Episode 5. Doing dance heritage – a conversation

This final episode takes the opportunity to further unravel the question of ‘doing’ dance heritage from multiple perspectives. Moving beyond the stage and studio, we travel around Europe to meet Madeline Ritter, initiator of DanceMap and a leading advocate of dance heritage, Franz Anton Cramer with a background in archiving dance, Timmy De Laet, a dance studies professor at the University of Antwerp, and Jonathan Burrows who is a choreographer and works at Coventry University. 

From a zoomed out lens, this episode weaves together a conversation of ideas and questions: How can archiving play an active role in the intangible heritage of dance? How can the embodied knowledge of the dancer find its place in history? What are the sticky points of heritage of a living art form—the problems, issues and stumbling blocks? As we continue doing dance heritage, what can be reimagined, repurposed and refocused? 

This may be the final episode of the season, but let’s see where the conversation takes us!

STUK is participating in DanceMap, a dance heritage research project funded by the European Union (Horizon Europe). The people featured in this episode are connected to DanceMap in various ways. 

Sound featured in the episode: Stage recordings from Bartók / Beethoven / Schönberg, by Rosas/Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, recorded by Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes. Music: Grosse Fuge, op.133, by Ludwig van Beethoven, played live by Ictus — Field recordings from THE DOG DAYS ARE OVER 2.0 rehearsals, by Katharina Smets — Live sound from Out of Context – For Pina, by Alain Platel. Music: Sam Serruys, featuring the voices of the cast. Recorded by Beeldstorm, March 2023 — Theme music composed by Inne Eysermans.
Voices of: Jonathan Burrows, Franz Anton Cramer, Timmy De Laet, Madeline Ritter 

Interviews and narration: Tessa Hall

Transcript

You could say that dance is ephemeral. That it’s performed in the present and then gone. That the only way to know it, is to experience it, live.

So how can a live artform like dance survive across time? How can we experience choreographies from the past, the same way we can experience paintings in a museum? How would that happen? Especially if the object is movement, not something tangible like stone or canvas. 

To keep dance alive, it needs to be transmitted from body to body, audience to audience. 

Choreographies from the past, revived, and performed in the present—this is what we call 'repertory', and it’s a way of keeping dance alive and connecting us to dance heritage.

But the practice of doing repertoire isn’t always obvious. There are many ways to pass on a work through time and many questions to face.

Welcome to Body of Work — a podcast that explores the question of ‘doing’ dance heritage. This is a podcast by STUK, House for Dance, Image and Sound, in the city of Leuven. My name is Tessa Hall. I’m a dancer myself and also a dance heritage researcher.  

At STUK, we’ve been researching the heritage of the contemporary dance scene in Flanders, and with this series we’ll share that with you. To do that, we’ll meet all kinds of dance practitioners who’ve been working in the field of repertory. 

VO: When it comes to this question of ‘doing’ dance heritage, so far we’ve looked at the practice of repertory. We listened to what it’s like to sustain a work through time, to transmit a piece to a new generation, and to make room for yourself inside repertoire. 

Now I want to open up a broader discussion on dance heritage—what is it? Why is it important? But also, what challenges does it raise? To do this, I travelled around Europe in search of different voices that can help contextualise dance heritage through a zoomed out lens. And maybe… even challenge our thinking.

I met up with academics and cultural heritage workers, who in their various ways, work with dance. As a starting point, I looked to my colleagues in DanceMap (that’s the research network for Dance heritage, we’re currently part of at STUK).

I wanted to open the questions to them: What are the sticky points of heritage—the problems, issues and stumbling blocks? And as we continue ‘doing’ dance heritage, what can be reimagined, repurposed and refocused? 

Let’s see where the conversation takes us…

Madeline Ritter: Imagine you don't know the name of your grandmother. Imagine you had no stories about how your mother was brought up in what kind of surrounding in what city, and imagine there would be no stories about anything before your own time. That's heritage. Cultural heritage is a story about the culture we treasure and in our case, dance. 

VO: This is Madelyn Ritter who is the initiator of DanceMap

Madeline Ritter: I'm the director of Bureau Ritter. It's a non-profit arts organization, and we are supporting dance nationally and internationally in many ways. We are funding artists structures. Originally I'm a lawyer, but I always liked dance, so I built a dance organization in many different cities. And now in Berlin.

