Anarchiving a Screendance Archive. Reenacting Choreographic Traces within Museo Madre
10.6092/issn.2036-1599/11860
Questo saggio solleva l’attenzione sull’archivio di videodanza del Festival Internazionale Il Coreografo Elettronico custodito presso il Museo Madre di Napoli e curato in collaborazione con un team di ricercatori della Sapienza Università di Roma. Partendo dall’esplorazione del modello concettuale inscritto nel termine oggetto coreografico (Forsythe 2008-2018), l’articolo espone come l’archivio di Il Coreografo Elettronico possa costituire un caso di studio trasversale attraverso il quale analizzare da tre diverse prospettive la crescente presenza di esposizioni di danza/coreografiche all’interno degli spazi museali. Nel corso del saggio il concetto di anarchive (Massumi-Manning 2016) è applicato come principio centrale della ricerca. Viene utilizzato come approccio per legare insieme le tre prospettive e spiegare come le esposizioni di oggetti coreografici all’interno di un museo siano in grado di riconfigurare nell’ambiente contemporaneo l’empowerment sociale.
application/pdf
2036-1599
11860
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0
Danza e ricerca. Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni
Anarchiving a Screendance Archive. Reenacting Choreographic Traces within Museo Madre
Text.Serial.Journal
https://danzaericerca.unibo.it/
Dossier - Danza e museo
2020-12-31
2020-11-29
2020-12-31
2021-01-05
309-327
danzaericerca
Letizia Gioia Monda
2020/12/31
10.6092/issn.2036-1599/11860
309
Sapienza Università di Roma
2036-1599
en
327
Anarchiving a Screendance Archive. Reenacting Choreographic Traces within Museo Madre
https://danzaericerca.unibo.it/article/download/11860/12135
Letizia Gioia Monda *

Anarchiving a Screendance Archive. Reenacting
Choreographic Traces within Museo Madre
31 dicembre 2020, pp. 309­327
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036­1599/11860
Section: Dossier [peer reviewed]


                   Articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non­Commercial 3.0 Unported licence
                   (Authors retain copyright in their articles, permission to reuse third party copyrighted content is not
                   included).


           Email: danzaericerca@unibo.it

            Www: https://danzaericerca.unibo.it/




Abstract
Questo saggio solleva l’attenzione sull’archivio di vi­       This essay draws attention to the screendance archive
deodanza del Festival Internazionale Il Coreografo            of Il Coreografo Elettronico Festival stored within
Elettronico custodito presso il Museo Madre di Napoli         Museo Madre of Naples and curated in collaboration
e curato in collaborazione con un team di ricercatori         with a team of scholars from the Sapienza University of
della Sapienza Università di Roma. Partendo dall’e­           Rome. By exploring the conceptual model of the term
splorazione del modello concettuale inscritto nel ter­        choreographic object (Forsythe 2008­2018), the arti­
mine oggetto coreografico (Forsythe 2008­2018), l’ar­         cle explains how Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive can
ticolo espone come l’archivio di Il Coreografo Elettroni­     provide a transversal case study through which anal­
co possa costituire un caso di studio trasversale attra­      yse the increasing presence of dance/choreographic
verso il quale analizzare da tre diverse prospettive la       exhibitions within museum spaces from three different
crescente presenza di esposizioni coreografiche all’in­       perspectives. Along the paper, the concept of anar­
terno degli spazi museali. Nel corso del saggio il con­       chive (Massumi­Manning 2016) is applied as a cen­
cetto di anarchive (Massumi­Manning 2016) è applica­          tral principle of the research. It is used as an approach
to come principio centrale della ricerca. Viene utilizzato    to link the three perspectives together and to explain
come approccio per legare insieme le tre prospettive          how the exhibition of choreographic objects within mu­
e spiegare come le esposizioni di oggetti coreografici        seums can reconfigure the social empowerment in the
all’interno di un museo siano in grado di riconfigurare       contemporary environment.
nell’ambiente contemporaneo l’empowerment sociale.

  *   La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italia.
                                              Letizia Gioia Monda


             Anarchiving a Screendance Archive. Reenacting
              Choreographic Traces within Museo Madre




Introduction
      How can we reenact choreographic traces to support the reconfiguration of social empowerment
in the contemporary environment?
      The question mentioned above drove the development of this paper, which comes as a result of
the research I am currently carrying out at the Museo Madre in Naples. My objective is to anarchive
the screendance archive of Il Coreografo Elettronico, which contains the materials collected during the
International Videodance Festival. Il Coreografo Elettronico Festival was founded in Naples in 1990
by Marilena Riccio as a venture of the cultural association Napolidanza 1. It represented for twenty-one
editions (the last in 2017 2 ) an essential platform for sharing and recognizing the videodance culture
in Italy. In 2019, the festival archive has been donated to Museo Madre directed by Laura Valente 3.
Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive approximately gathers 2000 screendance works 4 and represents an
important cultural heritage. It stores several types of screendance practices because since its fifth edition
(1994) 5, the festival was organized as an international competition among different categories:

   A) recording of stage performance or adaptation of it in studio

   B) original creation for the video

   1. Cf. Marilena Riccio, Il Coreografo Elettronico, in Vito Di Bernardi – Letizia Gioia Monda (a cura di), Immaginare la
danza. Corpi e visioni nell’era digitale, Piretti, Bologna 2018, pp. 171-174.
   2. The 2018 edition of Il Coreografo Elettronico, for which about 30 videos have been selected and subsequently archived
together with the others, did not take place for organizational reasons.
   3. Laura Valente is President of Foundation Donnaregina per le Arti Contemporanee/Museo Madre in Naples. Since 2015,
she is also the Artistic Director of Il Coreografo Elettronico, International Videodance Festival.
   4. These records are on Betacam, Betamax, VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, and digital supports.
   5. When Il Coreografo Elettronico Festival was founded in 1990, screendance was an unknown practice in Italy. The
festival provided an important platform for sharing and recognizing videodance culture in Italy. At the beginning, the creators
Marilena Riccio (former principal dancer of the Teatro di San Carlo di Napoli) and the choreographer Jean-Claude Gallotta
did not have clear the potentiality of this initiative. Along the first five editions, the growing development of the event and
the increasing participation of authors from all over Europe, USA, Canada, etc., drove the experts, who promoted the event
as organizers and as part of the jury, to articulate the competition in the five categories. See: Elisa [Guzzo] Vaccarino, La
Musa dello schermo freddo. Videodanza, computer e robot, Costa&Nolan, Genova 1996, pp. 175-180.




                                «Danza e ricerca. Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni», anno XII, numero 12, 2020
                                                                                                 danzaericerca.unibo.it
                                                                                  DOI: 10.6092/issn.2036­1599/11860
310                                                                                                        Letizia Gioia Monda




   C) documentaries or movie on folk dances

  D) videodance developed by digital graphic design

   E) works inspired by the art field

      Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive is curated by Vito Di Bernardi’s team 6 following to an agree-
ment with the Department of History Anthropology Religions Art Performance of Sapienza University
of Rome. The Sapienza’s team 7 analyses the archive to create new structural conditions from the original
archival logic 8 in order to make its contents visible and accessible to a wider audience. The purpose
of this project is to reenact the dance knowledge studying the choreographic traces collected during
the festival’s years. The investigation wants to create more awareness on screendance and increase its
inclusion in teaching and research programs, providing contributions to enquire into dance cultural
heritage. Ideally, the initiative should support the development of a history of dance that has not yet
been written by designing a cross-sectoral digital platform.
      As a member of Sapienza team, my work consists in studying the screendance practices as a «mul-
timodal expression coming from a physical thinker’s projection» 9 in objects created through the digital
transcodification of the movement language. After analysing the practices, I argue that each screendance
performance can be conceptualized as a choreographic object through which investigate and observe the
evolution and perception of choreographic procedures long a specific time frame. In accordance with
William Forsythe’s approach, a choreographic object can generate new kind of knowledge by putting
in relation physical phenomena; as users we can experience the kinesthetic event by interacting with
those types of artefacts in a real environment. In this paper, I am going to apply the conceptual model
of the choreographic object 10 to explain how Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive of Museo Madre can
provide a transversal case study through which analyse the increasing presence of dance/choreographic
exhibitions within museum spaces from three different perspectives.

