 Hi everyone, my great pleasure to introduce our third panelist, so this morning we'll be speaking transmission, acts of transmission. I want to say to begin that two participants who were meant to be with us this morning had to cancel last minute this week and both of them are very sorry for not being able to be with all of us. Angelle Sallieu who is based in the US but had to travel to France after a sudden death in her family and Serge Laurent, the curator of Dan's Reflections, the festival that's going on in New York at the moment, had an accident two days ago and it is very sorry not to be here part of the conversation but his sending is warmest thoughts. I want to say this because Serge was very instrumental in us thinking this panel together. The question of transmission is for him foundational in how he envisions and how he practices curation. I don't want to paraphrase him but he's been talking a lot about the ways in which he curates contemporary dance or experimental dance but that for him it is important that his curation can make manifest the ways in which these choreographers, these works, draw on different histories right to make manifest the mini-ages across those works. So yes I want to thank Andre Lufecti who accepted to step in. We're thrilled that you are with us this morning. Andre is a writer, a curator and also professor in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU where he's also currently the Associate Dean of Research and Study. Thank you. Thank you Noemi and good morning everybody. Thank you esteemed panelists. I am just the moderator but so I'll try not to not to say too much but you know maybe just a little little note to think about act of transmission as the theme and just linking back to what we just heard before the beautiful conversation between Dorote and Will and maybe there's a way in which you can continue the line of transmissions. I find it very very intriguing that in this very distinguished panel that we have here with Anne Colot and Linda Murray and David Thompson we have ways of thinking about curation, collection, documenting, archiving, reenacting, reviving but in a way like the word transmission or actually when the word transmission is linked to the act of transmission I feel that something happens as well which is a kind of effective charge on all the missions that we have like it's almost like dry terms like collecting but they charge or preserving or reviving right so they charge with something that I feel both of you talked about because your conversation was beautiful because it was linked directly to questions of life and death right which are the questions of that really matter right in a sense and I have the impression that if there's an art that deals directly with questions of life and death is dense right so I think like within this we can maybe prolong and have a conversation there is a choreography I'm here like also enacting a line of transmission from Noemi Solomon which said you know each one of the panelists will have five minutes for five six minutes take a little bit of time to talk about their whatever they have to say relationship to this to these topics and then after that I'll have a few questions and then Ruth Stavis which I can't oh hi okay he's in the room will have also a response to the panel and then we finish the event yeah all right so we agree that we're just gonna go down the line and it's my pleasure to give the word to Linda Murray thank you so my name is Linda and I am the curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library so when I think about transmission I'm ordinarily thinking about you know to go to the life and death I'm dealing with archives of people who have left us bodies which held repositories of dance which are no longer here and how do we carry that history forward and how do we connect it into dance making that's happening now archives as you probably all know are traditionally places where we store dance film but also things like choreographic notation correspondence between artists photographs costumes ephemera if there's anything that's even vaguely related to the field of dance there's probably some representation for it in the archive since 1967 my division has also been filming dance so we'll be filming Dorothy this week at New York live arts so that means that we send video crews out all over the city and in fact across the country to make recordings so that we can add to the archive as well as the films we received directly from artists and then in 1974 my division began an oral history project which is ongoing and that was a really important active transmission that I think was acknowledged and in that moment as much as the moving image was necessary and helped all of us who have danced know that so much information in the studio is transmitted orally I mean yes we are we are looking at each other's bodies but there's a there's an entire history of intent and meaning in work and sort of the social underpinning of the why of the work that is communicated to us through stories and dancers have long been denied their voice so the oral history was an important way to give dance artists agency over telling their career the stories of their careers and their lives and how that intersected with their work and that also continues to this day I absolutely agree with you Andre I think that you know when we talk about the active transmission like there's the collecting there's the gathering things in but I think the work of curation when you manage an archive is trying to think through ways in which to make the transmission happen and you can't be passive in that act so a lot of my work is spent around thinking about ways to activate the archive and to to bring artists in and to get them to see the archive as a catalyst and a tool for work that they might want to make one of the projects that we we undertake and Nancy Dalva is in the room and is a great supporter of this project so thank you Nancy we have the dance research fellowship which is yes for academics but also for practitioners as well so it's a way to bring choreographers and dance artists in and just get them to think differently about their dance making and to give them space and time to just be in an archive and to see where that leads them if you happen to go see Pam Tenowitz's piece song of songs at city center in a couple of weeks one of the origin points for that piece for her began with the fellowship she it was during the pandemic and she wanted to study Jewish dance Pam is Jewish it was something she'd never really reflected on until her father died and so she spent six months looking at like old Jewish dance manuals teaching herself like the steps from these funny little drawings with like little feet print like book prints on maps filming herself doing that breaking it all down building it up into something else and then finally setting it on an entire ensemble of dancers it was beautiful to help her go on that journey in a small way another thing that