Franz Anton Cramer: My name is Franz Anton Cramer. I have been involved with work around archive and dance. I can say since 30 years and I'm currently involved in the Dance Map project, and I've been collaborating with, especially with Bureau Ritter and Madeline Ritter ever since 2006 when we started the first initiative in Germany to promote Dance Heritage.

VO: From meeting Franz Anton in Berlin, I met someone closer to home, in Antwerp

Timmy De Laet: Well, my name is Timmy. And the title that I acquired is, for now, associate  professor of theater and dance studies here at the University of Antwerp. 

VO: And I thought it could be interesting to talk to a choreographer.

Jonathan Burrows: So my name is Jonathan Burrows. I'm a choreographer and I am also now an associate professor at the Center for Dance Research at Coventry University in the UK.

VO: The Centre for Dance Research is one of our DanceMap partners. What is Dance Heritage? For Madeline, it’s about the stories that make us who we are

Madeline Ritter: And to come back to my example in the beginning, the stories you are told from your grandparents which we all treasure very much, even our own stories. I have stories I only know because they had been told to me about myself. I don't even have the memory, but other people have the memory. And this is what heritage is. So it's all the stories which are about the past, but which made me as a person or which make us as a culture. And with dance, it's an intangible art form. The object is the movement. 

VO: But Jonathan, well, he had a different point of view on the idea of heritage:

Jonathan Burrows: So in terms of contemporary dance, I'm not interested in heritage because it suggests ownership. But I am interested in lineage and where I've been exposed to that most strongly in the importance of it is within hip hop dance. Hip hop dance innovates faster at the moment than any other form. But there is a kind of understanding: no lineage, no innovation. And so there's a really great care and respect taken to understanding the routes that possibilities have taken through individual people, through cities, through scenes, through styles and hip hop is very carefully and curating itself; And that respect for lineage is really widespread. So lineage I would say. Because lineage connects me.

VO: Whether you call it lineage or heritage, how do we preserve knowledge and stories from the past? A fundamental approach is archiving. I spoke to Franz Anton about what an archive is, and what it can do:

Franz Anton Cramer: I think we have two notions of archive to, to start with. We have the historical notion of archive in the West, in Europe which is essentially a repository for important documents. Important, why? Because they bear proof of, for instance, legal matters. Land ownership, privileges granted by kings to certain people, etc., etc.. And as this sort of archive is a very century old institution. So historiography in the 19th century discovered this and said, okay, if you want to write history in a truthful way, we need to go back to the archive and consult the documents and understand how society and politics worked. And then we can say something about history. 

And then the archive is also a working tool for many artists who consider, like, even if it's just five years of work. Well, in these five years you have accumulated documents, impressions, materials of all sorts. And that's the archive other which you can draw material or inspiration for new work. So essentially the archive is a collection of materials that help you to remember the past, but also to understand it and to bring it in some way into your current situation.

Tessa Hall: What sorts of objects might you find in a dance archive?

Franz Anton Cramer: All the range of material that speaks about dance productions, dance work, dance creation. So photographs, program notes, costume designs, costumes even. All kinds of recordings can be notations, scores, musical scores with choreographic annotations, of course videos. There's a very, let's say, strong focus on, on moving image material. A performance is never the entire thing and also not the images of performances. 

And that's why I personally like archival work so much. Because you discover, intentions, motivations, obstacles, funding applications that were turned down, personal letters, love letters, often  the personal history influences how people work or what they can do. There is much more to a dance performance than only the performance. 

VO: But what would an archive of movements look like? Can you keep live dance performances in an archive? Or library? Or museum?

Franz Anton Cramer: The difficult thing about archiving dance is that dance is not material, and archives usually are material. So it's the performance, it's the moment, it's the experience, it's the energy, etcetera, etcetera. Dance is not only that what happens on stage, but it's also the life of the dancers, of the choreographers, of the creators, its circumstances, its social context, its political regimes. These, let's say, layers of dancers’ reality, they can be extracted from archival collections rather nicely, just as you can investigate on how musicians were living in the 1920s. 

But of course, the real work, if we say that dance is essentially dance work, then it's difficult. The eternal comparison between dance and music is partly of help, because we become used to think that, yeah, well, the musical score is there and you can play it now or in 100 years. But in order to be able to play the score, you still have to have a notion of what is this all about? What's the Mozart symphony? you have to enact it. Even in bakery or cooking. It's never enough to have a recipe book unless you have knowledge about cooking before, or what happens if you put things in boiling water. You have to have an understanding of that beforehand. But in dance, we need much more complementarity between archival sources of whatever kind and really lived experience and embodied knowledge in a specific situation.