   6. Since 2017, Vito Di Bernardi, Professor of History of Dance at the Sapienza University of Rome, is the director of the
research university project: “Per un archivio digitale della danza. L’uso delle nuove tecnologie per conservare e trasmettere la
memoria della danza. Progetto sull’archivio video del Festival Internazionale Il Coreografo Elettronico (Napoli 1991-2017)”
funded by the Sapienza University of Rome in 2017 and 2018.
   7. At present, Sapienza’s team is composed by Vito Di Bernardi, director and supervisor of the research project; and me
studying videodance works created as a form of digital choreography.
   8. Until 2015, Marilena Riccio (festival founder) took care of Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive and she organized the
archival logic per year according to the materials presented by the authors long the several festival editions.
   9. Cf. Letizia Gioia Monda, What we are talking about when we talk about videodance?, in «Music in Art», vol. XLV, going
to be published.
   10. Long this essay, I am going to explore the double meaning inscribed in the expression “choreographic object”: from
the one hand, the notion developed by the choreographer William Forsythe; from the other hand the definition from an-
thropology and social science, who declined that expression to refer to a “boundary object”, a construct that can foster
interdisciplinary investigations on dance practices. See: James Leach, Choreographic Objects, in «Journal of Cultural Eco-
nomy», vol. VII, n. 4, November 2014, pp. 458-475. See also: Scott deLahunta, Working without an Overview, in Sabine
Gehm – Pirkko Husemann – Katharina von Wilcke (edited by), Knowledge in Motion, Transaction, Bielefeld 2007, p. 98.
Anarchiving a Screendance Archive                                                                                      311




      The first perspective examines the performative aspects of choreographic objects within museums.
Through this perspective, the choreographic object is meant as potential tool to have access to the
knowledge coming from the kinesthetic experience.
      The second perspective concerns how Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive, intended as an archive
composed by choreographic objects, can provide a research instrument to reenact the traces of choreo-
graphic thinking among the years.
      The third point of view proposes to observe how research on the screendance archive can reactivate
the process of writing choreography, by using the archive itself as a source of choreographic exhibitions
where its objects are designed to support the development of new dance literature.
      Thanks to the application of the concept of anarchive, these three perspectives are linked to-
gether in the speculation. As a central principle of the research presented here, through the concept
of anarchive I am going to explain how the exhibition of choreographic objects within museums can
reconfigure the social empowerment in the contemporary environment. The Anarchive concept has been
theorised by the Senselab of Montreal, which is directed by the choreographer Erin Manning and the
philosopher Brain Massumi. It is an approach that aims at giving value to the pure feeling 11, which we,
as users, perceive on the edge of performance. In 2016, the Senselab’s scholars began to wonder on a
series of questions after the event Distributing the Insensible 12 :

     • What is felt matters even if it does not actually register?

     • How can we give a value to what is not possible to archive?

      From this issue, the SenseLab defined some principles for the anarchive practice 13. The declination
of the anarchive notion, coming from both artistic practice and archival theory 14, places itself in an
oblique position toward the traditional archival logics. Literally, it means «an-archival because it leaves
behind the classical archival principles of order, accessibility, and tangibility in favor of regeneration,
submediality, and embodied memory» 15. As Brian Massumi explained: «the anarchive is a technique for
making research-creation a process-making engine. Many products are produced, but they are not the

   11. I refer to the concept of pure feeling developed by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, cf. A. N. Whitehead,
Process and Reality, Free Press, New York 1978.
   12. More details about this event can be found at the following link: http://senselab.ca/wp2/immediations/upcoming-
distributing-the-insensible-dec-10-20-2016/ (accessed 4/10/2020).
   13. Those principles are published in the book: Andrew Murphie (edited by), Go-to How To Book of Anarchiving, The
Senselab, Montreal 2016.
   14. Recently, Timmy De Leat pointed out how the term “anarchive” has been applied occasionally in the critical discourse
on the archive to foster new ways of exploring the archival logics in contemporary dance field. For example, the media
scholar Wolfgang Ernst is recognized as one of the first who proposed the term to reflect on the impact digitization had
on the archiving practice. Cf. Timmy De Leat, The Anarchive of Contemporary Dance. Toward a topographic understanding of
choreography, in Helen Thomas – Stacey Prickett (edited by), The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, Routledge, Abingdon
2019, pp. 177-190.
   15. Ivi, p. 178.
312                                                                                                     Letizia Gioia Monda




product. They are the visible indexing of the process’s repeated taking-effect: they embody its traces» 16.
Along this paper and in accordance to that, I am going to argue how the anarchive of Il Coreografo
Elettronico Archive may serve a double purpose. Firstly, it can open new perspectives to read dance
knowledge; moreover, it can reconfigure the social empowerment of dance culture in the contemporary
environment.



Choreographic Objects in a Museum Space
      The enthusiasm for exhibiting choreography 17 within museums is not a new phenomenon. The
practice finds its roots in the Thirties and it is later developed in the Sixties and Seventies. Then, it has
been successfully recognized in the contemporary age as the initiative announced by Boris Charmatz
with the Musée de la danse 18. The potential subversion of the historical hierarchy between visual arts
and performing arts is one of the most relevant aspects of this increasing presence of dance inside
museum spaces. Such a phenomenon has helped to shed light on how choreographic practices have
changed during the last century. It focuses on the distinction between the abstract manifestations of
choreographic ideas and the acknowledgment of their historical forms of representations, or of what,
according to William Forsythe, we could name “the choreography of dance” 19. Indeed, Forsythe ex-
plained the nature of this transformation in his essay Choreographic Objects 20. Within the mentioned
publication, he describes a choreographic object as:

           a categorizing tool that can help identify sites within which to locate the understanding of
       potential organization and instigation of action-based knowledge. With this tool, the proliferation
       of choreographic thinking across wider domain of arts practice can be thrown into relief 21.

      This concept offers an important strategy to support, in the movement analysis, the understanding
of those forms of choreography coming from the interaction between real and virtual spaces. What
Forsythe’s essay highlighted is the result of a path from Rudolf von Laban to the more contemporary

   16. Brian Massumi, Working Principles, in Andrew Murphie (edited by), Go-to How To Book of Anarchiving, cit., p. 7.
   17. Cf. Kirsten Maar, Exhibiting Choreography, in Maren Butte et al. (edited by), Assigne and Arrange. Methodologies of
Presentation in Art and Dance, Sternberg, Berlin 2014, pp. 94-11.
   18. Cf. Boris Charmatz, Manifesto for a Dancing Museum, online: www.museedeladanse.org/fr/articles/manifeste-pour-
un-musee-de-la-danse (accessed 11/11/2020).
   19. William Forsythe, Choreographic Objects, in Markus Weisbeck (edited by), William Forsythe, Suspense, JRP|Ringier,
Zürich 2008, pp. 4-5.
   20. The essay Choreographic Objects has been published the first time in 2008 in the book William Forsythe. Suspense,
cit. Afterward, Forsythe edited the essay in accordance with the evolution of his practice of choreography. The last version
appeared in Louise Neri – Eva Respini (edited by), William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects, Del Monico Books, Boston 2018.
The aforementioned book was published in occasion of the exhibition “William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects” held at
The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in Boston.
   21. William Forsythe, Choreographic Objects, in Louise Neri – Eva Respini (edited by), William Forsythe: Choreographic
Objects, cit., p. 49.
Anarchiving a Screendance Archive                                                                                               313




conceptual distinction between dance and choreography. In his book Choreutics, by explaining his space
instruction, Laban claimed:

            Movement is, so to speak, living architecture – living in the sense of changing emplacements
        as well as changing cohesion. The architecture is created by human movements and is made up of
        pathways tracing shapes in space which we may call trace-forms 22.

