Introduction: Reconsidering Reenactment

1Ever since its steadily increasing prominence in the fields of dance, performance art, and the visual arts from the late 1990s onward, artistic reenactment has either been hailed or denounced (albeit less frequently) for its potential to spur alternative modes of historiography that, seasoned with the creativity of artists, are often characterised as “affective”,¹ “embodied”,² or “performative”.³ By attaching these labels to the various ways in which artists have been engaging with history through their practice, scholarly discourse has attempted to follow closely in the footsteps of reenactment as it made its way into the arts. Specifically with regard to dance, choreographic forms of reenactment gave rise to reinvigorated views on the complex relationships between dance and the archive, dancers and historians, movement and memory, choreography and ephemerality – pushing forward some of the most fundamental issues that not only constitute dance studies as a field of academic inquiry but also (and most importantly) underlie its future directions.

2At this point in time, and nearly twenty years after reenactment first became recognisable as an artistic “genre” in its own right, we are in a position to start looking back on a practice that in itself revolves around the act of looking back. In this contribution, I wish to mimic this act by throwing a retrospective glance at – and perhaps offer a somewhat speculative prospect of – collaboration in and beyond choreographic reenactment. I more specifically want to look at collaboration as a particular aspect of choreographic reenactment that somehow went unnoticed in the midst of the predominant focus on the role of the body in reenacting dance, but one with important implications for standard modes of doing dance historiography. Certainly, it was by squarely inserting the body – both as a literal medium and as a discursive figure of thought – into the key operations of the historical profession such as archiving, documenting, and writing history that reenactment in dance has endeavoured to widen the scope and the tools of traditional historiography in arguably unprecedented ways. However, various other implications of choreographic reenactment are equally incisive for dance historiography, though they are often much harder to discern. In that sense, it is hardly surprising that what we can describe as the “deep impact” of choreographic reenactment is coming to the surface only now, after an incubation period of nearly two decades.

3Despite my intention to go beyond the emphasis on embodiment and corporeality in the discourse on choreographic reenactment, the chief principle of collaboration I want to focus on is nonetheless central to the idea of “body-to-body transmission” that, as has been variously argued, buttresses most forms of reenactment in dance.⁴ Precisely because traditional media for documenting live performances (such as videos, photographs, writings, or notations) are hardly sufficient to reconstruct dances from the past, the embodied knowledges of dancers who had a direct link with the source material are a necessary supplement for dance reenactors endeavouring to recreate a specific work. But in order to probe the actual significance of this “body-to-body transmission”, I want to reformulate this crucial process in terms of collaboration. This notion is less tailored to the body and might have a broader resonance, which is of paramount importance if we are to fathom the so-called “deep impact” of choreographic reenactment on dance historiography.

Choreographic Collaborations

4In his editorial introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, Mark Franko is one of the first to hint at the importance of collaboration for choreographic reenactment. He notes that one of the primary characteristics that may differentiate reenactment from traditional forms of dance reconstruction is that “the dancer frequently works through the memory of a custodian of the work”.⁵ Importantly, collaborating with custodians indicates how choreographic reenactment does away with the prerequisite of distance as a primordial condition for historiography in particular and research in general. Examples of how different forms of collaboration are an essential drive behind choreographic reenactment are not difficult to find: for A Mary Wigman Dance Evening (2009), Fabián Barba went to train with Susanne Linke, Irene Sieben, and Katharine Sehnert; Martin Nachbar similarly worked with Waltraud Luley to learn Dore Hoyer’s expressionist dancing style for his piece Urheben Aufheben (2008). However, collaboration takes other forms too: one could refer to Anne Collod, who deliberately went to consult Anna Halprin in order to create her so-called “replay” of Halprin’s notorious 1965 piece Parades and Changes (2008), or to Olga de Soto’s reliance on what in essence is oral history for pieces such as Histoire(s) (2004) and Debords: Reflections on the Green Table (2012). We can consider all these works as forms of collaboration as well.

