Releasing the Archive: Choreographing with the Past

Abstract

Releasing the Archive: Choreographing with the Past unloads the canon of Euro-American modernist dance histories with the affective charge of a distributed corporeal archive from the periphery. The exiled and refugeed European Jewish choreographer and Professor, Gertrud Bodenwieser (1890-1959) has been largely written off and out, into the margins as a footnote to history. This serious play offers a sip of absinthe, ecstatic inebriation to counter the bipolar schwung (swing) of despair and hope, hope and despair of the exiled dancer from Europe who re-invents herself in the antipodes. Paradoxical but not patriarchal her pelvis is thrust forward into the future, holding back history’s destr..