Tessa Hall: So would you argue that the music partition is not the original form that the composer intended? For you, would it be the playing of that?

Franz Anton Cramer: I know that in music studies it's a long standing and still today prevalent conviction that the musical work is the written word and the rest is interpretation. Even Swan Lake, for instance, I mean, from the original version that has gained most, fame of the 1892 and a restaging of it by Paris Opera today, it's not identical. So the reality of Swan Lake as a ballet is in the performance wherever it happens. So to come back to your  initial question, I think the score is an essential part, but it's not the same as the work.

VO: Some people claim that pieces of repertoire themselves are kind of like archives. A piece of choreography is a container for so much knowledge: dance technique, costume, music, scores, lights, the tastes of the time, the political issues of the time, even anecdotes and memories. From the audience, when we watch repertoire, we are peeking into an archive. But what about the dancers? As a dancer himself, I wanted to know how Jonathan feels about repertory:

Jonathan Burrow: I don't really like the word repertory.

Tessa Hall: Okay. Why is that?

Jonathan Burrows: Because it suggests a dusty library. Bodies are not like that.

VO: True, but on the other hand, Jonathan spoke to me about what he gained from ballet repertoire.

Jonathan Burrows: I have a long experience with repertory because I was a ballet dancer for 13 years and ballet companies run off repertory. Of course within a ballet company, some of the repertory is boring to repeat, Swan Lake for the 150th time, can be boring and other of the repertory can be something you really look forward to returning to and to bringing back into your body. I took great pleasure from having this knowledge in my body that allowed me to go on to a stage and join with other people and feel that I was part of something that we were all doing, that supported us together to do it even in Swan Lake. 

VO:  In the landscape of shows we go and see, what purpose does repertoire serve?

Timmy De Laet: Why do we agree with having museums filled with visual art while dance is something it disappears and then it's gone. Why do people go to museums? Because it's like an obligatory aspect of a tourist visit to a city, for sure, but also because it situates itself between continuity and discontinuity. What does a museum do? It brings together very different artworks from very different periods. And then you can start to see cross connections. What stays, what disappears, what comes again? What? And then it becomes interesting. So when there is no repertoire, there is also no memory of dance and hence no history. And there it stops. And then we can continue going on in circles again and again and again. I mean, the past is always there. And then you add something from the present and it becomes this mix of things, and then it becomes interesting. 

VO: So if repertoire is an archive, does that mean that the bodies doing the repertoire—passing it on from generation to generation—are some kind of “living archive”? The body as an archive has become a recurrent topic within dance discourse. So what does the body as an archive mean?

Franz Anton Cramer: I'm not very happy with that term. What I'm very convinced and fond of is the body memory, the body knowledge. Movement habits, patterns of behavior, taste, smell. And of course, also movement memory in the sense of artistic movement. My understanding of an archive is also something that's more objectifying that grants access to people other than the one who collected. If your body is an archive, how can I have access to it? 

Tessa Hall: And an archive is also organized and chosen. Not everything just falls into the archive. Things are put in the archive. 

Jonathan Burrows: I have a slight problem with the idea of the body as archival, though intellectually I really understand it, and it's extremely well argued, and it makes a lot of sense. But I've always thought my body was (my body mind, if you like) is much more unruly than that.

Tessa Hall: An archive is too well organized.

Jonathan Burrows: Yeah, really, it's such a mess, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Franz Anton Cramer: But it has been a useful tool in conceptualizing embodied knowledge or these things. That they are things in the body that can be retrieved, but more by individuals than by a community, and that the body knowledge is deposited in the body.

Tessa Hall: Well, then what about embodied knowledge? Could you say a bit more about that? What does that mean to you?

Jonathan Burrows: Well, I think I'll begin by saying I'm not sure we know what we mean yet when we talk about embodied knowledge. And I think it's very important that we stay humble within that question. Certainly there's still a push against the idea that the mind is central, and a push towards recognizing that there are ways that we understand the world through our bodies. In connection with dance there are so many different ways that embodied knowledge plays a part. I mean, on a very simple level, the things we have learned or copied physically and that we have pleasure in reproducing or playing with. But then there's also all the things in our life that surface when we dance, traumatic or celebratory or joyful, or to do with positive relationship or to do with difficulty. I mean, that's also embodied knowledge. 