5According to sociologist Rudi Laermans, “within the world of contemporary dance, the preference for shifting artistic collaborations of the more equal and diverse kind has become quite outspoken after its initial re-emergence during the second half of the 1990s”.⁶ If Laermans’s observation holds true, it should come as no surprise that dancers endeavouring to reenact dances from the past go searching for the input of direct witnesses to help them realise their aims. Choreographic reenactment aligns with a larger trend in contemporary dance and the arts, increasingly bending towards collaboration as a preferred working mode, particularly in projects that take artistic research as one of their driving principles. Following this trend, there is a burgeoning body of literature grappling with both the potentials and pitfalls of artistic research through collaboration⁷. In some cases, this interest also leads to critical assessments of how collaboration can play into the predicaments of our current neoliberal regime in which creativity, flexibility, or self-realisation become marketable values.⁸

6Against this background, the central role of collaboration in choreographic reenactment is neither new nor exceptional. The more interesting and urgent question – the one I also want to raise in this contribution – is why it comes that, even when choreographic reenactment is steadily being recognised as a form of historiography potentially expanding existing methodologies within dance history, collaborative modes of working have not found their way (yet) to dance historiography in its scholarly instances? Put otherwise: what can dance historians learn from dancers engaging with reenactment besides the fact that the body too acts as a living archive incorporating its own embodied documentation? Could it not be that reenactment impels us to deal seriously with collaboration as a partial yet primordial strategy to cope with some of the challenges that continue to haunt dance history? These challenges are well-known, as they include the difficulty in accounting for embodied knowledges, the limited legibility of archival materials, the epistemological valorisation of memories held by different actants within the field of dance (and beyond), the need to decolonise dance history by looking at global crosscurrents, or the mere fact that there is only so much a dance historian can do by her/himself.⁹ Several recent trends in dance historiography speak directly to some of these issues and open up new avenues that, as I will argue, can be deepened and intensified by pursuing an interdisciplinary dialogue with recent theorisations of what is known as global history, on the one hand, and with the practice of choreographic reenactment, on the other hand.

The Changing Scope of Dance Histories

7In her chapter for The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies, Susan Manning lucidly articulates some of the most crucial issues dance history faces as we move forward into the twenty-first century. She traces how a so-called “nation-state model” (which structures dance history along relatively clear yet imaginary boundaries) has been shifting toward what she calls a “transnational model”. This model broadens the purview of dance history by paying closer attention to the circulation of dance and dancers in more extensive networks of exchange and mutual influences.¹⁰ While Manning is sympathetic to this shift, she remains wary of privileging the newer transnational model over the presumably older nation-state model, emphasising that both approaches are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. In her view, even the more recent work on transnational dance histories is already showing its limitations, as she claims:

there remains much work to be done before we achieve a fully rounded account of modern dance in transnational circulation. At present, we have a wide array of new studies but few accounts that attempt to synthesize, compare and map the transnational historiography.¹¹

8According to Manning, dance history needs to develop a more integrative approach that combines macro- and micro-perspectives. This move is necessary to arrive at historical studies that cover a larger scale and at the same time account for local particularities against the background of broader crosscurrents within the dance scene as well as the cultural, social, and political climate in which dance is always necessarily grounded.

9The importance of Manning’s remarks comes into relief when juxtaposed with one of the observations voiced by Janet Adshead-Lansdale and June Layson in their 1994 book Dance History: An Introduction. Writing about “general histories of dance” that typically stretch over large timespans, they note that “it is perhaps significant that few recent dance scholars have attempted such ambitious projects, knowing from modern historical methods and social anthropological research how problematic enterprises of this kind are”.¹² The prototypical example of such long-term history is, of course, Curt Sachs’s notorious Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes (first published in 1933, and translated in English in 1965 as World History of Dance). Sachs’s study exemplifies some of the fundamental flaws that so-called “world histories” of this kind commonly suffer from, most notably the tendency to forge the history of dance into a teleological narrative that progresses from allegedly primitive forms of dance in foreign lands to so-called more “developed” choreographic genres as they emerged in mainly the Western world.¹³

10Due to the universalist underpinnings of the world history paradigm exemplified by Sachs, the response of dance history has primarily been to choose a more limited timespan and to focus on single oeuvres or a selected range of case studies.¹⁴ The result, however, is that there are currently hardly any qualitative textbooks for teaching dance history at either undergraduate or graduate levels. The choice for richness in detail comes with a loss: when the emphasis on specific historical events takes precedence over the insight into larger periodical frameworks (however relative they may be), it becomes increasingly difficult to grasp the significance of these events within their particular contexts. In this respect, the emergence of what Manning terms the transnational model may initiate a promising new direction in dance historiography. This is especially the case when the recent interest in enlarging the scope of dance historical inquiry does not signal a return to the older types of world histories but rather aligns itself with what is known as “global history”. While the notion of “global history” is subject to various understandings, generally speaking, it constitutes a methodological lens through which historians develop a perspective on the past that absolves historiography from the universalist ethnocentrism that impregnates the genre of world history while retaining some of its attention to larger scales and more extended periods of time.¹⁵ To the extent that dance history might be moving in the direction of so-called “global history”, it is instructive to have a brief look at how this branch of research is taking shape in historiography at large.

