Accidental Archives of Performance Making

This paper introduces the online toolkit created during the AHRC-funded Resilience and Inclusion: Dancers as Agents of Change project. Although the primary aim of the toolkit is the transmission of information for training purposes, the toolkit has simultaneously created a carefully curated repository of performance documents and related materials with a film at the core out of which many of the learning materials emerge. The discussion considers how this curated library of valuable performance documents creates an accidental archive. Notwithstanding the challenges of making materials open, often connected to institutional gatekeeping, this short paper poses questions about the documenting of process (in various forms and formats) to ask what value these process documents hold, for the artist and audience, and for those who are responsible for their safe keeping

Postscript

An issue of a journal that focuses on just one art work may be unusual, but the range and the breadth of the perspectives adopted by all the authors included here demonstrate that there is much to appreciate in this single work. Such attention given to All This Can Happen (ATCH) might also suggest that, as editors of this issue, we regard it as a landmark screendance work, and in many ways it is. It arrived at a time when changes were taking place in the art world. ATCH reflects, or perhaps contributed to, some of these changes, including: that of the shifting relationship between dance and visual arts that has subsequently posed a challenge to established hierarchies, the fascination with early technologies as source material in the production of new art work, and a growing interest in reconnecting with the past through reusing and reimagining archival content