we've really sort of been reflecting on is giving the artist power in how the archive gets shaped and also thinking through the absences and the gaps in the archive for us in our particular archive that gap was in the area of social dance so we did a very good job in our 80-year history of gathering information about concert dance but when it came to American social dance styles which have been incredibly influential on what we end up seeing on the stage we did not have much representation for that there are understandable reasons behind that if dance that is commodified and is commercialized and when you monetize something you create ephemera around it so like when you go to perform on a stage you have to sell tickets which means that you're getting a professional photographer in you're creating marketing materials somebody may come in and film the dance if you think about how social dance happens in a community setting you don't have the same sort of need to advertise what you're doing but it also means that it leaves behind very little of a trace so we've been inviting in guest artists from communities where we have identified gaps and we've been asking them to gather elders from their field and also to bring in young dancers from the same community we have a dance studio that goes into one of our exhibition spaces for a couple of months a year in our building and we invite them in for two week residencies and we set again we set up a camera crew and we asked the elders to set dances that are lost from within their community on the young dancers we film the whole process and then we do oral histories with the elders that's been really beautiful in building an intergenerational sense of community but it's also been a wonderful way for us to expand the archive in a way where the artist feels like they have control over the boundaries of the project and the terms in which we engage with them so this summer we did a two week residency with Maria Torres on the hustle and we went in she made us all dance but yeah so it was it was for me it was a huge education because they were really breaking down a social history of New York in the 1970s the choreographies that they were demonstrating for us were distinguishing between communities in Brooklyn and the Bronx and they also got into like how the hustle traveled to places like Philadelphia and Philly and Paris was also a huge place for the hustle so Paris also got a mention in there and we're so we that was a two week residency where we sort of traced that and we're now kind of catching up and doing the oral histories with they didn't like to be called elders they liked to be called innovators and then in December and there's always public hours so if anybody wants to come in December the first two weeks of December we'll be working with Sukumek Miller on Mambo so 1950s and 1960s Mambo specifically in New York City and again the transmission of that information and the inevitable sort of shifts over time as communities assimilate and like other other influences global influences come into the form so kind of tracing that lineage from something that's more local into something that then has sort of a wider reach so I think that's just a little bit of what we do but happy to answer any questions. Hello so I'm Angolo choreographer based in Paris and transmission is at the heart of my practice as a choreographer but also as a pedagogue and the question that matters to me is how to make transmission an act of emancipation. So a significant part of my work is devoted to the recreation to the reinterpretation of dance works from the 20th century and most of them are from North American modern or postmodern dance as it seems I have a never-ending interest and curiosity for it. How to do dance work survive, travel through space and time and how can they be recreated that's a big question and of course the archives are a big part of it and as you all know in dance there is this tradition of oral transmission from choreographer to performer from teacher to student with all its richness and limits also and probably what is special about mining with transmission is that it's based on text, scores, archives and whether in lab and kinetography an abstract system some of you might know for writing and analyzing movement that I studied at conservateur de Paris and it was around that tool that we formed a collective with three other dancers in the early 90s the quatriore Albrecht de Knust with Dominique Brun Christophe Vavellet and Simon Équet and lab annotation enabled us to recreate namely or for example dances by Doris Humphrey or Nijinski's afternoon of a phone in the early 2000s but more recently it was also thanks to lab annotation score that I was able to propose a critical reinterpretation of solely by Ruth Sandonis for the peace moving alternatives in 2019 with a fantastic team of performers among them Calixtonetto, Sherwood Chen, Paul Pi, Gislingo, Nitz and Margaglio and Chantala Chivalier Gapa. I work also with different scores action programs in particular those by Anna Halbrin who enabled me to reinterpret periods and changes for landmark 1965 piece in dialogue with her and periods and changes would play stored throughout Europe and also in the United States as it was presented in New York in 2009 at the Dense Theatre Workshop and was awarded a Basie and we were so proud of that and the team again was amazing with Alain Vufar we were talking about him of course and he's still very much alive in my heart also but also Didi Dorvillier, Nuno Bizarro, Boas Barkam who do I and Veramantero of course. What about emancipation? So I start from my personal experience at this relationship with transmission through the written has been for me profoundly emancipating it allowed a direct access to the history of dance in movement and allowing me to situate myself in my practice and avoid to reproduce the same thing emancipation from mimicry and authority figures since you are freed of the performer and the teacher and emancipation from impose the lineages and heritages working with scores you are conscious that there are always versions of the work translation that you are dealing with and transmitting and not the original work itself which in dance is constantly slipping away so it offered the possibility to undo and this is very important for me the sacralization sacralization of the work and the past and avoid freezing the work in a patrimonial dimension and I love this quote from Walter Benjamin who says sorry for the translation but rather than proposing a commemoration that are executions it is a question of saving the phenomena from the catastrophe that a certain way of transmitting them as heritage represents they are saved when one brings to light in them the crack the whole program so for me it's very important to always try to question the modes and transmission and their effects and maybe it's just a series of question what is transmitted which work are available kind of so our have left traces which bodies and