Convergences with Global History

11Because global history is still often confounded with the older genre of world histories, historians have been at pains to differentiate both approaches, often by articulating the main methodological underpinnings of global history as the “newer” type of historiography. Following Sebastian Conrad, these underpinnings can be summarised in the seven following principles:

• Global historians are not concerned with macro-perspectives alone;
• Global histories experiment with alternative notions of space;
• Global histories are inherently relational;
• Global history forms part of the larger “spatial turn”;
• Global history emphasizes the synchronicity of historical events;
• Global histories are self-reflective on the issue of Eurocentrism;
• Global histories explicitly recognise the positionality of thinking about the global past.¹⁶

12It obviously falls beyond the scope of this contribution to discuss in detail each of the principles outlined by Conrad. Most pertinent are the strong resonances one can identify between these tenets of global history and some of the most prominent issues currently debated within dance history and, more generally, dance studies. For example, the emphasis on not only time (claim 5) but also space (claims 2 and 4) and positionality (claim 7) reflects how these topics have gained renewed attention inside dance history too, particularly in the wake of choreographic reenactment.¹⁷ Similarly, the need for a decolonising turn within historiography (claim 6) and for combining macro-perspectives with micro-level analyses (claim 1) are at the forefront of dance studies as well.¹⁸ Yet the perhaps most critical aspect concerns the relationality (claim 3) that according to Conrad is an inherent part of the perspective of global history, which is why I want to delve briefly into this particular dimension.

13Whether we call it transnational or global history, the primary hallmark of this emerging field is the interest in what is variously described as “connections”, “networks”, “entanglements”, “links”, “exchanges”, “flows”, or “circulations”. These terms indicate how the focus shifts towards the dynamics of more extensive historical processes that cross regional or national boundaries, temporal or historical periods, and spatial or geographical demarcations. One of the primary reasons explaining why global history has been growing popular amongst historians from the 1990s onward is, of course, that Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 dictum that “we now live in a ‘global village’” has become, probably more than ever, a palpable reality.¹⁹ Postwar capitalism, transnational migration, digital technologies, social media, world politics and diplomacy led historians to a growing awareness of how various networks and patterns of circulation are driving forces behind history. These factors put under pressure some of the most cardinal premises of twentieth-century historiography. In her contribution to a 2019 special issue on “Historicizing the Global” of the Journal of Global History, Katja Naumann similarly observes that “the last decades have seen crucial conceptual shifts”, which she explains as follows:

Realities of connections, flows, and entanglements are in the centre, while metaphysical presuppositions are challenged. Scholars try to break with overly universalist and orientalist views by confronting them with primary source-based and decentred reconstructions of the unity of the world, which bring out differences, convergences, and diversity.²⁰

14Nonetheless, even while avowing that there is certain “newness” to the renewed interest in relational understandings of historiography that underpin global history, Naumann contends that such a development has a longer history itself that is not always readily recognised. In her account, this history harks back to critical innovations in the historical profession long before the twentieth century and which, through “continuing conceptual revisions” of the “global”, laid the ground for the interest in transnational world histories as they appeared from the 1960s throughout the 1980s onward.²¹ What remains conspicuously missing from her otherwise highly informed genealogy, however, is the tradition within historiography spawning from the notion of longue durée. This concept was first introduced by the French historian Fernand Braudel in the late 1950s and has been attracting renewed attention in recent years from historians and theorists of history alike.

