Circus, archive and the eternal wish

We preserve an object related to a specific time, often using it as a tool to interpret the past or to understand our present better. In the same way, we store gestures, actions, and words that provide a foothold in existence, a familiar structure to refer to over time. In this way, we build up our archive of the body, an evocative repository of what we consider important and unimportant, useful or superfluous, positive but also harmful. Contrary to what is commonly thought of when referring to the term archive, we are not referring to the preservation of inanimate objects, but to the capacity to connect the past with the present and the future through a non-hierarchical perspective, thus thinking of the archive as a:

«transient entity or in a continual state of flux as opposed to fixed in time, destabilising the linearity and sense of permanence commonly associated with the archive» (Griffiths, 2014: 78).

The ideas of flow and transition are totally at odds with the permanence of objects, especially when discussing the archive of immaterial, ephemeral artistic practices, using a term dear to Peggy Phelan. Focusing then on the arts of dance and circus, there is an increasingly evident reference to the body archive, a notion elaborated by André Lepecki that has inaugurated a renewed interest in these studies and that defines the body as a place of stratification of both the past and cultural memories that continually resurface during creative processes. 

Therefore, not exactly something ephemeral and evanescent, but a phenomenon that passes - away, around, across - and comes back again[1]. The question of memory in the arts that by their nature leave no trace - specifically dance and circus, for different reasons - has stimulated a series of questions, especially from artists, about what it means to archive, what it is used for, and above all how it is possible to define an archive in the intangible arts. 

These reflections were addressed in the three days of ArchiveLab: a workshop dedicated to exploring different interpretations of archives - especially within circus - organised within the CircusDanceFestival and held in the German Dance Archive Cologne. This workshop was dedicated to young students, artists, and experts and coordinated by researchers Mirjam Hildbrand and Johanna Hilari. Several presentations were made within the festival programme, in a specific section dedicated to the performing arts archive.

One provocation came from Thomas Thorausch, deputy director of the German Dance Archive Cologne[2]  and was discovered thanks to the International Visitors Programme linked to the Circus Dance Festival:

The archive is based on the eternal wish to reconstruct dance, and we store so much material to make this possible. Please, keep in mind that you create a piece today, and maybe in ten or fifteen years, you will want to reconstruct it. Which important materials would be important for you? This you want to store. 

Two aspects essentially emerge from these words: on the one hand, contemporary artistic production defines the need for a recovery of the past, identifiable in dance as an attempt to put the repertoire back-into-action (Pontremoli, 2016) and question its symbolic value in the present with its social values, body patterns and social rules. In circus specifically, there is the need to build up a historical heritage of experiences that have hitherto been little treated by specialist studies and political institutions: attention is needed to create an epistemological statute familiar to theatre and dance, in order to free it from marginality.

On the other hand, it is clear that there is a sort of fascination with the past, an attempt to discover where everything began and what elements we can find: an attraction that Derrida defined as a:

«compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin [...] a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement» (Derrida, 1996: 91).

During the days spent in the German Dance Archive Cologne, the beginning of the research was a random sifting of texts, photos and materials, starting with some general keywords such as ‘dance’, ‘circus’, and ‘object’, leading to the discovery of some not very well-known figures - about whom little has been written - such as Lotte Goslar. Born in Dresden in 1907, she studied and worked with Mary Wigman and Gret Palucca within the Ausdruckstanz scene. She developed an interest in clowning and cabaret, so much so that - due to her opposition to the National Socialist Party and despite not being directly threatened by it - she moved to the United States in 1933. In 1954, she founded the Pantomime Circus where she united dancers, acrobats, circus performers and cabaret into one creative dimension, bringing her idea of the comic and the grotesque, together with profound research on the body that knew no limitations in stage form. We have a great deal of photographic material, posters and reviews on this artist, but very little on the research side. We do find a dissertation on Goslar, described as follows by Marianna Vogt:

Lotte Goslar was a clown. She was a dancer. She was a pantomime and cabaret artist. Before there was performance art, she was a performance artist. [...] She is most often classified as a dancer, sometimes as a clown, more rarely as a kabarettist. None of these categories suits her perfectly. Neither did Goslar wish to adhere to the dictates, style, or tradition of any discipline. She was most at home outside the borders of the art forms with which she is associated, and throughout her career followed no creative movements except those of her mind and her body (Vogt, 2007: 1)

The discovery of her figure later led to connections with other famous personalities: the meeting at Jacob's Pillow Dance with Jean Cébron moved the search back to Europe, to the Folkwang Ballet, where Pina Bausch danced for Kurt Jooss. We find some photographs of Bausch and Cébron in the rehearsal room, someone capturing a moment of L'aprés-midi d'un faune from 1966. With a Pindaric flight, one can go on to reason about the various versions of the faun theme, thus discovering the Non Nova company's reworking by Phia Ménard of L'aprés-midi d'un foehn in which objects - in this case plastic bags - take control of the stage to the notes of Debussy. From here the paths branch out, either following the path marked by the use of objects on stage and their transformation over time, or that of reworking repertoire works through the eyes of the circus.

In short, excavating archives helps to shed light on many histories and artistic phenomena of the present: it is now a question of understanding how this ‘archival impulse’, according to Hal Foster's fortunate definition, can actually contribute to artists' work. In ephemeral arts, the most important archives are precisely the artists' bodies as a place of sedimentation of practices, movement schêmata, gestures, motor mechanisms and production of kinetic apparatuses that are transmitted through the ages, like Warburgian survivals that return and reappear. Aware of this, artists are called upon to talk about the work, to produce materials from it and to write about it: they are, in a way,

«condemned to the word» (Bernard, cited in Dupuy, 2011: 108).

Thomas Thorausch is also well aware of this and explains how

«the hidden thing that dancers and choreographers must understand is that heritage is also their task: to give material to the archive, to document themselves».

This is a delicate issue that brings us back to the problems connected with the overproduction of works - and thus their subsequent selection - in digital format.
The highly topical question is therefore how it is possible to document the practices of bodies, especially in circus where familiarity with notation systems is decidedly less: is it really necessary to ‘fix’ these practices? Or is it necessary to speak of strategies of transmission through bodies,

«a process of re-memorization, or re-emergence, [...] however inevitably subject to loss» (Sini, 2015: 80)?

If this is the direction, the archive of the body will never be able to re-propose the same actions, the same gestures, as they are re-proposed by different bodies, just as the materials deposited will never have the same value in the eyes of those who discover and use them.  The archive is, therefore, a living thing, in circus more than ever, as it is constituted through the materials created by a community that knows them and collects them as a testimony and a tool: Terry Cook imagines a practice of «community archiving» where each artist or company can create its own small archive and network it with other members, as was imagined with the Circus Oz Living Archive (Carlin, 2014). 

Perhaps the time has come to stand in relation to the new dynamics of the circulation of ideas and processes through networks and digital media, while reflecting on what objects are shared, for what purposes and what complexities should be discussed regarding references, authorship and identity of the bodies involved in performance. Until then, the controversy between a permanent archive as a repository of selected objects - gestures, languages, actions - or as a new space of passage and transformation remains open.

References

[1] Andrè Lepecki uses the expressions «passes», «passes around, between and across», and «comes back around» indicating a particular dynamic: «where bodies intertwine or intermingle, across time—in an endless chain of reciprocal emissions, transmissions, receptions, and exchanges of times, gestures, steps, affects, sweat, breathing, and historical and political particles» (Lepecki, 2010: 39).

[2] I would like to thank the NRW Kultur Sekretariat and CircusDanceFestival for allowing me to participate in the ArchiveLab workshop (13-14-15th of May 2024) and discover the German Dance Archive Cologne during the International Visitor Programme.

Bibliography

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