gesture are in the archives and who makes history and we might know it's mainly a white history and who is transmitting alone or with other the choreographers dancers any other persons or IA or whatever to whom what what are the audience concern and it might be a very very large panel and how modes of transmission through direct transmission schools constraints games and for what what is the intention so this one is a deep deep question and I always wonder how transmission can be an encounter a dialogue a co-creation of new links between a work and its recipient how can we felices facilitated the elaboration of a situated point of view or a plurality of point of views and be critical in a good way how can we make people aware of the game of gaps of this disappearance absences distances either as close as possible to the score or in a speculation that might bring out new potential it is in the work what is constitutive of the work is it the creative processes it is the graphic writing by example and what is it that continues to act today and might be a fertile resource for nowadays and so I will finish with the the case of my current project source yeah which is a game in between sorceress and sure so races doather for an environmental and feminist history of dance with which focuses on North American postmodern choreograph female choreographer and a hot print which a brown simon 40 but also Lisa Nelson and instead of recreating their dances I'm into I'm more interested in the processes and the sensitive knowledges they have created thanks to their links with specific natural environments and we are just back of a creative laboratory at PS 21 in Chatham on how natural environments are partners of creations how they have changed the way of dancing of these North American choreographers but also of today's artist and with a fantastic we were five with a fantastic moment of exploration in and sharing with Lisa Nelson Tara Lorenzen Mina Nishimura and French choreographer Laurent Pischot who is with us today and this project will lead to a site specific creation with Juan Giroux Camuyo as a dancer Rosa Ventadou and Zoe de Souza and I just wanted to thank Elena Sienco for this residency and Villa Albertina and specifically of course Nicole Birmann thank you what a beautiful lineup I love hearing I love hearing them so I'm David my modes of transmission are as performer creator advocate and instigator my role is to cause trouble and to create structure my work my particular practice centers around the interrogation of presence and absence and identity as a performative state my work has appeared in whether it's considered dance or installation or engagement from a range of intimate conversations one-on-one conversations regarding the sources of identity that almost become a confessional booth to another piece the warriors where the public is eavesdropping via their own phones into an intimate conversation that's being had in the park between two individuals discussing race violence and is a third part race violence and questions of intimacy I feel that the structures each of these containers really are forms the containers are forms of transmissions that are really important to think about how we transmit something whether it's live or digital or in the distance or up close is really important when you're thinking about what a work is or what the engagement is and what what's really important about sharing I feel like I am a structuralist in certain ways of looking at how things connect but that also the concept of transmission leads me back to a conversation yesterday about the body being an archive and how essential that is and how you know over the course of the last 40 or some odd years watching how bodies change and watching how work changes because of bodies now that's really essential for us to recognize I remember the first time I saw the Trisha Brown company and I saw Iran dancing and it just blew me away but also understanding that Iran is such a unique and brilliant mover that is not repbookable you can't you can't teach that you can't you can share ideas about it but the essence of and the scent of the way she moves and how she negotiates is something very unique and that's something that's locked in history and it's locked in her body and when you think about a work and the creation of the work the identities within that creation are locked in that moment they can never be done again and so when you reconstruct a piece what are you reconstructing what are you sharing and how do we sometimes think about preserving the flower but losing the scent and how do we also look at so yes and so it's this is interesting thing when you think about what what are we what do we think about when we archive in this new age and what what information do we have that we're actually passing along and how does that then get translated through the new contextual shape of the politic or the physical and knowing that the bodies are recreating work but they're not recreating the work one of the lines that I always remember from Diane Madden was that every time you go on stage you're recreating this work and that's really important to know it doesn't exist unless you do it you have documentation that's only a form of remembrance yes and that's also mitigated by the screen or by the materials I spent 10 years working with Coriola house building an archive database for Trisha Brown's work because I had worked with the company I had really intimate knowledge about how she worked and how the work was connected and it was really important for me to structure this database in a way that would really reveal and sort of parallel the underpinnings of the construction the conceptual work the structural relationship of the material the range of collaborators and how they integrated within that history of the work and it actually goes down to almost a very granular moment of looking at the building materials and knowing from this moment to this moment this person is doing this named material that you can source as well as understanding the relationships of the building material to the sections within a piece and how this particular material may appear in other works so that's a transmission of structure it's a transmission of the conceptual nature that one might not readily see when you see the work especially if you're not seeing the range of the work over the course of time but it's also a limited idea one of the aspects I feel is really important right now that we're having discussions on is what is the legacy of a choreographer is it really the work or is it the three-dimensional aspects of who they were who they are how they thought on so many different levels what were their writings what were the accidents that happened for example when you mentioned when she was making sky map and she called in for these scores excuse me what what are those stories that actually reveal who that choreographer or that creator was secondary to that are the I think of when I think of dance history