I'm very much influenced by the approach to embodiment of the anthropologist Tim Ingold. He suggests that when I whistle a tune, the whistling is the memory. And that suggests to me an idea that it's not an archive which is brought back from a library shelf in my mind and put into my body, which my body is then subject to as an act of colonisation of my body, which restricts my possibilities, but rather when I whistle the tune and I'm remembering it, it continues to be embodied. It just picks up from the moment where it was left before. So every re-engagement is a new embodiment. And that doesn't stop till I die. This I find beautiful. So the idea that it's ongoing, it's emergent. He would use the word emergent. It's not fixed.

VO: But embodied knowledge is not what we would call ‘tangible’. It can’t be categorized onto shelves, or taken out like a book from a library. As an embodied practice, dance is full of intangible forms of knowledge and memories. So the big question is, how can all of that become part of our heritage?

While I was searching for an answer, Timmy reminded me that dance is not only intangible:

Timmy De Laet: There is such a predominant belief that dance is only situated in what is embodied or what is a physical practice, but then you limit performance to its ephemerality. It only happens in that moment. I can do this movement now, I do it again, it's already different. Okay. Fair enough. But what if we would think further?

I think one of the flaws within dance studies is that it tends to separate embodiment from anything that is material or tangible. We are moving beyond that. But still, there is a tendency, within dance, to say that dance is about the body. If I hear that, then I immediately think, well, no, I'm not in agreement with that. Because dance is about material objects, is about societal context, is about global politics, about ideas, is about knowledge.

But when you look at the practice of dance, I mean, if you think about it, you're in rehearsal. And how often does it happen that you take your smartphone and you start filming what other people are doing during an improvisation? So it's already materialized. Okay, digital, but you have a trace of it. Even when you think about classical ballet, the use of a mirror is so central to that. So how can you say that it is only intangible or embodied? No. You need an instrument in order to activate that embodiment that is intangible. What is specific about dance heritage is that it really brings out this dialectic between tangibility and intangibility. 

VO: Things are not as binary as mind and body, tangible and intangible. The question of dance heritage asks us to move beyond that binary.

Franz Anton Cramer: In the Western context, European context, let's say we are over centuries, have been trained to think of the written source as the let's say the ultimate source. But we should not forget that culture is always processual. It's more realistic to accept that things are changing and in that sense, ephemeral, than insisting on something that should remain identical all the time.

VO: Practices like archiving can help us trace those intangible changes across time. Repertoire can do that as well. Have you ever had the opportunity to see a dance show one year and then see it again many years later? How were the dancers different? Did the piece speak to you differently? Maybe some things felt outdated? Or maybe it felt as if you were seeing the show for the first time? When we look at those changes across time, we can see where we have come from, what we have learnt along the way.

Madeline Ritter: To see a piece from the past danced by contemporary dancers and maybe even put in relation to what is now, framing it—it's a discovery and it's a pure joy.

The audience feels that. So they're not looking at something. Oh, that's interesting. It comes from there. And they're just showing it to me because it's happening in the moment. In that way it of course informs the future. Because me, as an audience, I take that experience with to any other piece I see. So it goes way into the future as an experience also for the performer. That's fantastic. And for an audience, of course, it's great. 

VO: For visual artists, it’s so normal. There are exhibitions, retrospectives… so personally, I agree with Madeline. When I’m in the audience, I find that repertoire can bring me into contact with dance histories. Then again, the place of repertoire is not always simple…

Jonathan Burrows: In contemporary dance, we've had this bizarre thing of constantly negating lineage. Because at the moment, I think we’ve reached a point where we’re constantly negating everything that our bodies are learning, cherishing, drawing upon. We’re trying to break it, we’re trying to rupture that and move towards something that we imagine we don’t know. 

VO: And why is that? 

Jonathan Burrows: There came a moment by the 1980s where choreographers were encouraged to produce a new work every year. There was a kind of model that was the understood model that you applied for funding. You produced a new work. 

VO: A mindset of new-ness and innovation. Afterall, the word “contemporary” literally means the present, not the past.

And a byproduct of that was that it was very much seen that some something that had been done before was no longer valid. And of course, in retrospect, this seems like a very neoliberal approach. And it is not a very ecological approach.