      My analysis starts from Laban because I argue the publication of the Labanotation (or Kinéto-
graphie) proposed a model, a score 23 «to dwell on the moving body that exposes the real, material, yet
abstract complexity of the world» 24 in a graphic form. This type of “choreographic writing” 25 allowed
us to have access to symbolic choreographic traces of social, cultural, political, anthropological concep-
tions of the movement related to a specific historical period. Since then, the notion of choreography
expanded, and we observed several declinations of “making-choreography” codified according to spe-
cific creative technologies applied to meta-represent the experience of being in movement 26. In this
respect, we observed the development of expressions such as chronophotography, screendance, dance
and choreographic installations. Moreover, the digitization of performances allowed by the technolo-
gical progress has led the production of new virtual materials.
      Therefore, from the same matrix (the movement experience) we watched the use of other tools
besides the dancing body in the choreographic practices. I am talking about those «inherited beautiful
forms of eternal value» 27 like language, history, communication, and other media such as cinematic
technologies, music and digital devices, driving the development of lived abstractions 28.
      As Jenevive Nykolak points out, dancing and choreographic exhibitions made their entrance in
the museum spaces «through a broad embrace of multimedia programming accompanied by a hetero-
geneous rhetorical focus on liveliness» 29. In this revolution, the impact of William Forsythe’s approach

    22. Rudolf von Laban, Choreutics, annotated and edited by Lisa Ullmann, Macdonald and Evans, London 1966, p. 5. My
emphasis.
    23. Cf. Letizia Gioia Monda, Lo score: un algoritmo per investigare la body knowledge, in «Danza e ricerca. Laboratorio
di studi, scritture e visioni», numero speciale La danza nei dottorati di ricerca italiani: metodologie, saperi, storie. Giornate di
studio, a cura di Stefania Onesti e Giulia Taddeo, n. 6, marzo 2015, pp. 133-146.
    24. Mark Franko, Museum Artifact Act, in Noémie Solomon (edited by), Danse: An Anthology, les presses du réel, Dijon
2014, p. 251.
    25. As Noémie Solomon pointed out: «“Écriture chorégraphique” is another expression often used in French dance literat-
ure to designate processes of composition while alluding to the writing metaphor. This of course evokes the score, and further
the activity of reading as integral to the making and perceiving of a dance performance» (Noémie Solomon, Introduction, in
Id. (edited by), Danse: An Anthology, cit., p. 19).
    26. Cf. Letizia Gioia Monda, Dall’oggetto coreografico ai digital dance score. Le metafore della creatività per studiare
l’intelligenza coreografica, in «Biblioteca Teatrale», numero monografico L’opera coreografica e i suoi processi creativi, a cura
di Vito Di Bernardi, n. 134, luglio-novembre 2020, pp. 233-257.
    27. Bojana Cvejić, The End with Judgement by Way of Clarification, in Noémie Solomon (edited by), Danse: An Anthology,
cit., pp. 145-157.
    28. Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event, MIT Press, Massacchuttets 2011, p. 17.
    29. Jenevive Nykolak, On Moving and Touching: From Kineticism to Dance in the Museum, in «Art Journal», vol. LXXVIII,
n. 4, 2019, pp. 38-57.
314                                                                                                       Letizia Gioia Monda




was crucial, particularly in 1990, when the architect Daniel Libeskind 30 invited him to participate in
the project The Book of Groningen in Netherlands. During this experience, Forsythe recognized how
«the mechanics of choreographic strategy could effectively be demonstrated in adjacent domains and
other media besides the human body» 31. For thirty years he experimented with the production of sev-
eral types of choreographic objects, from performative architecture to choreographic installations, from
pedagogical digital devices to dance for camera, and to virtual choreographic objects. In this way, he
proved a considerable range of possibilities in which choreographic thinking can occur 32. The exhibi-
tion for The Fact of Matter, which took place in October 2015 at the Museum für Modern Kunst of
Frankfurt am Main 33 can be considered emblematic of this research process. In the gallery spaces, For-
sythe organized the performance of eleven choreographic objects to demonstrate the dialectic resources
coming from his choreographic practice:

            The objects instigate processes in the body that instrumentalize the body’s readiness to provide
        input for our heuristically driven, predictive faculties, which work incessantly to secure for us a
        higher probability of preferred physical and mental outcomes. A principal feature of the cho-
        reographic object is that the preferred outcome is a form of knowledge production for whoever
        engages with it, engendering an acute awareness of the self within specific action schemata 34.

      This affirmation allows us to understand a key aspect of choreographic exhibitions placed within
museums in our times. More specifically, it illuminates the fact that who is dancing in the gallery spaces
is at the same time a spectator 35, who reads through his/her physical experience the choreographic
score. According to that, I argue the new forms of abstract choreography work on the users’ body by
reactivating their pure feeling 36 and revealing the invisible network that connects all of us in a social
(real) environment, to re-establish the sense of belonging to a community 37. In this speculation, it is
crucial to take into consideration how the installations of choreographic objects and dance exhibitions
in museums also emerge as a solution to digitization, since the experimentations of the graphical turn 38

   30. About the artistic collaboration between Forsythe and Libeskind, Patricia Baudoin and Heidi Gilpin already wrote
in 1989 the essay, Proliferation and Perfect Disorder: William Forsythe and the Architecture of Disappearance, in Marinella
Guatterini (a cura di), William Forsythe Festival di Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia 1989, vol. II, pp. 73-79.
   31. William Forsythe in dialogue with Louise Neri, Unhoused and Unsustainable: Choreography in and beyond dance, in
Louise Neri – Eva Respini (edited by), William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects, cit., p. 32.
   32. From a personal conversation with Dana Caspersen, collaborator of William Forsythe as performer and creator at
Ballet Frankfurt and the Forsythe Company for 28 years. Frankfurt am Main, February 2015.
   33. Cf. Susanne Gaensheimer – Mario Kramer (edited by), William Forsythe. The Fact of Matter, Museum für Modern
Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld/Berlin 2016.
   34. William Forsythe in dialogue with Louise Neri, Unhoused and Unsustainable, cit., p. 49.
   35. Cf. Stephanie Rosenthal, Choreographing You Choreographies in the Visual Arts, in Id. (edited by), Move. Choreographing
You. Art and Dance Since the 1960s, MIT Press, Massachusetts 2010, pp. 8-21.
   36. Cf. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, cit.
   37. Cf. Nicholas Humphrey, Seeing red: a study in consciousness, Harvard University Press, New York 2006.
   38. I am talking about the development of graphical interfaces that aimed at making sensitive the interaction between
the human body and the digital devices. Cf. Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code. Interfaces with Digital Media, Routledge,
Abdingdon 2006.
Anarchiving a Screendance Archive                                                                                              315




impacted our communication systems determining the establishment of the associative space 39 as an
environment for the social interaction. As Claire Bishop pointed out:

            The migration of the performing arts to the museum and gallery should therefore be read not
        (just) as a cynical attempt on the part of museums to attract audiences, but as a direct consequence
        of the white cube and the black box changing under the pressure of new technology and eventually
        converging to produce a hybrid apparatus 40.