I think of it's not just the making of the work it's the setting and the landscape in which the work was made what was what were the economic or political environments that these works were being made from and why did they become this way what was the impact of that that's part of the transmission of the creative act working within strictures but also working within other fields of influence and I feel like this the idea of archiving and transmission is almost quantum in how the multiplicities of actions and nodes are connected to this one particular piece or work or body of work I you know so in looking at legacy I think going forward in this world how do we sometimes I think about the idea of fracturing the archive how do you open it up in a way it's like there's a mode of preservation but there's a mode of dialogue and I think you're you're activating that in different ways as well and as as well as you and this idea of how do we bring people in to have dialogues not just in relationship to the work itself but in relationship to the conceptual historical nature of the individual or the institution so that these smaller stories also get daylight maybe these relationships are are looked upon or seen in ways that would otherwise be lost in history and I think the transmission becomes much more three-dimensional when we look beyond just the work because it's the people behind the work it's the actions it's the accidents it's the places that actually shape and form it's like when you're cooking are you cooking on gas are you cooking on electric is it is it a campfire is it outdoors what kind of herbs do you use you know all of those things it's like you know you pick one herb or another and it changes the work you know so it's I feel like the transmission I think of as a scent the way it's something that you remember but it's also very tactile and it has to remain tactile that's the question how do you keep it alive and how do you reinvigorate it how do you keep adding to the stew as it slowly cooks that will feed a village and so you're constantly cooking this pot and it's always cooking and people are always eating from it and you use the same base but it grows I'm blown away I don't know about you so this is incredible because the conversation like how it just went down the line and I felt there's like a transmission line like going on here with with several things and even maybe I wasn't here yesterday but I could imagine also like how the conversation today could link to the questions of pedagogy right and how is it that then within the space of pedagogy you can think about how is it that you actually teach the scent how is it you know like the process of this cooking and this and this transgression emancipation but also like this this the sociality that dance always already is right so I have like a few questions that maybe maybe I just throw them in and then as a as an excuse for all of you to start thinking about your own questions but I was thinking a few things the question of form is also a question that is important I guess in the act of transmission and in thinking about how is it that one transmits I cannot help but to think between the difference between the document and precisely the scent or precisely the desire to to emancipate or to transgress even the authority or authoritarian authority of the author right right and to actually start thinking through the kind of irreverent quality of the work right the work sometimes wants things that even the author may be afraid of you know so in thinking about you know for instance a collection right how is it that one collects as one must collect and every dance scholar is hyper grateful to the existence of the you know the dance collection New York Public Library will revere we need it we need to be there we need to be in the archive and at the same time I'm thinking about how is it that the spirit of something can linger in the document so this will be like one question and even like thinking about the difference between in law like the spirit of the law and the letter of the law and sometimes you need to go to one and the other right so I'm just wondering like if you want to explore a little bit further you know when you're transmitting do you know how much do you transgress to certain point that actually the form is no longer there and therefore the work is no longer there you see what I'm saying like I don't know if you want to go down the line again or if you have like other other forms of jumping in I am I am just thinking of the this idea of transmission with how do you prepare the context and the terrain the terrain of transmission so that it's not that you are bringing an object of form to people that are totally empty but how do you make them aware or invite them to be aware of what there are people with like these shapes this gesture this and so that it's a conversation so I don't really answer your question but it it bought that in it bought me that in mind and how the fact that the document or the score or actually don't have the flavor or the scent of the dance is actually super interesting because it and it is already a transgression I mean to to recreate a piece from or a dance from something that is totally you could say dead I mean a text is really like horizontal lying symbols etc and how it's really an act of creation to reinterpret and to go from the form because there are shapes that are written on the on the page to the living body and to your inner sensations and to continue to make back and forth into your own creation and what is the the past of the score is really something that is very powerful and probably allow some freedom when maybe when you are trying to imitate or to catch the the the style of the of the person it's something and it I love it and it's super interesting I don't say this is not a good way of transmitting but this disappearance of the movement itself allow a whole field of reinvention regarding certain rules yeah I think the you know it's it's a question of there's so many questions within that of you know like I think they're four right therefore yes at least four at least yeah yeah yes um I you know this idea of appropriation this idea of ownership this idea of really reinvigorating something or killing something and I think there's also a beauty in decay about how decay actually feeds something else and you know so is there are there rights and wrongs or are there legal issues you know because again somebody takes your work and they do something with it without your permission how do you what do you do you know the act of transmission it's you who are making me think about these scores from Jackson McLo he was a poet from the 60s and he had actually created a series of 40 poems called 40 40 dances 40 pronoun dances and he did it through a series of chance operations with language and they're quite beautiful and they work as poetry but they're also dance scores instructions and he originally created them for Simone Porti and then actually