Dancing With Archives

"Dancing with Archives" gives a thematic focus to the topic of dance and archive and the many questions that come with it.

The first foray into this topic began in June 2026 as a collaboration with the Indonesian Dance Festival, Southeast Asia's longest-running contemporary dance festival, and the Goethe-Institut. The first encounter brought together Hamburg based Iranian choreographer Sina Saberi and Balinese choreographer Mang Tri Ray Dewantara. In both Hamburg and Jakarta the two artists engaged in collaborative research residencies, sharing their research and artistic practices dealing with moving images and living archives.

The collaborative engagement in this topic treats the archive not as an end point or outcome, but rather as a springboard for embodying and retrieving dances as a way to know and learn from dance histories that might otherwise disappear or be further marginalized. In this context the archive is not a fixed record but a living, choreographic material: a space between individual and collective memory, tradition and intimate re-reading. How do we come together across different dance cultures, crossing the distance between image, memory, and flesh? What does embodying an archive reveal about gender, gaze, and cultural heritage that the image alone does not? And how is a dancing body historically constructed by colonial encounters, documentation, institutionalisation, tourism, and cultural policy? Such questions also open into how institutions offer artists a respectful space for this research to unfold organically and what institutions might learn to inform their curatorial practice.

Outcomes from this initial research were shared during the first edition of the Tanztriennale in the form of a workshop and discussion, accompanied by Bertha Bermudez, (researcher and Co-Director of DANTZAZ) in the context of the Forum "Collective Impact".

They continue in Jakarta during the 20th edition of the Indonesian Dance Festival:

30 October 2026 at 2:30pm (GMT+7)
Dance Talk: Dancing Body as a Living Archive: Encounter, Memory and Transmission

31 October 2026 at 11:00am (GMT+7)
A Workshop in movement, memory, and transmission

Dancing With Archives is a collaboration between the Goethe-Institut, the Tanztriennale Hamburg e.V. and the Indonesian Dance Festival Jakarta.