Accidental Archives of Performance Making

Abstract

This paper introduces the online toolkit created during the AHRC-funded Resilience and Inclusion: Dancers as Agents of Change project. Although the primary aim of the toolkit is the transmission of information for training purposes, the toolkit has simultaneously created a carefully curated repository of performance documents and related materials with a film at the core out of which many of the learning materials emerge. The discussion considers how this curated library of valuable performance documents creates an "accidental archive." Notwithstanding the challenges of making materials "open," often connected to institutional gatekeeping, this short paper poses questions about the documenting of process (in various forms and formats) to ask what value these process documents hold, for the artist and audience, and for those who are responsible for their safe keeping.

Keywords

• accidental archives
• dance
• process
• film