Migrations
      The inclusion of digital technologies in everyday life induced the development of “an objective
world” 41. The unity of self progressively became a set of data, numbers, lines, computationally distant
from our physical feeling 42. This condition caused the evanescence of the organic body, its “idealization”
and “doubling”, since today what appears is how we are existing in an associative space. Because of
the digitization, our presence migrated from the body to our “avatars” (virtual forms of presence),
and this event drove us to program our consciousness on the connectivity between real and virtual
environments 43. Before the advent of digital technologies, the identity of a subject was based on the
“mutual gazing” 44 with others, and the theater space was recognized as a privileged site for the social
encounter. Otherwise, today, we can notice a sleepwalking of our species that is rampant in a world
where the use of smartphone and digital devices changed our understanding of social cognition in terms
of time, space and matter of interaction. For the purpose of triggering the spectator’s attention and
increasing its participation in the event, choreographic exhibitions inside museum spaces are recognized
by the artists as a plan of action to re-activate the audience’s curiosity 45. They work by creating a
hyperbole in the spectator’s psycho-physical perception, expanding the sensorial experience of “living”

   39. The term “associative space” has been coined by the Italian philosopher Pietro Montani to intend the environment
coming from the encounter between real and virtual world. Cf. Pietro Montani, Tecnologie della sensibilità. Estetica e imma-
ginazione interattiva, Raffaello Cortina, Milano 2014, p. 36.
   40. Claire Bishop, Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone: Dance Exhibitions and Audience Attention, in «The Drama Review»,
vol. LXII, n. 2, Summer 2018, p. 31.
   41. Vito Di Bernardi, Corpi e visioni nell’era digitale, in Vito Di Bernardi – Letizia Gioia Monda (a cura di), Immaginare
la danza, cit., p. 6.
   42. Cf. Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a Body. Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts, MIT Press, Massachu-
setts 2013.
   43. Cf. Letizia Gioia Monda, Il processo di digitalizzazione del pensiero coreografico. Analisi e lettura di “Using the Sky – An
Exploration of Deborah Hay’s solo No Time to Fly” (Motion Bank Digital Dance Score), in Vito Di Bernardi – Letizia Gioia
Monda (a cura di), Immaginare la danza, cit., pp. 143-157.
   44. With respect for this argumentation. I use the term mutual gaze to refer to the performance The Artist is Present by
Marina Abramovic, who worked with the audience on the re-establishment of eye contact we lose nowadays in the social
interaction. This dance exhibition was performed at The Museum of Modern Art of New York in 2010. See also: Jannifer
Harris, Embodiment in the Museum – What is a Museum?, in «ICOFOM Study Series», n. 43b, 2015, pp. 101-115.
   45. Cf. Erin Brannigan – Hannah Mathews, Performance, Choreography, and the Gallery: Materiality, Attention, Agency,
Sensation, and Instability, in «Performance Paradigm», n. 13, 2017, pp. 1-6.
316                                                                                                              Letizia Gioia Monda




the performative event 46. As Franz Anton Cramer writes:

             Transforming “bodily facts” of performance into media other than performance creates the
        ontological opacity of the exhibit. This opacity points much more to the potential to conceal
        than to the exteriorization of reality. The experiential intimacy sought by the Dancing Museum
        neutralizes the dialectics of negativity as absent and positivity as visible. In its place, experience
        becomes the central parameter: the issue in the paradigm of the museum is not to fixate dance
        to its promise as a metaphysical resource of organicity and singularity. Quite to the contrary, it is
        the body’s potential to radically experience its own outside and thereby transform experience into
        artifact 47.

      Also, Libeskind claimed that choreographic objects are «uninteresting residues of the particip-
atory experience, emblem of the reality which goes into their making» 48. Therefore, they should be
                                49
understood as dispositif             , «conditions set up by choreographic works as well as the heterogeneous
assemblage they perform» 50, able to produce new forms of knowledge and body awareness.
      The investigations carried within the artistic field underlined how the concept of a choreographic
body 51, meant as an archive of the experience of being in movement, inspired the research on the
choreographic object as a system for renovating the spectator’s attention, motivating his physical social
interaction throughout a powerful sensorial experience.
      In following Claire Bishop’s argumentation, the term “migrations” is used in this paragraph to
propose a parallelism in order to make visible how the increasing presence of dance and choreographic
exhibitions within museums happened as the direct consequence of the digitization processes that
affected global communication strategies. As long as the human presence migrated from the organic
bodies to the virtual personifications (objects), the choreographic thinking migrated from the (dancing)
physical body to multimodal choreographic objects. For many choreographers and artists like Yvonne
Rainer, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Ruth Gibson and Bruno
Martelli, and many others, dance exhibitions (meant as a hybrid type of performances 52 ) represented
performative strategies to communicate in the digital era choreographic ideas to the audience 53. In this

   46. Cf. Letizia Gioia Monda, Luci ed ombre sull’uso del digitale nella danza. Dal Festival Più che Danza! una riflessione sulle
reti sociali e le app per condividere i processi creativi coreografici, in «SigMa Rivista di Letterature comparate, Teatro e Arti dello
spettacolo», n. 3, 2019, pp. 959-981.
   47. Franz Anton Cramer, Experience as Artifact: Transformations of the Immaterial, in «Dance Research Journal», vol. XLVI,
n. 3, December 2014, p. 29.
   48. Daniel Libeskind, Architecture Intermundium, in «Threshold», vol. IV, Spring 1988, p. 115.
   49. With the term dispositif, I refer to the concept of “apparatus” introduced by the French philosopher Micheal Foucault,
in accordance with its interpretation by Gilles Deleuze. With dispositif, Deleuze meant a creative technology able to allow
the negotiation between the past and the future of the human being’s living experience. In these terms, his approach deeply
inspired the critical discourse about the archive and the research on innovative forms of expression based on multimedia
interaction. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Che cos’è un dispositivo?, Cronopio, Napoli 2007.
   50. Noémie Solomon, Introduction, in Id. (edited by), Dance: An Anthology, cit., p.18.
   51. Cf. Letizia Gioia Monda, Choreographic bodies. L’esperienza della Motion Bank nel progetto multidisciplinare di Forsythe,
Dino Audino, Roma 2016.
   52. Cf. Claire Bishop, Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone, cit., pp. 22-42.
   53. William Forsythe claimed: «Strategy is a choreographic moment. At present, I perceive that many artists are thinking
Anarchiving a Screendance Archive                                                                                             317




framework, Bishop suggests looking at the museum space as a gray zone 54 ‒ not entirely corresponding
with the White Cube nor the Black Box ‒ providing a new environment where the visitor can experience
the connectivity with the virtual reality. The gray zone is a potential space based on the conceptual
opposition between presence and absence 55, construction and deconstruction, time flow and stillness
(or also suspense). It offers to the spectator/visitor an experience that enables his/her self-awareness
outside of the social patterns of both, the real environment or the social networks. In a choreographic
exhibition, the user is put in the condition to rediscover his/her own body feeling. In the last thirty
years, there was a growing development of dance/choreographic exhibitions within museum spaces as
a direct consequence of the previously mentioned condition. From the Center Pompidou in Paris to
the MoMA in New York, from the Tate Modern in London to the Venice Biennale, museums took
on the function of «a sort of contrapuntal musical space» 56 to play a polyphony made of kinesthetic
phenomena. In this context, choreographic objects work as algorithms or diagnostic equations pushing
the spectator to wonder: «How am I in the world as a body?» 57.



