ABSTRACT
Dance survives through the practise of dance, where movements and words interrelate, passing through to other generations the embodied knowledge collected while dancing. The body creates, performs, and safeguards dance through the dance itself. However, in some cases, the practise of dance falls within the established practise of knowledge production, where reading and writing are the bases to acquire, produce, maintain, and preserve it. In these cases, dance translates its practise into written documents as notations, scores, manuscripts, or glossaries in order to create, transmit, and document dance. Dance scores belong to such documents. They propose concrete tasks and instructions, through words and drawings, to a reader/performer to enact a dance/performance. Jonathan Burrows suggests that scores can “mediate between the maker and the work, and also between the maker and the performer” (2010: 142). In this case, the score mediates between the repertory of a dance event (or better, dance knowledge) and the person investigating it. This chapter proposes dance scores as transitional objects between documents and embodiment, between reading and performing between action and preservation, intersecting social worlds, and becoming a “boundary object” (Star & Griesemer, 1989).
