Archiving the Dance: Making Siobhan Davies Replay

Siobhan Davies Replay is the first digital dance archive of its kind in the UK and one of the first worldwide. It provides online access to multi-media content (video, text, audio, image) as well as a comprehensive collection of materials that document the creative dance making process. The archive is designed to invite new ways to explore the content and provides tools to create new kinds of digital objects. The idea for the project first emerged in 2005 when there were a handful of online catalogues of dance but very few collections that included actual dance content, and no freely available digital dance archives, so it began its development with few external reference points or models to consult. Work on the archive began in 2007 and it was launched in June 2009 after 30 months of development.