15A case in point is a 2015 issue of Annales that collects a range of critical interventions under the title of “Debating the Longue Durée”. The starting point for that debate is a text written by the American historians David Armitage and Jo Guldi, in which they argue for a return to Braudel’s longue durée as a necessary counterpoint to the predominance of so-called microhistories that might be valuable for their focus on local or individual specificities of historical events, but which fail to chart more extensive historical processes across various geographical regions as well as different periods of time. In their view, recent technological developments allow for the analysis of “big data”, adding not only a renewed urgency to history as longue durée but also forging arguably unprecedented possibilities to expand the scope of historiography.²² As such, Armitage and Guldi echo a call they voiced previously in their 2014 The History Manifesto. Here they state that digital tools can help “to promote longue-durée synthesis that includes perspectives other than that of the nation-state” but they also note that this potential “rest[s] upon the ongoing creation and maintenance of inclusive archives”.²³

Inclusive yet Dispersive Archives

16The idea of creating and maintaining “inclusive archives” is a crucial addition that, even though Armitage and Guldi do not make it entirely concrete, counters a trenchant critique that in recent years has been directed at the development of the “new” genre of global history. As historian Matthias Middell observes, “since the mid-2010s”, critics of global history have warned against “an inherent ideological globalism and a problematic narrowing towards an Anglo-Saxon model of globalisation”.²⁴ Despite the justified wariness that global history risks mimicking or even reinforcing deep structures of hegemonic imperialism, it does seem to generate an outspoken emphasis on inclusivity amongst its adherents. In this vein, historian Dominique Sachsenmeier suggests that global history holds the promise (although it often remains unfulfilled potential) to “be characterized by a diversity of standpoints, each of which would be rooted in a widely independent scholarly tradition and, by implication, provide alternative viewpoints to Western narratives”.²⁵ The political awareness following from the scope of global histories will probably sound like a welcome proposition for many scholars and artists engaging with dance history. To the extent that global history aims to strike a balance between microhistories of individuals and global tendencies, it feeds into ongoing debates on decolonisation within and outside the field of dance studies. The underlying current that appears to connect scholarship on dance with the emerging strand of global history may be the growing awareness that not only dance but also society at large need to work against the oppressive dominance of the West, which continues to creep into critical thought as well as cultural practices like dance.

17At the same time, the very notion of “inclusive archives” takes on a different dimension in the context of dance as it touches upon the fundamental problem that every attempt at archiving dance inevitably brings to light. We have grown accustomed to the fact that, as an art of movement, dance resists any easy entrance into the archive as we traditionally know it, often reinforcing the well-known lament of dance’s presumably inescapable ephemerality. Yet, it is exactly this longstanding emphasis on dance’s evanescence that has overshadowed some of the more structural reasons behind the heuristically poor conditions with which dance historical research still confronts us today. The limited timespan of dance stems arguably not so much from dance’s alleged transient nature but rather from the fact that dance is a deeply dispersive art form. The work of dance tends to spread among various actants, including not only choreographers, dancers, or teachers, but also spectators, scholars, or critics. Moreover, unexpected encounters, inadvertent or wilful exposure to outer influences, and changing institutional contexts all impregnate the dance works that eventually appear on stage. However, precisely because these seemingly random yet formative circumstances take place off stage, they tend to remain out of sight and, from a historical point of view, hardly traceable.

18By describing dance as a deeply dispersive art form, I am, of course, reminiscent of how Michel Foucault affords a considerable if not essential place to the principle of dispersion within his theorisation of the archive and his view on what he calls archaeology. As we can already read in the opening pages of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault’s archaeological project opposes itself to the “total description” as practised in traditional historiography and constitutes instead what he terms “a general history” that “would deploy the space of a dispersion”.²⁶ In other words, Foucault distances his archaeology from the unifying narratives construed by historians who work to streamline the capricious courses of past events by focusing on causal relationships, homogenising analogies, and periodisation. As an alternative, archaeology embraces the somewhat unorthodox principles of indeterminacy, contingency, and dispersion. Equally important is that the notion of dispersion allows Foucault to conceive the archive as an overarching system that comprises both so-called “discursive” and “non-discursive” practices. Archaeology “tries to determine how the rules of formation that govern it […] may be linked to non-discursive systems”, Foucault writes.²⁷ Put otherwise, insofar as Foucault conceptualises the archive as the regulatory system determining what can and cannot be said, the archaeological approach would need to take into account how discursive regulations and non-discursive practices relate to one another since the impact of the former manifests itself in the reality of the latter, and vice versa.

