L’archiviazione e la diffusione di una tecnica coreica. Tracce dal Fondo Gianni Secondo

Abstract

The dancing body is perceived as an evanescent entity in the light of a rhetoric of the transitory. The traces left by the dancing body can be searched for by consulting archival documents that make it possible to reconstruct the object of dance thanks to traces. As a consequence, dance archive collections are an essential source in dance studies research. Thanks to the close relation between body and practice, studying the ways in which dance techniques are disseminated allows to recover the dancing body. This essay is aimed at tracing some of the main documents about dance techniques in the Gianni Secondo Archive Collection of the National and University Library of Turin, offering an overview of the different dissemination systems and their historical development after the Second World War. As a result, practice originates not only from body actions, but also from discourses. In fact, in different ways, every document includes a transcription of what Joëlle Vellet calls discourses in situation, that is discourses that «accompany or condition dissemination» and that become «an instrument to organise knowledge into memory». Knowledge is organised into memory following different processes and structures, including both treatises – where discourse consists of instructions for performing every single movement – and more popular works. These documents play an important role in theoretical and aesthetic analysis because they highlight the social and cultural context that has contributed to the development of practice.