Museo Madre Mission
      Museo Madre of Naples, under the direction of Laura Valente, changed its mission and increased
the choreographic performative exhibitions to stimulate an impact on the social Neapolitan environ-
ment. Since 2018, we have been observing a growing inclusion of dance exhibitions in the galleries
of Museo Madre. An example is the retrospective on the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe Choreo-
graphy for an Exhibition, curated by Laura Valente and Andrea Villani 58, and organized in collaboration
with Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation of New York 59. The exciting aspect of this choreographic ex-
hibition was the setting of multi-layered performative actions as a chance for inviting the audience
to read the content of the retrospective through many choreographic perspectives and forms. In fact,
for the exhibition, the museum ordered a choreography to be made by Anna Gerus on the Mappleth-
orpe’s photographic series White Gauze (1984). In the creative process, the choreographer got insights
from this repertory developing the piece The Floating Grace, then performed in the same gallery space

strategically in terms of how their work can be read, its affect – relationally, historically. Choreography is a way to get things
in motion, and artists are always trying to get people to move their minds in new directions» (William Forsythe in dialogue
with Louise Neri, Unhoused and Unsustainable, cit., p. 42).
   54. Cf. Claire Bishop, Black Box, White Cube, Gray Zone, cit., pp. 22-42.
   55. Cf. Enrico Pitozzi, Figurazioni, uno studio sulle gradazioni di presenza, in «Culture Teatrali», numero monografico On
Presence, a cura di Enrico Pitozzi, n. 21, 2011, pp. 107-127.
   56. William Forsythe in dialogue with Louise Neri, Unhoused and Unsustainable, cit., p. 32.
   57. Ibidem.
   58. Andrea Villani is the former Artistic Director of the Museo Madre.
   59. Letizia Gioia Monda, “Coreografia per una mostra”, la pratica fotografica di Mapplethorpe in scena al Museo MADRE di
Napoli, in «Campadidanza Dance Magazine», 30 dicembre 2018, online: https://www.campadidanza.it/coreografia-per-una-
mostra-la-pratica-fotografica-di-mapplethorpe-in-scena-al-museo-madre-di-napoli.html (accessed 12/6/2020).
318                                                                                                      Letizia Gioia Monda




where White Gauze collection was exposed. This dance exhibition inspired the Ukrainian photographer
and visual artist Vadim Stein’s screendance, which was then projected in another moment of the same
initiative 60.
      Another successful project was also Atlante del gesto_Napoli by the well-known Italian choreo-
grapher Virgilio Sieni, who proposed in 2019 a set of dance workshops and site-specific performances
made explicitly for the spaces of Museo Madre and its community. Even in this case, the action was
designed to promote an experiential path for the participants in the workshops, leading them to pay
attention to the body feeling and the movement language to develop a common gesture to shape the
performative dance exhibitions consequently within the museum. Finally, the most recent intervention
was Pina Bausch. Ensembles, a dance/choreographic exhibition dedicated to the memory of the founder
of the Tanztheater Wuppertal ten years after her death. The event started with the dance performance
Moving with Pina by and with Cristina Morganti. It ended with Ensembles, a screendance exhibition
on Pina Bausch curated by the Pina Bausch Foundation.
      At the beginning of 2020, Kathryn Weir (former director of Départment du Développment Cul-
turel du Centre Pompidou) has been appointed as the new artistic director of the Museo Madre. Weir’s
approach focuses on practices of inclusions to increase the exchanges with the local community and
promote the experimentation of new art forms based on the hybridization of the visual and the per-
formative. In a recent interview, Laura Valente explains her vision for Museo Madre by quoting Jette
Sandahl’s definition of “museum” 61 :

             Madre has to change in a democratic space and to actively collaborate with the several com-
        munities to collect, archive, interpret, exhibit, and increase the understanding of the world. In this
        moment, in which some models are no longer sustainable, in terms of cultural heritage, the need
        is to discover new strategies to integrate in the system some policies able to combine inclusion and
        reflection, and stimulating the education of experts, who will be the ruling class in our future. I
        am thinking about Museo Madre as a community: widespread, active, shared, participated 62.

      By looking back at the culture of the museum 63, Museo Madre’s mission seems to get closer
to the models suggested by the New York MoMA’s activities; hence, it embodies a creative factory
where new approaches are generated to choreographically exhibit collections in order to increase the
social empowerment in the contemporary environment. Laura Valente’s attention on performing and
researching new models of interaction within the gallery spaces gave birth to the collaboration with

   60. Cf. Vadim Stein, The Floating Grace, online: https://vimeo.com/397655682 (accessed 10/5/2020).
   61. Jette Sandahl is currently president of the European Museum Forum.
   62. Santa Nastro, Come sarà il 2020 dei Musei? Intervista a Laura Valente, Presidente del Museo Madre, online:
https://www.artribune.com/arti-visive/arte-contemporanea/2020/01/come-sara-il-2020-dei-musei-intervista-a-laura-
valente-presidente-del-museo-madre/ (accessed 20/5/2020).
   63. Marcella Lista, Play Dead/Fare il morto: danza, musei e “le arti basate sul tempo”, in «Danza e ricerca. Laboratorio
di studi, scritture, visioni», n. 9, 2017, pp. 11-35, online: https://danzaericerca.unibo.it/article/view/7671/7447 (accessed
9/11/2020)
Anarchiving a Screendance Archive                                                                                        319




Sapienza University of Rome, and, specifically, with Vito Di Bernardi, Professor of Dance History,
with the purpose to curate the screendance archive of Il Coreografo Elettronico Festival.
      Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive is a particularly interesting case study because it allows the ob-
servation of a cyclic phenomenon. In particular, the festival took place in art spaces, such as Palazzo
delle Arti di Napoli (PAN), Museum Macro in Rome, and the Museo Madre itself. In these contexts,
videodance works presented for the contest and outside the contest were exhibited through projec-
tions. The festival was designed according to several criteria, taking into consideration the categories
of competition, the nationality of the works, the techniques applied, the authorship, etc. After twenty
years, this venture occupies the museum space under another form: not as a festival but an archive of
screendance works stored within the library of Museo Madre. Thanks to this transformation, it is pos-
sible today to look at the copious archive of Il Coreografo Elettronico through another perspective 64.
As Laura Valente claimed, we can observe the reinvention of an event, born as videodance Festival,
which became a site where experiment and research occur on living memories 65. This circularity allows
us to reconsider the screendance filmic performance as an experience perceived “through” objects, in
which the choreographic thinking is investigated, inscribed, and performed to exist «within a museum
exhibition as part of a majestic children’s event of a new productive era» 66.
      In analyzing Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive as a case study, the critical aspect is to pay attention
to the previously mentioned circularity, which sheds a light on the double meaning inscribed in this
collection of screendance works. Firstly, the exhibition of screendance works during the festival allows
us to observe their nature of choreographic objects developed by the authors with the aim of trans-
lating the kinesthetic experience through particular strategies of choreographic writing. Secondly, the
choreographic objects collected into Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive are shown as boundary objects 67,
or rather as research instruments through which investigate the traces of the choreographic thinking
that drove their creation 68. This unique articulation is what makes Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive
itself a very potent tool to study the dance cultural heritage in itself inscribed. Such a peculiarity drove
me to apply the anarchiving approach as a research principle to investigate Il Coreografo Elettronico
Archive. This approach is just not meant as a documentation of the festival past activity; rather, it looks
for choreographic-making processes that drove the development of choreographic objects and their ex-

