Digital Preservation of Dance, Inclusion and Absence

Digital technologies have introduced a raft of opportunities for novel modes of dance documentation and preservation. More particularly, digital tools have been developed that have offered dance scholars and artists opportunities to develop new modes of dance visualization and transmission, creating new ways to access dance content and in turn provide new insights to dance, and its compositional and relational properties. This chapter examines three digital dance resources that have emerged in recent years; Siobhan Davies RePlay, Digital Dance Archives and Synchronous Objects, and will draw on a series of interviews with dance practitioners and researchers who have worked long-term with technologies, to explore what it is that is preserved and for whom, the nature of the documents or ‘objects’ that are created, the role of the spectator, viewer or ‘user’ in the construction and preservation of dance, and how digital methods disrupt the temporal properties of the dance ‘event’. The chapter seeks to argue that the opportunity afforded by digital technologies to access the hidden processes of dance creation, shows how these digital artefacts become new kinds of records of performance.