Trisha took some of the cards and she started working with them and when I think about the transmission where's the transmission within the score it's in the body it's really in the spirit of the translation that's I mean when you look at translators you know there's an original work but when the score is actually made for the individual to find themselves within it and in finding yourself within it it's going to be different from the 60s to maybe the you know 2000s because of what those words mean now but hopefully the humanity stays as a continuity but you he's released that freedom into the score when it comes to recreating work it's yeah I don't I don't really know if I have an answer to that because it's so personal about how people recreate when I was with the company when I was with Trisha we recreated set and reset like three times we recreated it and so we'd go back and like no it's this way it's that way very particular and so you're asking what was being lost I don't know what did she see or not see yeah what do you gain from that um and also watching the evolution of form and some when you have and I think I've seen this from the number of choreographers the original company that they start out with are the people around their age there's an individuality and then as time goes on it becomes codified to hold the form and yet they're they're trying to preserve the work as much as they're trying to hold on to something because they don't know how to allow freedom within that space and still retain what are the parameters of existence I think part of that is because when work is originally created the choreographer is making it it's bespoke on your body right like a choreographer is thinking I have Anne and I have David and I have John and like they're this is their they have these strengths these are their weaknesses and you you work to their specific body and how their body moves and then in subsequent generations you're placing what is a highly individual experience on a different body and that's that's why it gets codified because it doesn't necessarily sit and you're you're trying to adapt and conform to hold to hold it as you said across history but it's hard we often gather multiple generations of dancers of specific works together to talk about particularly iconic roles in dance history and to a person they never agree on how the role was performed and they were all like no but I was in the room with the choreographer like I know and it's like yeah you were all in the room with the choreographer at different moments in time and the choreographer is like yeah you're not that's not working for you so let me find something else for you and they they make little adjustments and tweaks and as long as the choreographer is living that's that we're all fine with that and then the burden of history hits us when the choreographer dies and then we have to think through how to navigate that I do just also want to say I hear you completely but for me interaction with archives is actually an incredibly intimate experience um and there there is a capacity to be in dialogue with people who are gone in a way that's actually quite magical and I think to your question André the role of a curator in collecting is to try and ensure that a collection it captures the totality of who the person was not not just who they were as an artist but also the motivations for how they chose to live their life and how that is all part of a whole the person I'm thinking of right now is um though we lost lovely Gus Solomon's junior who placed his archive with the dance division before his death some of you may know Gus used to have puppets of Martha and Martha Graham and Morse Cunningham and also a little Gus puppet Martha and Morse weren't always kind to little Gus um and Gus uh Gus wanted to make sure that those puppets came into the dance division but not until after he died so I they're coming in now but but to me those puppets are something where um you know they all the the people who were in charge of just sort of clearing out his apartment didn't know what they were and were almost going to throw them away and then I jumped on them um but they say so much about him like they're this object that reveals something about him and his place in the world that is it's separate from his work but also totally part of his work as well no I totally agree with you I mean I love archives and actually my first job everybody has to love our I did well we do we do we do I have to say my first job was with the New York public library when I was 14 and I worked in a research library in the Bronx so I it's I'm there that's okay I thought but you know the and when I think when I when I speak about archives it's really about how it becomes a holy thing for certain people and it becomes a static moment rather than a growing dynamic and the fact that you are holding the range of paraphernalia or artifacts that are related to individuals that's what's really essential and those are the sort of the the um refractions that I think are really important when we think about transmission it's like how that life breaks out into so many different rays and it's that's really important rather than just I think people think of the work at times and I agree I agree it's really beautiful and it's beautiful to know that the puppets will be there because they are amazing they are amazing um so Ruth uh we have a respondent are you ready you have a microphone okay so uh to hear the different speakers in this round table to to think about the questions of transmission in in many different ways challenging the idea of like collecting and preserving performance but really more interested about the idea of how we transmit ideas knowledge movement but also trauma and memory through body practices I'm going to ask a question that comes from a very particular field because I have been working all my life in museums and our and contemporary art centers um museums that somehow are interested in collecting performance and in preserving performance I'd say somehow because it's not it's never completely committed to that they said never totally but um so for for me has been always interesting of course like finding methodologies to exhibit archives that are coming from performative work in the way that go beyond the of the document of course and so in the process the reference the encounters but of course for me uh like performance is always like a sort of response to a political or to a social moment as you were saying um so for me this is a very radical question but I think for me performance is actually the only way to give history a second chance so my question is like could be performance in museums a method of healing uh and also um yes will be performance a new methodology for museums to rethink history to advocate for alternative narratives through embodiment and storytelling and I'm going to put an example because I mean like like a little study case that for me was very important I I worked for four