  64. Cf. Laura Valente, Il Coreografo Elettronico, oggi e domani, in Vito Di Bernardi – Letizia Gioia Monda (a cura di),
Immaginare la danza, cit., p. 175.
  65. As Sherril Dodds points out screendance offers a useful model for thinking through time on the living body. Cf. Sherril
Dodds, Dance on Screen, Palgrave, London 2001, p. 33.
  66. Laura Valente, Il Coreografo Elettronico, oggi e domani, cit., p. 175.
  67. Cf. Scott deLahunta, Working without an Overview, cit., p. 98.
  68. Cf. James Leach, Making Knowledge from Movement. Some Notes on the Contextual Impetus to Transmit Knowledge from
Dance, in Maaike Bleeker (edited by), Transmission in Motion. The Technologizing of Dance, Routledge, Abingdon 2017, pp.
141-154.
320                                                                                                    Letizia Gioia Monda




hibitions. My aim is to find principles to reenact the traces of physical thinking which continually
change the performing contexts. My purpose is to investigate the screendance creative processes and
the choreographic strategies that activate the synesthetic experience on which those artifacts are based.
Finally, by identifying these traces in the choreographic objects I am looking at, I hope to cast new
light on some aspects of Western dance history.


Anarchive a Screendance Archive
      The taxonomy of archiving came from the desire to preserve aspects of our lives as human beings
through documents 69. The purpose of archiving finds its sense in the idea of creating order in disorder,
providing coherence in our reading-the-past ability. In being similar to choreographic bodies 70 and
objects, archives are not static geometries. They regularly change the practice of anarchiving. In par-
ticular, the digitization transformed the archival logic. As Maaike Bleeker claimed, this transformation
involved a shift from “archival order” to “archival dynamics”:

            This is a shift from the archive as place that keeps and orders documents of events that took
       place at one time and in one place towards the archive as a “dynarchive” (Ernst): a place of re-
       generation coproduced by users. These transformations can be seen reflected in projects from the
       field of dance that engage with new possibilities of digital technology to store and transmit dance
       knowledge while at the same time, dance and these projects appear most useful to think through
       implications and potentials of the new archival logic brought about by digitization 71.

      In these terms, Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive can be considered as an archive in motion 72
made by choreographic objects, through which reactivate choreographic thinking traces that shaped
their making. Following Massumi, the traces «are not inert but are carriers of potential. They are re-
activatable, and their reactivation helps trigger a new event which continues the creative process from
which they came, but in a new iteration» 73.
      For Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive, I developed a methodology that mobilizes its contents.
I approached the research as a user to understand through my pure feeling the logic that moved the
kinesthetic experience transcodification into a screendance filmic performance. Then, I studied the

   69. Ruth Noak, Dance/Archives/Exhibition? Moving between Words, in Gabriele Brandstetter – Gabriele Klein (edited by),
Dance [and] Theory, Transcript, Bielefeld 2013, p. 228.
   70. With the term “choreographic bodies”, I refer to aspects of the performer’s bodily knowledge. By training the body-
mind through a dance technique, a dancer is able to embody choreographic principles re-configuring the geometry of his/her
dancing experience. This dance score is an artificial structure a creator can move/transit through. It should be meant as a
technological creative tool to support the performer’s self-expression by the movement language. Cf. Letizia Gioia Monda,
Choreographic bodies, cit., pp. 24-94.
   71. Maaike Bleeker, What if This Were an Archive? Abstractions, Enactment and Human Implicatedness, in Id. (edited by),
Transmission in Motion, cit., p. 199.
   72. Marion von Osten, The Archive in Motion, in Gabriele Brandstetter – Gabriele Klein (edited by), Dance [and] Theory,
cit., pp. 231-233.
   73. Brian Massumi, Working Principles, cit., p. 7.
Anarchiving a Screendance Archive                                                                                              321




system elaborated by the Italian critics and experts, who originally promoted the contest – Marilena
Riccio (as founder), Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino, Vittoria Ottolenghi, and more (as part of the jury) –
and structured the participation of screendance works in the five categories. By analyzing the archive
catalogues and the list of the several festival edition winners, though, I discovered many details. For
example, in the application, the authors could choose the category in which to compete with their
works and many choreographers, who participated in the category “B” – original creation for the
video – won the competition as “screendance directors”. For this reason, I rather research the works
as they were objects created as digital choreographies, thus as results of creative processes that aimed
at the hybrid between dance, cinema, and digital graphic design. By shifting to the choreographic
process that generated these screendance works, I could study the choreographic strategies applied
by the authors to objectify the physical, kinetic, tactile, spatial and rhythmic dimension of “making-
choreography” into a conceptual artefact. From this perspective, I could better inquire into both the
ideologies and the processes of representation of the choreo-cinematic works. Moreover, I found a
compelling approach for screendance movement analysis in the plural authoriality 74. By applying this
method, I understood how the several forms of negotiation between digital and organic choreographies
could produce different expressions of screendance. Finally, I adopted a correct approach and point of
view to analyse each specific work accurately. In the end, I identified the recurring participation of some
creators at several festival editions, developing like that a transdisciplinary and diachronic research on
the archived material to better understand the development of videodance.



Reenacting Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s screendance practice: a case
study
      The investigation performed was a precious contribution to the teaching material of the course
of Digital Choreography at Sapienza University of Rome. I took advantage of the screendance works
to explain how the application of new media in a choreographic making process can help to study the
traces of choreographic thinking into objects. I moved around concepts, keywords, poetics, countries
to visualize the connections between different expressions of choreographic thinking, and to stimulate
their interpretation starting from the performance experience. An interesting case study has been the
screendance practice of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. It is proposed here as a practical example to

   74. In my research, I recognized three recurring cases of plural authoriality in screendance work: the first is the one in which
a choreographer is also the director of a work; the second is the one in which choreographer and director work in parallel;
and the third is when the director is also the choreographer of a videodance filmic performance. Cf. Letizia Gioia Monda,
La negoziazione tra regia e coreografia nelle opere di videodanza. Uno studio condotto presso l’archivio del Festival Il Coreografo
Elettronico, in Luca Bandirali – Daniela Castaldo – Francesco Ceraolo (a cura di), Re-directing. La regia nello spettacolo del
XXI secolo, Salento University Press, Lecce 2020, pp 219-225.
322                                                                                                        Letizia Gioia Monda




explain the potential of reenacting the choreographic traces from Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive.
      Precisely, De Keersmaeker’s participation in Il Coreografo Elettronico Festival allows expanding
the knowledge on her choreographic thinking and practice. She submitted to the contest two of her
screendance works, Counter Phrases in 2004 and Ma Mère l’Oye (made in collaboration with other
choreographers too 75 ) in 2005, created with the filmmaker and composer Thierry De Mey.
      De Keersmaeker’s choreographic language has been the subject of several academic and histor-
ical books by dance scholars 76. Moreover, the three-volume series (with DVDs contributions) titled
A Choreographer’s Score edited by Bojana Cvejić 77 are very sophisticated pedagogical tools to invest-
igate how De Keersmaeker articulates choreographic parameters as matter of writing (écriture) into a
score 78. As Philippe Guisgand pointed out, De Keersmaeker’s work can be studied as a puzzle based
on a more or less linear system of references through which we can observe how parts of performances
are transmitted to the next one:

             The temporal succession of the pieces is then disrupted by the construction of these circular-
        ities (redundancies, reminders, quotations of all kinds), revealing the choreographer’s obstinacy
        in digging the same furrows. De Keersmaeker thus proposes a journey through a long and elastic
        temporality where the choreographic past and the outline of a later creation are mixed together 79.

