tracing fragments//something shimmers: the body archive in dance performance

Tracing fragments//something shimmers is a 33-minute, work of choreography for seven dancers that premiered at Space Place Theater in Iowa City, Iowa on April 2nd, 2026. Structured through the collaging of multiple interwoven sections, the dance engages athletic postmodern dancing, gestural sequences, facial expressivity, theatricality, and sounding to delve into the relationship between the body, dance performance, and the archive. Creative methodologies used to craft the work included movement improvisation, free writing, and devising road maps, or scores for movement generation. The choreography reveals three foundations for thinking about the body as an archive. First, the dance invokes the unconscious as well as the intentional elicitation of memory to think through how the body carries history and knowledge. Core elements of the work including rhythm, repetition, and iteration are revealed as strategies for re-enacting and enlivening the body as an archive. Second, tracing fragments//something shimmers invites a nuanced relationship to notions of authenticity and difference in archival structures. Finally, the choreography demonstrates how feminine subjectivity emerges as a structure for thinking through interiority and desire as key components within the body as an archive as well as a defiance of the patriarchal structures within traditional notions of the archive. Overall, tracing fragments//something shimmers reveals slippery, internal, and imaginative dimensions of the body as an archive and provides a new platform for thinking about traditional archival structures.

https://doi.org/10.25820/2rv5-xz68