Sri Lanka's long civil war (1983–2009) resulted in large-scale personal, physical and social trauma and a high number of deaths. Furthermore, many people became disabled due to the war. Disabled people in Sri Lanka have often been marginalized and excluded from the public sphere. Whilst there are initiatives to support disabled people from both the State and Non-Governmental Organisations, support often adopts a charity-based approach which has been criticised for contributing to marginalisation and the dependency of disabled people on others. Performing Empowerment (2016–18) was a research project that responded to this context by seeking to examine whether combining dance workshops with human rights education might lead to greater legal empowerment for disabled people in Sri Lanka. In this paper, I reflect on the experiences of five Tamil women who took part in the project, outlining how they gained confidence and rights awareness which enabled them to self-advocate and make changes to their everyday lives, demonstrating increased legal empowerment. I argue that this change arose in part through different forms of performance that they experienced within the workshops, which enabled a series of transportations from their daily lives.

Oral archives are important components of dance archives but are not frequently discussed. In this context I am looking at the George Balanchine Foundation's Interpreters Archive and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's and Bojana Cvejić’s publication entitled The Choreographer's Score, the latter as basis for a possible archive. The oral descriptions provided in those projects transmit a form of knowledge about dance and choreographic practice that cannot be offered through physical demonstration and haptic exchanges of body postures and movement qualities alone. The oral transmission of information works here differently from written discourses, but both forms of documentation of dance can be seen as informing each other, providing traces of the choreographic practice that counteract the ephemerality of dance performances.

This paper offers a conspectus of several online dance archives made in the context of the Portuguese research project TKB. The online searches we conducted from 2018 to the end of 2019 suggested four broad categories of resources for what one may call ‘online dance archives’. Aiming to observe how dance resources are available on the internet, we made each category correspond to a different operation – to collect (to build up a collection), to accumulate (to gather almost random material), to store (to organize according to a set of rules), to assemble (to compose and curate material). And we posed the same set of questions: for each of these categories: what is the mission of the archive, who are its subjects and objects, and which community of users does it bring together? The outcome is both a general overview, and the possibility of a comparative approach. Our original motivation has been to survey and to analyse a sample of available online resources for dance documentation and/or archiving, in order to feed TKB future projects and experiences. Starting from the TKB project perspective, and aiming at categorizing the different approaches to storage, curation, ownership and availability reflected by those archival platforms, we finally identified three major challenges in the relation between dance and the digital archive: the question of access, the ontology of dance and archive – what it is, what it has been, and what ‘dance and archiving’ can become in the future –, and the ‘Will to archive’ (cf. Lepecki 2010 ). Each one of these challenges will eventually provoke new questions as to the future of the TKB project and of its team of researchers, and the nature of the work they may undertake.

The ample attention the archivisation of dance has received in recent years primarily focused on new archival formats that often rely on digital technologies or which relocate the archive into choreography and the dancing body. Even though these more experimental approaches are vital in broaching new avenues for dance archivisation, this article takes a step back by considering how existing archival structures can be expanded in order to increase both the accessibility and legibility of archive materials. Interweaving a personal account of doing archival research with a discussion of recent debates within both dance studies and archival science, the aim is to set up an interdisciplinary dialogue between two domains that have been operating in a remarkably isolated manner despite their mutual interests. Taking my cue from how the notion of ‘participatory archives’ is gaining prominence in archival practice and scholarship, I argue that enlarging the input of archival information may lead to a greater output with regard to both archival research and community outreach.

The article discusses the Batsheva Dance Company Archive Project, conducted by a team I headed in the years 2012–2015. 1 The analysis of this project will assist in understanding both its significance as an archival act of documenting the past, and its influence on the company's present and on Israeli dance. The method of analysis will include a description of the different practices involved in constructing a dance archive; a contextual discussion of archival practices; and a theoretical discussion, principally in the context of changes in current archiving practices and developments in critical thinking about dance as a discipline. The description of the course of events in this article mainly relies on my personal experience and involvement as director of the Batsheva Dance Company Archive Project. The different proceedings, goals, considerations and decisions were documented in monthly reports and in the project's concluding document, and so assisted in tracing the chronicle and details of events. 2