VO: Just as complicated, if not more complicated, is the idea of "heritage". Like Jonathan said before, he’s not such a fan of the word “heritage” because it suggests a certain kind of ownership. And he’s not alone in thinking that. 

Timmy De Laet: I think we really bump into the institutional question there and into the preservational question and into the question of tradition as well. Like all these terms are so clouded with conservatist meanings that it almost becomes a political issue.

Because what is heritage? heritage is only what is recognized as heritage. There is no intrinsic heritage. But this is the top down influence that we need to be aware of. 

Franz Anton Cramer: Politically or socially, there might be this link towards conservatism. But working on dance history and trying to promote a notion of heritage, to me, has always seemed more innovative than conservative.

VO: Maybe the heritage practices of contemporary dance don't have to be conservative?

Timmy De Laet: It's like historical consciousness. To stick with one of the canon examples, if I wouldn't have been able to see Rosas danst Rosas performance, I honestly believe I would have missed something.

Also in working with students, what is the value of repertoire and actually also of the canon, when I can tell them that Anne Teresa actually imported American minimalism into Belgian dance, and I can show them contemporary pieces by people like Jonathan Burrows or Jan Martens, and they are using similar strategies like it's only the moving of the hands, for instance. I mean, yeah, you get a larger lineage that you become aware of and you start to see things. You need to be knowledgeable about the histories of dance in order to become more fully immersed within its present.

VO: But the thing is, like any other art form, dance also has its ‘classics’ — works of art just as skillful and culturally significant as paintings you find in museums — choreographers whose pieces are being taught and analysed in art schools around the world. What’s wrong with that?

Timmy De Laet: The problem with the canon is the dynamics behind it. Which is a dynamics of selection. Some are included, some are excluded.

And I'm very conscious also when teaching to students who in most cases they don't have a clue about dance. Not whatsoever. So of course I teach the canon because then I give them certain anchor points that they can relate to. But then the work begins. 

What is the problem with being canonized is not so much these dynamics of selection, but the problem is rather that it often stops there. While the most interesting step is when the cannon itself is being. Is that a word? Dynamized.

Tessa Hall: Dynamized. Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Timmy De Laet: Put into motion. 

Tessa Hall: Yeah.

Timmy De Laet: That you can say, okay, we have all these anchor points, but what's beyond that? Like, who do we remember?

VO: And how do we decide? I was curious to know what we need to aim for in order to ‘do’ dance heritage well. I’m going to break this down into four major ideas. These are by no means ‘the’ four answers to the question, but this is what I came across in our conversations. So, ‘doing’ dance heritage, what should we aim for? 

The first idea takes us right back to the archive. Maybe, we can re-imagine how to archive dance…

Madeline Ritter: Of course, we can't preserve everything. That's not how we go through the world. Even on a personal archive, what do you keep? What do you keep from your grandmother to come back to the beginning of our talk. At one point it becomes too much and you just let it go. 

Timmy De Laet: We definitely need different ways of how to build heritage and how to archive dance. And that is a question that we are still really not done with. I mean, because institutionally there is no possibility to do it otherwise. What is being preserved are videos and texts these kind of straightforward materials that come out of dance. But I would be rather interested in hearing what spectators felt when they watched this dance or what even the light technician saw when he saw this, or they or she saw this dance or what the costume designer thought about this dance, and all these people are currently not included. I was recently at an exhibition of dance in Germany, and there I ended up talking with one of the what's the word in English? 

In Dutch or Flemish we would say “suppoost”. Okay. Like, the people who are around there like, watching the other people. And I ended up talking with her, and there was this very big installation. Very impressive. And I was in that space with her, I actually asked her, “you spend so many hours within this exhibition, what is the piece that you like the most?” And then she took me to another piece. Well, it was a drawing that was on a wall, but very small. It was just there on the wall. And I asked her why? And she said, I cannot tell. But, well, when I told my daughter about the exhibition, I told her about this picture because it touches me. And for me, it's fascinating. And then, you know, you get to the kind of… a different level. I mean, I can explain then I can try then from a theoretical point of view, okay what is this historically and all that. But the fascination of this person that spent so many hours in this museum space and then goes to that picture again and again.

VO: Some stories don’t make it into the archive, yet maybe they should. On the flip side, some things can’t be boxed in. Jonathan remembers a conversation with a woman who’s involved in traditional English Morris dancing.

