CREATING A CONTEMPORARY ARCHIVE: ALONZO KING LINES BALLET AT TWENTY-FIVE

In the title essay from Choreographing History, Susan Leigh Foster interrogates the belief that the body serves as a site for dance to be enacted upon and through. She, along with several others in this edited volume, sought to reposition and consequently enhance the contribution of dancers' bodies by not limiting the essays within to observational accounts or choreographic reviews. Instead Foster and her colleagues query “the possibility of a body that is written upon but that also writes” as means of urging dance scholars to “move critical studies of the body in new directions.” I take this position as an entry point and use it to contemplate the process of making and writing about contemporary ballet history using Alonzo King LINES Ballet, a San Francisco–based troupe, as a case study. In this essay, I describe the challenges I and others have faced in our efforts to collect and interpret a visual and verbal archive for this dance troupe, which has been performing for more than a quarter of a century. This process highlights a larger issue for dance historians, namely, how to create a critically sensitive archive for a company when the most reliable (and oftentimes the only available) source is the personal memory of its choreographer. I anchor this analysis to the different models of critical writing about bodies offered by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacqueline Shea Murphy, and Hayden White and suggest that companies such as LINES offer challenges to those engaged in the archival process and in the practice of writing history.