2017), which focused on the act of dancing, has made the transition to a second and comparatively scarcer body of literature on dancing.…”