Archives and remounts
by Christopher House

The thoughtful and inspiring conversation that I witnessed on Dec.12, 2023 raised many interesting questions for me. What follows reflects the ways in which the conversation directed me back to my question about archives as an indicator of 1. time passing, values changing and technology advancing, and 2. the challenges of re-producing a choreographic work in its full complexity.

Part One The physical archive

I am in the third period of my career. The question of archive and its many aspects has been bouncing around in my head for years. Having had the relative luxury of directing a mid-size dance company with significant resources over twenty-six seasons, I have often used the process of remounting a work as an opportunity to revisit artistic choices. In 2015 I initiated a project with Toronto Dance Theatre called Reimagining Repertoire where existing works were considered not as fixed artifacts but rather as found objects that could be plundered as generative sources for remixes, adaptations, or completely new works.

I left TDT at the onset of the pandemic and against the backdrop of huge shifts in social justice awareness. I subsequently have spent much time contemplating the ways in which my life in dance has unfolded. My personal archives have played a large role in this enquiry.

I see this archive as a tool to help me track my journey as an artist and human being, and to measure how my values and my understanding of the world have changed.

The elements of my archive include handwritten notebooks and journal; print interviews, articles, and reviews; photos, other images, and videos, and – considerably less easy to pin down– my memories, those of my brilliant collaborator Rosemary James, and the embodied knowledge of the many dancers that have co-created and danced in my works.

Starting with printed materials, I have forty-seven plastic envelopes labelled by year from 1976- 2024. The first envelopes are relatively thin. By the early eighties they begin to swell, growing plumper with each passing year until about 2005 when they begin to shrink. From the 1980s, I have advance articles, reviews, and interviews relating to almost every new work or presentation of my work at home and on tour. These works are often covered by multiple writers– as many as six– in different publications. In the nineties, there are fewer reviews but more articles and better-designed (and thicker!) programs and brochures.

With the coming of the new millennium, there is a gradual and then rapid shift from print to online journalism resulting in far fewer physical documents. Publications limit their arts coverage and, ultimately, their arts criticism. One by one, newspapers stop reviewing entirely. And finally, the printed program (that people often take home and save and– maybe– cherish) gives way to the QR code. With nothing analogue to contemplate and/or keep, the ephemeral life of a dance fades further.

I grieve for each of these losses as they mark the increasing marginalization of dance after so many years of so many people working for so little money to build a foundation for an imagined future.

Photos in my files follow a similar pattern to printed matter but for different reasons, moving from few, to many, and back to fewer. In the seventies and eighties, most of our photos were staged in a studio. Photo calls were stressful affairs driven by the desperate need for at least one good image to market our new work. Prints were expensive and often there were only a few, carefully labelled so that they could be returned to the company after they were used. As reproduction technology improved, prints became cheaper and more numerous. And then, with the advent of digital technology, inexpensive, high-quality images were in unlimited supply! Rather than take place in a studio, our dances were increasingly photographed in stage light at the dress rehearsal, changing the look of our images– and the look of our marketing– from dance-as-pose to dance-as-action.

I currently have many thousands of images of my work on various hard drives, all waiting to be reviewed an organized one day. But, post-digital, I have almost no physical prints.

Regarding video, in the late seventies it was expensive and hard to use under theatrical lighting. Early works on Shibaden reel-to-reel or on 3⁄4 inch cassettes survive as scenes of white blobs bouncing around on a background of grey snow. Detail, subtlety and sometimes even the identity of a performer is lost. Captured in this format, many of my early works have, effectively, disappeared.

Beta and VHS were a revolution but with performances usually shot from the back of the hall, they were still limited in resolution. Luckily about 1985, with the advent of camcorders, it became much easier and cheaper to use video, which led to a different problem. Accumulation! Since my first camcorder, I estimate that Rosemary James and I have recorded about 4000 hours of videotape (quietly disintegrating as I write this) of our creative process including multiple versions of works-in-progress, improvised tasks, and fruitful accidents. Many of my own copies are labelled New Work which, in retrospect, was not a very smart choice. Also, around this time I began to write less about my work and rely more on video as a tool. And so, my earlier pieces and their process of creation are more permanently captured as they are often diagrammed or described in notebooks.

