| Summary: | The text proposes a historical-theoretical exploration of the concept of “body-archive” that has proved
to be central both for the recent trends of dance historiography and for the artists who increasingly
dialogue with the past through their reenactments of choreographic works or dance traditions. The
metaphor of the body-archive refers to the idea that the materiality of the body can be understood as a
set of documents capable of suggesting meanings beyond the physical dimension and of preserving
traces of knowledge as remote as it in constant transformation. Whether it is the embodied memory of
the dancer, the visual, emotional and kinaesthetic memory of the audience, or techological divices to
record dance, to write about dance and to dance necessarily requires a specific concept of archive. The
many theories of the body as an archive advanced by scholars and artists are substantiating new
theoretical and practical approaches to the history of dance, and are helping to deconstruct, thanks also
to the contributions of studies on memory, narratives and genealogies resulting from more traditional
methodological and theoretical approaches.
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