years in a project I mean actually Edgar knows about that when I was at Redcat it was it was not a dance piece it was a voice piece by Leon Ferrari the words of others it's a performance of eight hours that is based on a text that was written on the 60s and we performed this piece about the um the Vietnam War about other things but mostly was responding to the Vietnam War because it was the first war that was somehow transmitted through the media in a very brutal way so we performed this piece with different people it was it's an eight hours piece always 40 voices in different in many places around the world and in a certain moment the rena Sophia in Madrid thought about the idea of acquiring this work the piece belongs to everybody I mean Leon never thought about selling this piece because it's a text we created together with Jose Antonio Sanchez the dear colleague like a way of like reading that but for the rena Sophia the question was if we acquire this piece perhaps the idea is like like the moral question of performing this every year or every two years as something that the museum should do no like it's not going to be there archived somewhere so that was one of the questions and all the time that we do this piece it will come with a series of workshops with different people that will talk about the context of that piece in the present even if the piece will be always be the same it's not that like we will look for different quotes from different ideas it was always be the same text um well they didn't the piece at the end again but it was a lot of I mean I was part of this conversation of what I mean to to collect such a work so I don't know that's my question for you guys like what you I mean in terms of museums like if you think like this question of like if performance could be the only way of healing or like giving a history a second chance okay who wants to pick that up I it's interesting I think when you say healing I think very particular moments um and uh you know when you acquire a piece what are you really acquiring and I think of when you were speaking I was thinking of Tino Segal who actually doesn't want documentation who doesn't there's infamorality to the moment that exists and so what you're buying or what you're acquiring cannot be written down cannot be documented it has to be recreated somehow some mysterious way um I was also thinking about Marina Abramovich and I was part of the retrospective in that work and um we weren't performers we were re-performers and there's a clarity of like no you're not performing this you're re-performing an idea a form and that's what it is granted I will also say that the form of that recreation was not the same as the original um when it was the one of the sections uh being recreated there were series of them that were being recreated at the same time and so it was almost like four pieces or five pieces within a room and that's very different from having a solitary piece in a room the relationship the focus the space around something totally changes the message and the engagement rather than just the documentation of an action the transmission is actually the architecture of the space as well and I think that's important when when something's being acquired these are really important questions for the creator to consider what's important to them which when you're creating something you're just creating you don't know how often it will be recreated or not whether it'll tour whether it'll die after three nights so when something somebody wants something what are you giving up you're giving up your child how do you want your child raised you know and do you want to do you feel like there are so many like those uh yeah oh at least at least four so I'm trying to um I think yes as you said it's really about also what is the intention of the of the author even if sometimes you often very often you can also look to a transgression and I think some works are really specific and can be conserved and owned but this question of uh oneness property is really a very um not a complicated question but a very political one and how as artists do we relate to these questions and regarding dance as you said a work or dance is only alive if you dance it so who is allowed to dance it what for etc so I am always very much concerned about the the power institutions to like froze the the the work and the possibilities and I agree with you that performance might be a healing process and I am thinking to this work with moving alternatives about this repertoire from Ruth Sunderlie and Ted Schoen and how we gather a lot a multiplicity of point of views and of stories to deconstruct and question the representation this major figures of uh North American history have been creating at their time and who which bring questions regarding uh exoticism cultural appropriation gender identity and how your if you want to go back uh because I question myself should I go there and I sort of as a French white choreographer it's part of my heritage and what is my job how could I deconstruct the fest the the importance of that and I think this has to be done all the time yes examining what is at work what was at work at the time and how does it trouble us replace us and how we can invent tools to to not to totally eradicate erase or refuse these works but to be able to okay and I see and I remember what I wanted to say that the body is a fantastic tool to to think to to uh yes I think it's the sensitive tool and as long as you didn't perform a work I think you don't you you just know it from outside so that's a few things I'll speak to the museum part of it um I think there are maybe certain works where cultural institutions need to make commitments to performing them on a regular basis um where there's a moral imperative to do so independent of your question I've been thinking for a long time about how to um address indigeneity in our archive and the fact that the that overwhelmingly indigenous communities some do but most don't want to be documented and that is absolutely their choice and their right and I support it but then there's still the issue of absence of representation for them historically and how to how to try and address that um and so I've been thinking about ways in which we could maybe do exactly what you propose which is welcome them in to perform on at regular intervals as a way to archive in real time and they have community constructs that would allow for that to happen I I think the where the struggle might be with other works is we get back to that thing of like the shifting of work as we move through history um if the museum doesn't have access to the right group of dancers and you know the the right body of knowledge in perpetuity how do they maintain that long term on the Lincoln Center campus most people in this room will know on September 11 the table of silence is performed every year starting when the first plane crashed to mark that occasion and while we have Jacqueline Luclisi that will always be I