19Through Foucault, we can get a better sense of the profoundly dispersive nature of dance and the many challenges this presents for dance historical research. These challenges are hard to tackle through isolated or individual efforts only, particularly when we truly want to account for dance’s dispersion amongst various non-discursive circumstances that in their turn are contingent on discursive regulatory frameworks. Moreover, these difficulties are exacerbated when the scope of history enlarges toward global histories. Consequently, it can be argued that collaborative research formats are required to start tracing the myriad networks and pathways that specific dance works as well as individual dancers, choreographers, or companies have followed throughout different periods of time and across multiple regions. Digital humanities obviously provide – as Armitage and Guldi suggest too – important auxiliary tools and methods for this kind of laborious research, allowing us to enlarge the scale of historical studies in an arguably unprecedented manner. However, despite the at times euphoric embracing of digital technologies, it is important to remember that merely mapping the cross-connections between historical events or the networks through which people, works, influences, or expertise circulate is hardly satisfactory when it comes to generating genuine historical knowledge of the topic under scrutiny. As Sebastian Conrad firmly states, “a focus on connections alone is not enough to make good global history”.²⁸ This means that qualitative research remains necessary even when digital tools may facilitate the collection, processing, and visualisation of historical data. The question, then, is what forms collaborative research can take within dance studies and, more to my interest here, how it can be applied to dance historiography.

Collaborative Research in Dance

20A few examples from dance studies (as well as from the adjacent fields of theatre and performance studies) suggest that scholars are increasingly exploring collaborative research methods, despite all the challenges collaboration in academia may bring. One of the probably most symptomatic indications of the growing interest in collaborative approaches is the recent joint issue of Global Performance Studies and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, titled “Collaborative Research in Theatre and Performance Studies”. Explaining the rationale behind their choice for this theme, the editors raise a basic but shrewd question: “Considering the high level of collaboration necessary to produce theatre and performance, why is so much of the scholarship on the subject written by single authors?”.²⁹ ​​Interestingly, the editors turned the theme of the joint issue into a formal principle as they would only accept contributions “authored by three or more collaborators” in order to “explicitly open space for collaborative scholarship and to encourage the joint production of academic work”.³⁰ Obviously, the collaborative authorship pursued here is far removed from the common practice in the exact sciences to mention members of research teams as authors of journal articles even when they did not contribute to the writing of the piece. Instead, the stated invitation is for scholars to engage in the intricacies of genuine collaborative work as well as to learn from the collaborative nature of the practices under scrutiny.³¹ It is the process of collaboration that stands central in this joint issue rather than simply assuming that the contributions are the product of collaborative work.

21Another example of collaborative research closer to dance studies is Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit’s project “Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry” (2018-2021). Characteristic of “Dunham’s Data” is that it draws on digital humanities to trace the networks and circulations through which Dunham’s practices moved, leading to a form of transnational dance history as discussed by Susan Manning. In an interim report published in Dance Research in November 2020, Bench and Elswit importantly show how their dance historical research aims to go beyond merely establishing relations between different sets of archival and documentary data, using these findings instead for qualitative scholarly analysis. They point out how they deliberately pursue what they call a “polyvocality” in their research by seeking a “dialogue with those who hold deep knowledge of Dunham’s history, practices, and legacy”.³² To this end, they are conducting oral history interviews with former company members while also planning to produce a publication with commissioned essays by experts. It can be said that “Dunham’s Data” intends to find productive synergies between new collaborative research methods and more conventional forms of analysis and output, which might mitigate any concerns that collaboration necessarily implies overthrowing established modes of researching and writing that – despite their limitations – have proven their value in generating historical insight. Most crucially, Bench and Elswit undertake collaborative research in a broader sense than generally conceived, insofar as it not only involves the joint work of researchers but also actively aims at including the informational input of historical agents.

22Other examples of collaborative research in dance that deserve mention here could include, for instance, the work theorist Erin Brannigan has been doing with dance artists Lizzie Thomson and Matthew Day. Labelling their joint endeavours as a form of “co-habitation”, they claim they “are not working towards concrete outcomes with shared authorship” and are instead “co-habiting a field of research interests”.³³ A similar conception of collaboration underlies the research set-up developed by choreographer Wayne McGregor and dance scholar Scott deLahunta, initially as a part of a project called “Choreography and Cognition” (2003-2004), but later expanded into various other projects and collaborations. The “collaborative framework” initiated in this context entailed that “the choreographer, the dancers and the scientists were very much equal partners, with everyone included in one form of dialogue or another, and all parties came away with material that they found useful for their own practice”.³⁴ Coming from a different angle is the collaborative project “Dancing with Parkinson’s” (2019-–2021), led by professor of dialogic communication Louise Jane Phillips at the Roskilde University in Denmark. This project aims to investigate the therapeutic use of dance for people diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease through a series of workshops that build on a collaborative research design to gain insight into the experiences and knowledge of both patients and their spouses (or family). Specific to “Dancing with Parkinson’s” is also the critical engagement with so-called “participatory health research” by tracing the tensions that might arise in the co-production of knowledge through the actual involvement of patients in conducting research.³⁵