Jonathan Burrows: We were discussing about whether English folk dance should be ratified by the Unesco Intangible Cultural Heritage Program and she said the most brilliant thing that applies to contemporary dance. She said “the thing is, we just argue all the time, what is English traditional dance?” And then she said, “and that is the intangible cultural heritage.” It's the argument that matters. No, you're doing it wrong. That's what matters. Not that we say, “oh yes, we're doing this correctly and this is the heritage.” You've got to go on fighting. And that's what makes it brilliant. And I suppose with contemporary dance there's something like that. It's got to be something at stake.

Tessa Hall: Yeah, yeah. I really like that idea that perhaps it's not the dance pieces that get left behind, but it's the thinking that goes around them that does.

Jonathan Burrows: Yeah. And the thinking is physical as well. It's not we're not talking about intellect necessarily 

VO: Jonathan lays out the dilemma. On one hand, we have this wish to protect dance from our past and give it the recognition it deserves, but on the other hand, it’s actually impossible to pin it down because it’s a living thing.

Timmy De Laet: The fundamental question is like, how can you inscribe change into heritage frameworks. So arguing, what if arguing would be inscribed within this heritage profile? It's like a characteristic of the practice.

VO: So the question is, how would you archive the small stories? Those museum workers' thoughts? How would you archive that arguing? If we continue to re-imagine what dance archiving can be, and actively work to gather up all those various artefacts, memories, stories–tangible and intangible–our heritage will become richer, more colourful, and more inclusive. 

Ok, ‘doing’ dance heritage. What should we aim for, idea 2. This is about community engagement and participation. Archival work doesn’t stop with storing our heritage on shelves or in museums. It’s the sharing of that collected knowledge that’s important…

Madeline Ritter: In the past, like, archival work hasn't been connected with that. And I think this we also want to change when we are dealing with heritage, I think STUK is changing that. 

Tessa Hall: Active archives.

Madeline Ritter: Active, open, accessible. Anybody can do it.

VO: But where are those active archives? How do we share dance heritage with the public? This is where cultural policy comes in. As a cultural policy worker, people like Madeline do everything they can to advocate for dance.

Madeline Ritter: When we started looking, what dance as an art form needs, we found that it's one of the least funded arts forms. And it's not taken seriously. It's something people do for fun, for joy. And maybe if one asks something, what is dance? They think maybe of ballet and that's it, but that it's a really broad art form and an expression of life itself and culture. I figured out that one of the reasons for that is that it is not seen as an art form which has a heritage, a history, because as an intangible art form you don't have objects in a museum. Each little town even has a museum and you can step into the history, the local history. There is a local history museum, but you don't have a place for the heritage of dance, because that is kept in the memory of the bodies. Maybe there are, of course there are some archives, but they are not accessible to a wider audience. So an art form which has no heritage, has no weight.

Do you know, maybe, how many Picasso museums we have in the world? And that's just one artist. He created massive work. And there are so many Picasso museums, not just one, but there are many. This we want for dance. We want if you come to Paris, if you come to London, or even smaller towns, that you also find a piece of dance in a place. And so what we are doing is to create places where you find dances from the past.

Tessa Hall: Let's imagine a sort of utopic city where you. The same way you can go to a city now and see the paintings of so and so, or the sculptures of so and so, or the literature of so and so. What do you imagine that would be for dance? Like would there be a museum of dance, or would it be about the presence of theatres or what would you imagine?

Madeline Ritter: If I go really utopian, the way I would learn a language, everybody would learn also a movement. You learn a specific language, in my case, German. Later I learned some other languages like English. And you also learn a piece of dance. So this is where it starts, that it becomes a very normal part of our culture.  And then as the places to be seen, of course, all the theaters where dancers performed have an understanding that repertoire is more than just creating a piece for the season. The repertoire is the archive, which is what you see on stage. So it's a way of living creating the heritage as, as a way of enriching culture in general. 

My utopian form is of course, we could have many dance museums as well. You know, I don't mind that. I think it's great to have not just we have one small one in Germany, but that should be each big capital should have a dance museum. 

VO: So ‘doing’ dance heritage, what should we aim for, idea 3. This idea asks you to completely shift your mindset. Heritage doesn't have to be dusty, or frozen, or obsessive about protecting the past. Actually, heritage is all about change—tracing change and embracing it. 