imagine Lincoln Center will want to keep it going long term I just don't yet know sort of how the how that will structurally be possible for them so I think those are questions that remain to be answered I I cannot help I'm sorry I'm going to transgress my position as do we need to finish we have 15 minutes right I'm keeping I'm keeping in time that that I'm not transgressing but moderators should not say things but I feel like I want to say something about your question because your question is amazing the you know can performance give a second chance to history and I was thinking about can re-performance give a second chance to history um and we're going to give just a very quick anecdote I in the summer I was uh occupied in working in the revival of a piece that had work in Portugal in 1997 so 26 years later this piece was being done by a Portuguese choreographer Francisco Masha I'm not going to go into this whole thing but I'm just going to say that originally there were 14 dancers right and now of the 14 only six was was from the original cast and there were younger ones who were not even born when the piece was premiered in 1997 and they're already like mature dancers 27 year old right so um so we are like okay we need to transmit to the new ones the new ones got the piece like this the new dancers it was the older ones who had to deal with the image of what they were in the past and there was one particular dancer and that was really really interesting to think about re-performance and giving history a second chance because there was one particular dancer that had created all the movement she was she was not just landing she was not landing she and she there's one day very close to the opening that you could tell she's finally there and I went to set you know Philippa you're like you're there and she said can I tell you what happened because you're not gonna think I'm crazy I'm like no okay so she said throughout the whole rehearsal period six weeks of re-enacting this thing she said I was looking to everyone around me especially the new dancers I was seeing them but I was also seeing the image of those who are not longer here in front of them so I had like this constant hallucination and it was only today that I finally saw those who are actually here and then I could dance which for me means to be so she gave history a second chance by by being fully engaged with the present with the now you know and that's what I feel like all of you are saying like once re-performance is no longer lingering with the image of the past right but actually fall into a full engagement with the present then you are doing it you know I feel that that's what's going on so I appreciate your question okay so now we have we keep going I'm a very obedient dancer so I follow the score so now we have time for the dance for the audience to ask questions for the dancers yes so any questions or comments or yes please hi everyone thanks for being here my name is John Huber dancer producer etc I asked this question as like a firm believer in transmission and someone who has loved learning as a dancer works by other artists from other generations but I do have this question of if at a certain point no longer presenting transmitted versions of works does best serve a work when there's so much distance between the hand of the author and other generations of performers saying this again as a performer myself who has loved learning older versions of work yeah I guess I'm just thinking about this this tension between the the possibility and and potential of transmission and of re-performance to activate history in these ways we were just talking about with the distance from the hand of the author that comes over time and how to hold these things in balance to think that the distance no okay the fact that the dancer and as an artist and I think for me it's super important to what I said to be situated otherwise you are you keep repeating things and imagining you are inventing and for me it's really a dialogue so if you can't perform the pieces if you can't see them perform you will be a kind of blind to what is your history and what has happened before so for me it's it's very important and it's almost a political issue so let's say that's what I wanted to to say and distance distance yes distance it oblige probably it obliges you to shift the attention more toward the process of dialoguing with something that has disappeared that is full of holes etc for the of absence and the process is also as important as the as the the work itself maybe just one thought about language the physical language of a work or a choreographer if it's very specific and again I'll just speak from Trisha which is a very very particular world and while there's no codified technique it there's a learning through just working in the work for an extended period of time and I think right now when we think about work and or reconstruction or even building work what what time do we have how much time can we afford and if we don't have the time to actually research or dive into the waters of that and really feel that language and learn that language it's going to evolve it's not going to be the same and I think that's something about losing language language will always be shifted French shifts English shifts do we allow it to shift that's the question and at what point does it then become its own dialect I think that the problem is if you if you don't put the work on bodies to to the earlier point that was made then it's just documentation to engage with the work you have to be present in the room with it there are certainly problematic elements to older works and those I'm perfectly fine with retiring to the archive it's not appropriate to have them on 21st century bodies I do think it's important we don't erase our history though I think we we need to know what all like the whole truth of what we did on stages before because while it may seem like cancelling something is is in the best interest of moving forward it's always really important not to forget the racism that was perpetuated perpetuated across stages and the trauma that caused it's really important to know that and acknowledge that and to learn that history so I think those things do have to be retained in an archive and understood and I think that's the appropriate place for that kind of information to reside um I can't actually answer your question because it's really it's a it's a knife edge right um I agree with you like the the further away you get from the choreographer the further away you get from choreographic intent but um you know I in the archive I have seen more than one choreographer basically say that from the moment that this the performers go on stage and performers in front of an audience it's not their work anymore you know that as you said every every single time you perform it it's a recreation and as long as you acknowledge that and accept that I think that's okay um please uh yes we'll be the last question my question is