      In her research, De Keersmaeker recognized how the application of video devices in her movement
practice could provide an excellent working tool to transmit dance knowledge, keeping traces of invest-
igation processes into choreographic intelligence. Its categorization as an experimentation into visual
art is avoided. Despite that, my application of the anarchive principles subverts the distinction between
performing and visual arts, while at the same time it proposes to juxtapose the linear interpretation
of historical events with a transversal perspective on De Keersmaeker’s work. In this speculation, her
screendance’s practice is meant as a parallel strategy to the choreographic writing, which she developed

   75. Together with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, the choreography was developed by Jonathan Burrows, Iris Bouche, Erna
Omarsdottir, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Damien Jalet, Samir Akika, Michèle Anne De Mey, Mauco Paccagnella.
   76. Cf. Marianne Van Kerkhoven and Anoek Nuyens, Listen to the Bloody Machine Creating Kris Verdonck’s End, Interna-
tional Theatre and Film’s Book, Utrecht School of the Arts, Amesterdam and Utrecht 2012; Marianne van Kerkhoven, Anne
Teresa De Keersmaeker, Vlaams Theater Instituut, Brussels 1997; Philippe Guisgand, Les fils d’un entrelacs sans fin. La danse
dans l’oeuvre de Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Septentrion, Villeneuve d’Ascq 2008; Philippe Guisgand, Accords intimes. Dance
et musique chez Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Septentrion, Villeneuve d’Ascq 2017; Irmela Kästner – Tina Ruisinger (edited
by), Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Kieser, Munich 2007.
   77. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker – Bojana Cvejić (edited by), A Choreographer’s Score: Fase, Rasas Danst Rosas, Elena’s Aria,
Bartók, Rosas & Mercatorfonds, Brussels 2012; En Atendant & Cesena: A Choreographer’s Score, Rosas & Mercatorfonds,
Brussels 2013; A Choreographer’s Score: Drumming & Rain, Rosas & Mercatorfonds, Brussels 2014.
   78. Bojana Cvejić, A Choreographer’s Score. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, in Maaike Bleeker (edited by), Transmission in
Motion, cit., p. 53.
   79. «La succession temporelle des pièces est alors perturbée par la construction de ces circularités (redondances, rappels,
citations de toutes sortes), révélatrices d’une obstination de la chorégraphe à creuser les mêmes sillons. De Keersmaeker
propose ainsi un voyage dans une temporalité longue et élastique à la fois où se mêlent passé chorégraphique et ébauche d’une
création ultérieure» (Philippe Guisgand, Les fils d’un entrelacs sans fin. La danse dans l’oeuvre de Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker,
cit., p. 13).
Anarchiving a Screendance Archive                                                                                               323




in order to investigate the complexity of what choreography is or might be. In starting from this point,
she tested the creative tensions that can arise in the dialogue within the choreographic concept and the
materialization into a choreographic object. Furthermore, she approached to the videodance practice
throughout a series of cine-choreographic operations 80 experimented in order to document the develop-
ment of her inquiry into choreography 81. In 1988, she made her first attempt. In collaboration with
the director Wolfgang Kolb 82, she produced Hoppla! 83, the screendance adaptation of the piece Rosa
Bartók (1987). Later, she created in collaboration with the director Walter Verdin 84, the videodance
version of the performance Ottone, Ottone (1988), a crucial production in De Keersmaeker’s choreo-
graphic research in 1991. In looking for compositional strategies to get in dialogue music and dance
she saw, on the occasion, the potential of videodance to emphasize the “dancing arias of action” 85,
and recognised the chance to face her subject matter from another perspective in the cinematographic
writing. Afterward, she directed her first screendance piece Achterland 86, a black and white movie, one
hour long, where the camera movements were engendered by the dancers’ dynamics in 1994. Within
the previous experience, she observed how cinematographic writing could provide an alternative sys-
tem through which objectify her interpretation of the choreographic counterpoint. Finally, she started
her collaboration with the filmmaker and composer Thierry De Mey 87 in 1996, with whom she cre-
ated many screendance filmic performance like Rosas danst Rosas (1996), Fase (2002), Tippeke (1997),
Counter Phrases (2004), Ma Mère l’Oye (2004), Prélude à la Mer (2010).
      Among the pragmatical framework, Counter Phrases represents an emblematic work to study the
artistic relationship between De Keersmaeker and De Mey; moreover, it provides an additional con-
tribution which is critical to contextualize De Keersmaeker’s choreographic practice within the history
of dance 88. In such a work, the choreographic counterpoint between music and dance is articulated

   80. Erin Branningam claimed cine-choreographic operations are those «where we see choreographic elements written through
by the cinematic apparatus», in Erin Braningam, Dancefilm. Choreography and Moving Image, Oxford University Press, New
York 2011, p. 11.
   81. About Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s screendance practice see also: Alessandro Amaducci, Screendance. Sperimentazioni
visive intorno al corpo tra film, video e computer grafica, Kaplan, Torino 2020, pp. 173-178.
   82. With Stefanie Bodien, Wolfgang Kolb is the artistic director of the International Dance Film Festival Brussels, L’art
difficile de filmer la danse, which saw its first edition in 2012. Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive Project participated as partner
of the 2018 edition of International Dance Film Festival Brussels, since the theme for the historical dance films program was
“Italian”.
   83. It is possible to watch the screendance work Hoppla! at the following link from the online digital archive Numeridanse:
https://www.numeridanse.tv/en/dance-videotheque/hoppla (accessed 8/10/2020).
   84. Elisa [Guzzo] Vaccarino, La Musa dello schermo freddo, cit., p. 45.
   85. Ibidem.
   86. This screendance work has been published in the DVD published by Rosas Dance Company, Achterland, Europe Im-
ages International, 1994. It is possible to watch it online at the following link: http://www.ubu.com/dance/keers_achterland.
html (accessed 8/10/2020).
   87. Thierry De Mey is the brother of Michèle Anne De Mey, a long-term collaborator with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
and former dancer with Rosas dance company.
   88. At the following link it is possible to watch the second half of the film Counter Phrases: http://www.ubu.com/dance/
keers_counter.html (accessed 8/10/2020).
324                                                                                                  Letizia Gioia Monda