Timmy De Laet: If you would compare it with cooking,  it would be preserving one way how to do, I don't know what kind of recipe, and that’s that. Well, if you transmit and transmission is key in heritage, if you transmit recipes within a family, they always change. And how to accommodate that change. And what degree of change do you. Do you allow for.  The idea is actually, how can you implement change within a heritage framework? How can you acknowledge that any kind of tradition is discontinuous? And you see, again, the dialectic? Tradition is continuity and discontinuity. Heritage is, yes, preservation but also change.

Franz Anton Cramer: It's helpful to accept that things can never stay as they are. Not in dance, but also not in other  contexts. Sometimes change is a threat. But change can also be  creative and meaningful. In any case, or in both cases, you need to understand what is what has actually changed. And for that this would be one value of the heritage notion to have a clearer image of where things come from, in what respect they changed and why this change came about.

VO: The fourth idea of what we should aim for in ‘doing’ dance heritage. This last idea brings us back to the core of it all—the dancer and the dancing body. What is the importance of embodied knowledge in our heritage?

Jonathan Burrows: That's a really good question. That's a tricky one. The most obvious response I would have is that we shouldn't forget how amazing human beings are at copying movement. We slightly take it for granted, and I think dancers particularly take it for granted because they think it's part of their training. But literally everybody can do it. That's how. That's how we learn everything.

Tessa Hall: That's how we learn to walk.

Jonathan Burrows: To walk to. Yeah. And to handle objects or whatever. And therefore whatever you think about lineage, you just have no choice. We just love to copy.

You're part of it. You're amongst it. It's amongst you. And so it just goes on. The transmission is partly through teaching, but  it's also just this constant copying.

Franz Anton Cramer: So that's also teaching.So in order to continue certain practices or works over time, you need to ingest the knowledge, the style, the way of doing the dynamics, the energies, the feelings, all that, in order to be able to reproduce it, to transmit it to yet another generation in the end. But also to make all this yours. So I think no dance heritage without embodied knowledge. 

Timmy De Laet: So if your question is what to strive for and how to do heritage work well, it all starts from listening, being open to what the other has to offer. Listening is also embodied knowing. I listen to you and I. And then I try to articulate something else and then we combine it.

Madeline Ritter: At the core of the art form of dance is the dancer. There is a dance needs to be danced. That's what dance is. And that's where the joy comes from. But also the art form is really…it's an amazing discipline and dancer who has danced for 30 or 40 years or 50 years has such an amazing memory of all the dances he or she has ever danced. You know, we are so far away from world peace. You know, how we treat each other and dance as an art form in itself is really giving each individual a value as the carrier of the knowledge of the one who does it. But at the core of it, it's the value of dance as an embodied art form which expresses life, I think, in the most beautiful way.

VO: What if the heritage that lives inside human bodies was valued the same as the heritage that is kept inside museums? If we recognise the importance of embodied knowledge in heritage, then it’s about the dancers—the living practitioners. 

Jonathan Burrows: I think there are interesting observations that can come from the experience of the dancer, because we are amazingly articulate. I really love to sit in a room of dancers and hear them grapple with what they're experiencing and why it matters or why it doesn't matter.

Madeline Ritter: That is what heritage is. Heritage is a living thing. It's something you do. 

Timmy De Laet: So the claim that I often make is like, history is what you create now. Like the past is now. So you need to act upon it. It's mobilizing heritage. And that is what dance can do. 

VO: Dance needs to be kept alive by dancing human bodies, and stays alive through transformation and even confrontation. Dance heritage is the same. It’s not just about the past. It’s about how we work with the past today, and how we carry it into our future. The question of ‘doing’ dance heritage never stops.

You are listening to Body of Work. A podcast created by STUK, House for Dance, Image and Sound, in the city of Leuven. This series is developed in the frame of DanceMap, a European research project and network, funded by the European Union (Horizon Europe). 

Body of Work  was conceived by Delphine Hesters.

Katharina Smets worked on the edit and the scenario.

Tessa Hall, that's me, I did research and narration.

The interviews were done by myself, Katharina Smets and Delphine Hesters 

Teressa Van Eycken assisted the audio production.

The theme music for the podcast was composed by Inne Eysermans.

And the mix was done by Inne Eysermans & Yves De Mey.

You heard the voices of: Jonathan Burrows, Franz Anton Cramer, Timmy De Laet and Madeline Ritter. 

Special thanks to DanceMap and to Klankverbond, for using their studio at Passa Porta.