Dynamic dichotomies: How can the body be a dynamic archive?

Abstract

This article discusses the complexities around movement dynamics and how the term ‘dynamic archive’ is understood in dance. Drawing from Andre Lepecki’s ‘The body as archive’ (2010), Rudolf Laban and F. C. Lawrence’s Effort theory (1947) and a choreological perspective to investigate the complexities of dynamics as an embodied phenomenon, I discuss the body as a dynamic archive of embodied experience. This article provides debate about how dynamics are learnt and recalled for the purposes of re-staging and how movement dynamics are stored by the dancer as a dynamic archive.