through an attractive rhythmic montage of the moving images. This specific choreographic object finds
its roots on the stage work (But if a look should) April Me performed by Rosas (dance) and the Ictus
Ensemble (music) for the first time in 2002. De Keersmaeker’s choreographic score provided the start-
ing point for ten danced phrases placed in different environments. The ten shorts sequences directed
by De Mey supplied the musical score composition for the videodance performance, which were com-
missioned to ten different contemporary composers: Stefan Van Eycken, Georges Aperghis, Thierry
De Mey, Robin de Raaff, Luca Francesconi, Jonathan Harvey, Magnus Lindberg, Toshio Hosokawa,
Steve Reich, Fausto Romitelli. Each of them worked on one of the variations separately, after the films
have been edited and merged. By watching Counter Phrases, it is possible to notice the synchronous
relationship between dance, music, and the editing time-rhythm. According to De Keersmaeker’s cho-
reographic thinking, the screendance composition shows the modulation of an energy cycle 89. Within
the movie, such an energy cycle is materialized thanks to a harmonic spiral counterpoint mathemat-
ically organized from one visual nucleus of reference. The core is the dance vocabulary created by De
Keersmaeker, which is the founding element of the original choreographic score of (But if a look should)
April Me. The previous score motivated the making-process of the whole screendance work and gave to
the artifact a circular flow dynamic. In these terms, Counter Phrases can be understood as a metaphor
of the choreographic thinking embodied in the score. We can look at the screendance performance as
an object where the choreographic intelligence is transcodificated to go to exist in another medium
besides the dancing body. Furthermore, the algorithmic relation between music, dance, and moving
images is translated into a living architecture by a visual strategy that allows us to perceive the emerging
counterpoint. In this scenario, the dancing movement is the vehicle of this transmission since we can
notice how it designs the space-time of interaction. Metaphorically, the movie action seems to suggest
a journey through space inscriptions, from the geometry of the natural environments to the artificial
design of the urban spaces. Such a path invites the audience to recognize the movement potential to
make alive the patterns that surround us. In these terms, the work offers a contribution to acknowledge
how human being’s actions can impact the social environment and vice versa.
      The cinematographic writing supports the “narration” of the mentioned concept because De Mey
defines a system to enact the choreographic thinking leading like that the screendance idea-logic. He
questions the opposites by applying the split-screen technique to stimulate the development of an im-
mersive performative context for the spectator. The alignment of close-ups and medium shot in the
same frame drives the audience to read how the bodies symmetries can reflect those of the surrounding
environment 90. Moreover, we could argue that De Mey’s cinematographic writing, applied as choreo-

  89. Cf. Philippe Guisgand, Intervista ad Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, L’Epos, Palermo 2008.
  90. Lucy Fine Donaldson based on Laban’s movement analysis her investigation on the viewer’s filmic experience. In
her theory, the alignment in one of the three stages forming the basis of our engagement with the action expressed by the
Anarchiving a Screendance Archive                                                                                         325




graphic strategy in the screendance composition, allows us to follow the traces of the somatic experience
from which the dance score was originated.
      In analyzing the artistic collaboration between De Mey and De Keersmaeker, the practice of an-
archiving Il Coreografo Elettronico Archive helps to acknowledge the impact this screendance experi-
ence had on the following work Ma Mère l’Oye. By observing De Mey’s search for a system of writing
able to objectify the counterpoint between choreographic bodies’ subjectivities and the multiplicity of
the natural environment geometries, we can notice his challenge to find a way to inscribe the musicality
given by the somatosensorial dancing dimension into the videodance filmic performance 91. Through Il
Coreografo Elettronico Archive, we can also better contextualize these experimentations within the de-
velopment of the screendance practice in Belgium. For example, it can be compared De Keersmaeker’s
experience with the one of other Belgian choreographers and filmmakers, such as Wim Vandekeybus
‒ who won Il Coreografo Elettronico Award in 2007 with the movie Here After ‒, or with other pro-
ductions coming from similar artistic collaboration as Derrière elle made by the Belgian composer and
filmmaker Thomas Turine and the choreographer Natalia Sardi, winners of Il Coreografo Elettronico
contest in 2009. The horizontal and vertical connections allow us to expand the understanding of dance
history, by designing renovated interdisciplinary constellations that can have an important impact on
teaching and research programs, as much as in the development of exhibition itineraries.
      As I argued above, the museum space can provide an expanding dimension through which play
new strategies for writing a history of dance that has not yet been written. Museo Madre represents
a unique case in its genre because the circularity of the phenomenon we observed with Il Coreo-
grafo Elettronico ‒ from a screendance festival placed within museums to a screendance archive stored
within a museum – shows the opportunity to identify its nature of dynarchive which is able to generate
renovated dance knowledge each time the anarchive technique is performed. A step forward can be
proposed if we considered Museo Madre itself as a “dispositif ”, a heterotopic space inclined to activate
potential fields of action. Ideally, exhibitions of videodance within the gallery spaces could provide
a double purpose: it can open new perspectives to read dance knowledge; moreover, it can improve
the social empowerment of dance culture. Therefore, the installations of a set of choreographic objects
organized according to several parameters ‒ like authors, countries, subjects, periods, type of exper-
imentations, digital technologies applied, relation with other artistic disciplines etc. which are based
on the anarchive practice ‒ may support the development of a new dance literature 92. Consequently,

moving images. The alignment helps to qualify the spectator’s access at the performer’s somatic experience, further indicating
how involved we might be with a performance: spatially, emotionally, and physically. Cf. Lucy Fine Donaldson, Effort and
Empathy: Engaging with Film Performance, in Dee Reynolds – Matthew Reason (edited by), Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative
and Cultural Practices, Intellect, Chicago 2012, pp. 139-174.
   91. See my analysis of Ma Mère l’Oye in Letizia Gioia Monda, What We Are Talking about when We Talk about Videodance?,
cit.
   92. Rebecca Groves – Norah Zuniga Shaw – Scott DeLahunta, Talking about Scores: William Forsythe’s Vision for a New
326                                                                                               Letizia Gioia Monda




the choreographic exhibition of the screendance archive may provide an innovative model of writing
and disseminating dance history stimulating its inclusion in the social environment at the same level
of other forms of art. In the end, the collaboration between Museo Madre and Sapienza University
of Rome should be interpreted as a chance to reshape the organization of choreographic knowledge
into the gallery spaces, providing new plans of action for supporting the visualization of passages of
thoughts and choreographic procedures throughout historical periods. Scholars and curators should
gather from this research a different attention and should look for new methodologies to exploit the
vital potential for choreographic traces contrapuntal reading to reenact into choreographic exhibitions.
In short, dance and choreography exhibited within a museum can transport dance culture heritage in
a renewed state of social relevance.



Visions
      If dancing can exist in other domains besides the body, the history of dance can be shaped through
different apparatus besides the books. The digitization stimulated intellectuals and artists to develop
new strategies to communicate the knowledge coming from human being’s kinesthetic experience.
Such an approach drives the development of multimodal objects meant as models to have access at the
choreographic intelligence. In this scenario, the choreographic objects can be understood as potential
working tools to transmit dance knowledge. By being placed within a museum, a choreographic object
can activate new conditions to experience and embody the traces of the choreographic thinking long
the history.
      Furthermore, a screendance archive such as that of Il Coreografo Elettronico can enlarge the
understanding of the history of dance thanks to the reenactment of the choreographic traces inscribed
in its artifacts. In allowing the screendance archive to speak to the audience, the performance must
be supported by a research-practice to make visible the knowledge coming from the participatory
experience produced by an invisible dance. Therefore, the process of reenactment and the design of a
gray zone to exhibit the screendance archive include the results of an investigation capable of justifying
the tasks and the behavioral rules that the spectator has to follow within the museum space. He/she
should be enabled to perceive the sense of a choreographic exhibition, which might be a conceptual,
historical, or phenomenological path.
      The process can allow us to find ourselves back, in our body, in our history, in our culture, and
can reconfigure our social position by making us feel connected again in the same environment. Fur-
thermore, it may lead to the development of a new, digitally structured, system of archiving, which

Form of »Dance Literature«, in Sabine Gehm – Pirkko Husemann – Katharina von Wilcke (edited by), Knowledge in Motion,
cit., pp. 91-100.
Anarchiving a Screendance Archive                                                                      327




could make us visualize different aspects of specific choreographic thinking in relation to the histor-
ical heritage and other fields of studies within the choreographic-thinking process of digitization itself.
Ideally, the whole process may produce an interactive conceptual map to stimulate the users to digit-
ally practice the anarchiving process by connecting domains of knowledge, sources, and metaphoric
solutions to the enigma of the human being’s experience in movement.
