The dancing body as living archive

This paper considers the notion of living archive applied to the body. What do we understand when we talk about the body as archive? An archive of what exactly? And how can we understand the process of archiving related to the body? This paper shows how the dancing body tells stories of encounters: when a soloist dances on stage, (s)he is dancing with the shadows of all the other bodies (s)he met, danced with and touched. All these bodies left traces on his/her dancing skills. The dancing body embodies all past stories shared with others. Therefore, I argue that the body is a living archive, still in movement, continually in transformation into new forms of being. Rather than archive as static repository, the body is an archive in motion that provides knowledge (Gehm, Husemann and Von Wilcke 2007)