Dance Genealogy: Tracing the Unarchived Epistemology of Practice

The epistemology of dance, namely, how dance is understood and the circumstances through which it is utilised and re-enforced as knowledge-making, is paramount to the development of dance and its history. I am not concerned about defining what dance is—that is separate from the main discussion of this article; rather, I address the way and the conditions in which it is captured, archived, transmitted, and re-used. A dance genealogy can be synthesised by examining one’s autoethnographic dance archive, in-cluding unarchived content. Applying dance genealogy to trace the historiographic and ethnographic lines of thought about matters pertaining to dance and performance is a crucial requirement for further study and exploration. In this article, I discuss an ex-cerpt of my autoethnographic dance-based journey and piece together the experiences I collected, as well as the practices and knowledge that shaped my dance genealogy. Using my background helps form a point of reference for further critical analysis. It offers a method of combining research on the performativity of dance, as experienced from the practitioner’s and archive user’s perspective, and the liveness of dance through re-flecting on experiential knowledge. This creates another relationship of critical analysis between the epistemology of the (dance) practitioner and their genealogy so as to open up a post-structural methodological approach to inscribing cultural and social history.