ABSTRACT
The artistic research project Capturing Dance highlighted the productive interrelationship between choreography/performance and documentation. Both fields are usually placed in opposition to one another: ontological expectations of authenticity on the one hand, and pragmatic demands on the other. However, documentary strategies are often artistic acts, while performance and dance resort to documentary processes. If one looks at the relationship from a complementary perspective instead of an antagonistic one, it is the transformational and transfer processes that yield compositionally and aesthetically different artefacts. These artefacts each have their own authorial and media-specific characteristics. This raises the question of what strategies are necessary in order to make a non-hierarchical relationship possible – a relationship that takes the equal value of artistic strategies seriously and can give them visibility. From this perspective, properties that are often attributed to the document, such as “subordinate,” “reductive” or “arbitrary” have to be re-examined. While merely viewing or executing a performance movement can never exhaust its “whole” potential, interrelating a range of different documents can indeed provide access to it. The work “as a whole” can only exist in a combination of various document levels that all relate to the movement event but each portray it, or evaluate it, in a different, specific way. Only such diverse, cumulative documents are able to reveal something about the entirety of the movement artefact. The chapter will discuss findings of the research project conducted between 2015 and 2016.
