Time Layers, Time Leaps, Time Loss

The crisis of historiography, diagnosed by postmodern theorists, is taken as a basis of methodological reflections on dance history/historiography. This chapter asks if and how dance as art and theory reflects on the problem of history and about the potential of a critical reworking, accounting, or narration of a history or histories proper to dance. Concerning the constructive character of historiography, the chapter discusses alternative models of historiography taken from other disciplines (especially literary theory) as they relate to dance and ultimately lay the foundation of a nonvectorial, “spatialized” historiography of dance. It points out that writing an alternative history of dance takes as its starting point the enmeshed model of a network, or a choreographic contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous. Danced reenactments finally are understood as choreographic juxtapositions, as reflections of moving scenes in relation to each other in time and space, or rather through times and spaces.