ABSTRACT
In her chapter “Our Method is Transmission,” dance scholar Daniela Hahn examines the notion of the body as a document and as a question of body knowledge. Hahn focuses on a close reading of the collaborative dance piece undo, redo and repeat (2014) and on interviews with its two choreographers, Christina Ciupke and Anna Till that serve as a point of departure for an investigation into the relationship between the temporalities of performance art and its documentation. She argues that bodily memory, in its organic, cognitive, and social dimensions, forms part of what bodies know, and that bodily memory is processed, mediated, and shared in and through processes of oral-performative transmission such as interviews, dialogues, teaching, workshops, and performances. By translating physical memories into a new body of work, their performance undo, redo and repeat itself turns into a document that, rather than providing historians of dance with facts about past works of performance, raises the question of how we can elucidate the kinship between past and present, documents and performance, while at the same time exposing their differences.