something about the transmission here which I find um really interesting because you are going from the written word you're going from the archives and none of that bothers me at all because in actual fact even if a dancer shows another dancer a piece that is the retransmission and it will be different but but what does distress me a lot is learning from the videotape very fast and I have the feeling that young dancers can learn all kinds of movement very fast and copy it and I feel that's where not only the transmission but their growth gets compromised so I wondered if you wanted to address that goes back to your scent right the difference between mirroring something and really kind of understanding the essence of it I I hear a lot I mean I talk to lots of different people in the dance field I do hear that there is a drastic need for coaching across the dance field somebody very somebody really agrees with that in the back yeah I mean we are we are underfunded as a field we like there's no question about that and dance is more underfunded than music or theater and I think we all know that um we absolutely need to invest in our young dancers they are they are literally the archive carrying our history forward as well it's creating our future so I think they should have every resource available to them so I'm definitely in favor of more more coaching and providing opportunities to previous interpreters of roles time and resources to come into studios and impart the knowledge that they have one last last question yeah I would like to testify um what um Tim when you this yeah is that right why is it funny yeah that's the oh sorry so I don't know if that's the morning how to say give an account of yes I've been the dancer of um some projects of the quite pure albrecht knust with Anne and Christophe and Simon and Dominique Brun so then not a novel notators and I would like to connect to the fact of emancipating dancers and also this journey between the past and the present which is really a strong thing for us all the time as dancers I'm not talking about that being a choreographer I'm talking being a dancer for others and being the dancers for the history of dance also so that's what also the quite your knust allowed us to live and um so there was the first program that I saw in conservatoire de paris that there was some program in 92 I think and then you start to gather people around the continuous project out of daily of Yvonne Reiner who started to come in front and to feel like making dance again because of you four and seeing us trying to do things and then at the same time satisfying lover of Steve that was the same program so we started to embody our references and our history so that was so strong that and then after you had the idea in 1999 2000 to do the afternoon the prelude at la premier d'un faune of Nijinsky which was so 1912 which was really uh in another another avant-garde and for us as dancers still dancing the faune and the grand nav because we were allowed to go on it has been such a strong gift to yeah to the to the cast who did that who the also to the school of angel because you came also for the students so allowing through natators to connect to their history is such a strong thing and since we're dancers I just want to do something one second which was such a strong thing in me because I had the feeling that the history and all that nijinsky I could understand something so I just want to say to do something that was so enormous I just yeah the fact of being the grand nav just when she there is the phone in front and the grand nav is just making this and only this moment of the forehead is just something that so much was so emotional and so erotic also but I was thinking okay a woman in this for him or for her was just that you know and I felt not for the first time but I felt really a woman doing that and the other thing is that for let's say five years we were doing this when Lofon wanted to to have the woman and then Dominique Brun once arrived to make me work and she says oh I saw something new in the in the score I saw something new in the score so now you're not going to do only like this but you're going to do the the head of the phone is going to do this and then in just one you have all the animality that it's not only wanting to have the the need but wanting to have the need it was just it was just so incredible all the things we've been spending years crazy years with yes and let me just quote the the team of uh they're all the old team of this okay no no can I just because I see my me like um and the time but I also just wanted to say that when you say I saw something new in the in the score someone said like the score is also moving right so so everything is emotional and so it's incredible because then the whole archive and the body can change right so anyway so should I I think then I feel very okay sorry thank you sorry um I wanted to try to pull a thread through from the performance pedagogy the first day and maybe speak about the pressure on young dancers and they're sorry I'm really emotional and the pressure on these quote bodies to reproduce I think you know I'm in a school where there's 200 of them and um I'll start there and also to say that when we talk about this idea I just keep thinking about this labor of these bodies trying to reproduce this idea of what this dance and this history might be so I want to say that and that it's enormous and that it's um fraud and it's exhaustive I also want to say that when Dorothea was talking about this this place they could move through to find one another through this storytelling I want to believe I have to believe that when you're speaking of this image of this dance that existed outside of these bodies that we're trying to reproduce this piece but in between I keep thinking about how Trentie Minha talked about how rhythm actually exists between the instrument in the body and that we're trying to meet it and I want to say that with training with pedagogies of performance the question I have is how do we attune young artist today to find those places to pass through to meet up with one another to suddenly distance is not the same and time is also different but I I want to believe that you know that that that's what we're doing I just wanted to say that you said also you know this thing about the spirit of something that can linger in the document so yeah it's there you know the joy it's there it's not in the bodies it's in the world you know I just want to say that that like all this pressure that these bodies have to make the joy or we create the dance that finding it seems so much more hopeful thank you thank you don't pay yeah thank you thank you all um for yes the labor and the time um you put into this um thank you also the hotel wheel for the conversation this morning I keep thinking of the gathering of the dispersed also maybe as a transmission an act of transmission um um Andre David and Linda thank you very much and we will re-gather at 1 15 come thank you