ABSTRACT
Terpsicore, named after the Greek dance muse, is a dance database that includes a collection of primary sources, such as programmes of dance pieces performed in Portugal, reviews, flyers, newspaper clippings, iconography, and video samples. The database builds upon the dance archives of both researchers and companies. However, the sources providing this documentation are diverse. Public libraries and audio-visual archives, as well as national broadcast collections, are feeding the database with a large amount of documentation. Systematic research is also being conducted in public entities, such as the Portuguese National Library, the Lisbon Newspaper Library, and the Museum of Cinema.
Following Susan Sontag's recommendation, this database aims to contribute to the “recovering of our senses” (2009: 14). On this subject, Terpsicore re-addresses questions to the artistic community. It examines the documentation processes of performative practises in the relationship between critical and artistic discourses, and the ethics of critical practise.
Terpsicore is being built with archival management software inspired by the Dublin Core protocol and adapted to the particular nature of dance and performance. The original software, which uses a set of controlled vocabulary terms that describe physical and digital resources, has been slightly modified to better serve the particular nature of the dance and performance documents.
In short, we want to discover, a) how we can construct a dance memory through the residual objects that the dance performance has left behind; and b) how we can archive these objects in order to make this endeavour feasible.
