Roundtable
Dance Archives: Talking to the dead

The wordless side
Moniek Merkx is an award-winning director, writer and dramaturg in Dutch youth theater and mime. During the 50th anniversary of Theater Science at the University of Amsterdam in 2014, Merkx posited the thesis that too little attention is paid in the Netherlands to the wordless side of theater:

"Looking, how do you do that? How do you analyze associations, how do you read montage, how do you see details in relation to the bigger picture, how do you develop a physical gaze, if you don't have language, characters and storylines? As far as I'm concerned, that often remains the key question. I still so often get bent toes when I read how my more physical work and that of many of my mime and dance colleagues is analyzed. I still read (after more than 30 years!!!) the lack of context, discourse, vocabulary to talk about the wordless side of theater work."

If this criticism is true, would this lack also apply to the archive? Does that too focus more on language, text and clear storylines, and is the wordless in danger of being underexposed here as well?

Keeping up and passing on
Pauline de Groot was one of the initiators of the SNDO. Although she worked with big names abroad and also brought a host of international celebrities to the school, her work did not always receive the recognition and support it deserved in the Netherlands. De Groot spent her life making scrapbooks and posters, keeping notebooks and dance notations, collecting photographs and videos and digitizing them as well. She is currently preparing her archive for transfer to the Theatre Collection of the Allard Pierson. We follow her as she goes through the archive and she talks about the importance she places in keeping and passing on documents associated with her oeuvre.

Talking to the dead
Catalina Insignares was born in Colombia, lives and works as a choreographer in Paris and, in addition to all kinds of training, did DAS Third. She is interested in how the imagination and sensory of dance can be used to communicate with the invisible, such as the dead. Listening together through the body to other forms of existence that still speak to us, that we carry with us. She asked Tamara Antonijević to write a text that thematized the remote exchange between bodies. This text will be booklet number 6 in the The New Dance Library, in collaboration with DAS Third / AHK Graduate School.

Reissue Modern dance in development
In 1985 Moniek Merkx, together with Aat Hougée, published her thesis on the School for New Dance Development. For a long time, Modern Dance in Development was the only publication on new dance in the Netherlands. The Nieuwe Dansbibliotheek decided to reissue the booklet, add an English edition and, by means of an extensive interview with Merkx and an article by Jeroen Fabius on the SNDO through the years, provide a broader artistic and historical context with the publication.

Mime scholar Marijn de Langen, who last year published the impressive book Dutch Mime with Amsterdam University Press, will give her reaction to the reissue of Modern Dance in Development. After De Langen found the mime archive in unsorted boxes at the old Theater Institute and single-handedly put things in order there with the help of students, she did years more of research and conducted dozens of interviews, before she obtained her doctorate in Utrecht and published the richly illustrated, beautifully designed edition. What does she think of this reissue? Does it make sense to translate an old text by a relative outsider to dance into English as well? What is this good for and what more needs to be done?

We will then begin the conversation with industry guests and the audience about how to translate the need for archiving into practices that do justice to the dance and allow us to speak to the dead.