My physical archives, as described above, help me answer questions such as: When was that piece made? Who were the first cast, a.k.a. my co-choreographers? Who were my other collaborators? What were the conditions of the work’s creation? What problem was I trying to solve? How did I begin? What, if anything, did I say in the program? What did I say in print interviews and how do I now feel about what I said then? Which pieces were hits and then died a quick death, and which had a slow burn, eventually becoming classics, at least for a few years? What were my influences, tangents, productive failures, and pointless exercises? Which of these works made me proud? Which do I prefer today?

The physical archive also provides a timeline of how much the art form that I knew and loved as a twenty-one-year-old has, through various expansions and contractions, continued to morph and shed its skins. I can see how certain shifts in thinking that arrived with utopic excitement ultimately hardened into orthodoxies that limited expression and experimentation in other areas. And I can see how the definition of dancing and choreography has been pulled into thrilling new directions.

The accumulation of these trends is a record of changing values that are social, political, and cultural in nature. They capture the ebb and flow of government support, the brutality of the Harris years, the blips in audience expansion (Russian defectors! Solid Gold! So You Think You Can Dance!), the impact of HIV, the shift of hegemony from NYC to Europe to everywhere, the loosening of gender roles, the opening to diversification of practices and, of course, the relentless march of the market. They also reveal the results of being tethered to the restrictions and subtle censorship of public funding, and the perils and rewards of bucking the system.

Part Two. The ephemeral archive:  memory, embodied knowledge, and the unfixed nature of choreography (my current thoughts)

01 We work hard to resist the bittersweet, intractable inevitable: dance disappears.

02 Values shift. When I began to choreograph, anything that suggested meaning or narrative was frowned upon. Dance was supposed to be about itself with the accidental poetry that emerged from the work. Emotion was suspect. Work that had a socio-political message was considered lesser. Fast forward...

03 Locking down a work in a perfect version usually backfires. The flaws, the messy bits, the space for a performer’s insider knowledge all go away when the work is sealed. It makes me think of franchise musicals where every gesture, in every version, needs to look the same. 

04 What is a completed work? Some choreographers feel that a premiere is the beginning, that it takes at least ten performances and the presence of an audience for a work to reveal itself. Then the work of responding to those ten performances can start.

05 Building on the above, my experience is that one performance of a given work by a group of performers can sometimes feel like the work's apotheosis. This usually happens when the performers' intuitive understanding of shared goals + their inspired, perfect choices in the moment + their willingness to regulate their adrenaline and notice the weather that is emerging onstage+ their delight and skill in trusting the ensemble while simultaneously leading and following + their understanding that each performance needs to be created anew in adventuresome partnership with everything that affects its outcome. Which is to say they are not presenting an artifact; they are creating an event. Tragically and beautifully, the conditions that brought this performance to life will never occur in the same way again. 

06 On the same topic, I believe that a work exists in a self-replenishing process of becoming when the performer is encouraged to take risks and make proposals through the practice of choreographic thinking in performance. To work best, this requires the presence of the choreographer, or a rehearsal director with knowledge and agency, or a future intervenor who signs on to optimistically destabilize the work. In these cases, the performer receives productive feedback or direction that responds to their proposals– or else nips them in the bud– on a per-case basis. 

07 I love Travis’s comment: “I see archives as kind of like breadcrumbs… these breadcrumbs come to me in the form of people that have these flashes of brilliance, flashes of transcendence through the form.”

08 I remember reading about a group of Balanchine dancers sharing their conflicting memories of how Concerto Barocco should be danced. This is likely because a choreographer will give different direction to different dancers based on their understanding of the role, what they bring to it, and the ways in which their singular qualities can even change the choreographer’s vision of what the work should be. 

09 Are works that are less in dialogue with a moment in time more easily restaged because they are untethered from a specific zeitgeist and thus do not "date"?

10 I was taught that a work of any value was transferable to other dancers. I disagree. A dance can be fused with an individual performer, created because of them and result in an unforgettable theatrical experience...but may never have the same fullness with another performer or at another time. 

11 Does the expansion and refinement of technique improve or simply change the affect of a work's performance? A case study from YouTube: Who better captures the essence of the Agon pas de deux, Diana Adams or Darcey Bussell? Adams embodies danger, risk, and apprehension. Bussell's gorgeously controlled reading imbues the work with elegance and sensual beauty. In restaging the work, which should be the archival source? 

12 We sometimes flatter ourselves with the fantasy that the present moment is a time of perfection in critical thinking, ethics and understanding of the world, and now we can relax.