Memoria Saltationis: The Memory of Dance

ONLINE CONFERENCE

Organised by Mali Skotheim (Frances A. Yates Long-Term Fellow, Warburg Institute)

Since antiquity, dance has had a special relationship with the art of memory. Writing on pantomime dance in the second century CE, Lucian of Samosata said that "above all Mnemosyne, and her daughter Polyhymnia, must be propitiated by an art that would remember all things" (De Salt. 36). This interdisciplinary online conference will explore the relationship between dance and memory, including revival and re-enactment as modes of engaging with historical dance, dance as cultural memory, the question of how archives preserve dance, methodological issues surrounding archival research in this field, and somatic memory in dance practice, with attention to psychological and physiological research.

This conference will be delivered by the Zoom online platform.

NB: BOOKING HAS NOW CLOSED. Enquiries email: warburg@sas.ac.uk

PROGRAMME (for abstracts click paper titles)

9:30am: Open Zoom meeting room

9:50am: Welcome and introduction

10:00-11:30am: Panel 1: Remembering and Forgetting (panel chair: Ruth Webb, Université de Lille)

• 10:00am: Anna Pakes (Roehampton): Forgetting, loss and destruction: ontological reflections on dance disappearance
  - (5 min. break)
• 10:25am: Mali Skotheim (Warburg Institute): Dancing like the ancients: the role of memory in 18th-19th century revivals of Greco-Roman dance
  - (5 min. break)
• 10:50am: Theresa Buckland (Roehampton): 'How our grandfathers danced': embodying cultural memories in nineteenth-century England
• 11:10am: Discussion

11:30am-12:00: Break

12:00-1:00pm: Panel 2: Dance and the Archive (panel chair: Rembrandt Duits, Warburg Institute)

• 12:00: Shivaangee Agrawal (Akademi): Archiving a major dance organization and the stories that it reveals
  - (5 min. break)
• 12:25pm: Iris Julia Bührle (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3): Shakespeare on the wordless stage: in search of the text of lost ballets
• 12:45pm: Discussion

1:00-2:00pm: Lunch break

2:00-3:30pm: Panel 3: Movement, Memory, Knowledge (panel chair: Jennifer Taylor, Warburg Institute)

• 2:00pm: Valentina Cacopardo (Warburg Institute): Πάθος and Κίνησις in the fifteenth-century Ars Memorativa
  - (5 min. break)
• 2:25pm: Shihan de Silva (SAS, Institute of Commonwealth Studies): Dance and difference: Afro-Sri Lankan cultural memories
  - (5 min. break)
• 2:50pm: Wanting Wu (Queens University Belfast): Memorising social changes through the body: dance in China over the past 20 years
• 3:10pm: Discussion

3:30-4:00pm: Break

4:00-5.00pm: Panel 4: Body and Mind (panel chair: Mali Skotheim, Warburg Institute)

• 4:00pm: Guido Orgs (Goldsmiths): Individual and collective movement dynamics predict dance aesthetics
  - (5 min. break)
• 4:25pm: Emma Redding (Trinity Laban): Mental imagery as a tool for learning and making dance
• 4:45pm: Discussion

5.00pm: 15 min. break

5:15-6:00pm: Final remarks and post-conference social