23Even though the above outline is necessarily brief and far from exhaustive, it does indicate that collaborative research methods are not only increasingly forging themselves into the field of dance studies but can also take many different forms.³⁶ However, it is striking that the number of collaborative projects in dance history is relatively small. Collaboration seems to be a more common mode of working in interdisciplinary research that not only engages the exact sciences but also involves the active participation of living choreographers and dancers. Historiographical research on dance, on the other hand, is still more often a solitary endeavour complying with the habituated idea that the historian’s work consists of individual archival research, even when complemented by oral history. Perhaps it is at this juncture that choreographic reenactment can serve as an inspiring practice to implement collaboration in dance historiographical research more broadly.

Learning from Reenactment

24If we are, as suggested earlier, on the cusp of a shift towards transnational or global dance histories, standard approaches to doing historiographical research clearly reach their limits. Whether or not this shift effectively heralds a new chapter in the history of the histories of dance remains to be seen, but there is hardly any doubt that important new developments are reshaping the field. Whereas the possibilities offered by digital technologies may enhance these new directions, I would argue that choreographic reenactment too might furnish some crucial methodological clues that have the potential to enlarge the standard set of research approaches for dance historians. Most crucially, to the extent that collaboration often plays a constitutive role in choreographic reenactment, we need to ask if and how collaboration could also turn into a methodological principle for academic dance historiography. It should be clear by now that collaboration in this respect does not mean so much how researchers work together in a team and on a single project, but rather how the research itself would be opened up to other agents as well as to the interaction between different types of media (including text, sound, objects, image, movement, voice, and embodied knowledges). From this point of view, choreographic reenactment suggests several important avenues that could enrich dance historical research. Based merely on the few examples I mentioned earlier, it is possible already to give some indication of the directions in which this might go: the fact that Olga de Soto decided to conduct oral history interviews with audience members who had seen the premiere of Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table instead of performers demonstrates the historical value of the memories that spectators (and not only dancers) hold of the piece itself, as well as of the larger historical context in which they initially saw it. The manner in which both Fabián Barba and Martin Nachbar collaborated closely with former students of Mary Wigman and Dore Hoyer, respectively, stresses the importance of attending to the role of dance pedagogues in transmitting embodied knowledge that otherwise often remains tacit. Or, knowing that Anne Collod could rely on the relatively extensive scores Anna Halprin created for Parades and Changes, but still decided to consult with Halprin testifies to the need to combine material documents and corporeal expertise in order to reactivate historical knowledges.

25The methods proposed by choreographic reenactment are in themselves not new, and it definitely would be wrong to claim that reenactment has the pretension to reinvent the historical profession altogether. However, it may be clear that the collaborative orientation that typifies choreographic reenactment provides potentially stimulating pathways for imagining what we might call a genuinely “collaborative dance historiography”. Elsewhere, I have similarly argued for an expansion of our standard dance historical methods, advocating not only the more structural inclusion of oral history resources in libraries and archival institutions but also the idea of archival participation in order to enlarge both the input of historical information as well as the output in terms of archival research and community outreach.³⁷ In this sense, too, participatory formats can become part of a larger collaborative dance historiography that would deepen and intensify some of the currents that are already on their way in dance historical research. To achieve this, dance studies can seek productive crossovers with other fields that have been showing increasing attention to collaborative conceptions of research, such as history, ethnography, literary history, and interdisciplinary human sciences.³⁸

26Ultimately, the proposition for a collaborative dance historiography is one partial answer to a fairly basic yet utterly complex question: if reenactment is rightly recognised for producing historical knowledge, we must seriously ask what we can learn from it and where this knowledge goes. Confronting these questions is necessary to ensure that the epistemological value of dance in general and reenactment in particular does not remain confined to either the temporary space of the stage or the limited legibility of historical documents. Instead, following the deeply dispersive nature of dance, research into its histories can only benefit from being similarly dispersed (in a positive sense) amongst various forms of input and output, which can only be achieved through collaborative endeavours.