ABSTRACT
Canadian dance professionals have also sought to recover the barely documented Canadian modern dance tradition. There has also been an interest in reconstructing the work of German modern dance innovators such as Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman and Kurt Jooss. This professional dance interest has been accompanied by the development of healthy debates within dance scholarship regarding the politics of reconstruction and preservation. This chapter explores some of the theoretical issues that dance scholars that have raised in regard to reconstruction and preservation. A reconstruction is made by someone else who researches the 'work'. A re-creation is concerned to capture the 'spirit of the work'. The chapter presents a case study of a now classic short ballet solo, The Dying Swan, choreographed by Mikhail Fokine in 1905, to shed light on questions of authenticity, reproducibility and interpretivity.
