How can you recreate dances from our history?

In his book Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte shows how complicated timetables or rugged topography can be captured and simplified through innovative visual design. Three-dimensional maps and timelines can tackle almost anything, except one simple activity: dance. How, he asks, is it possible to reduce this four-dimensional expression of time and space into little marks on paper flatlands?

Many have tried. Various notation systems have been developed through the centuries to preserve dance. Even videos will only show the superficial outline of the movement, missing the whispered asides and similes a choreographer offers to elicit the emotion behind a gesture. These lost details are what turns mere movement into dance.

When Emma Meehan began the process of revisiting 30-year-old works by Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre, she harnessed every piece of information she could find: videos, reviews, posters, programmes, notebooks. But the most important resource was the memory of the four choreographers: Joan Davis, Mary Nunan, Robert Connor and Loretta Yurick. Her project, Live Archive, has teamed these choreographers with younger dancers to recreate four of these works to various levels of authenticity.

DCDT was formed in 1976 by Davis, who was joined by other dancers on an ad hoc basis, before settling into a quartet of Davis, Nunan, Connor and Yurick. They worked with international choreographers as well as choreographing their own work, and disbanded in 1989 after the Arts Council cut its funding along with Irish National Ballet.

Current practice

"One of the ideas behind Live Archive was to investigate how this past work meets with current practice," says Meehan. "If a vital piece of information was missing, it wasn't necessarily a negative, but a conundrum that led to a deeper reflection of the artistic intention."

Some dances, such as Lunar Parables, were well documented through video, but other works had less raw materials. All that survived from Mary Nunan's 1983 solo Search – Up to a Point was a soundscore based on Beckett texts and Nunan's recollection of particular dance phrases and sensations. Rather than slavishly recreating the original, she decided to reinterrogate her original concepts.

“I chose Katherine O’Malley as a dancer,” Nunan says, “because I wanted someone who was mid-career and had the experience and confidence to ask me hard questions.”

Along with voice coach Óscar Mascareñas, the three worked collaboratively to retain the concept of the original using a new gestural vocabulary. Joan Davis's solo Continuum was also reimagined rather than reproduced.

“I was never really happy with it as a dance,” she says. “I was working with the idea of a spiral, and I never felt the dance expressed what I intended.” She watched the work again a few years ago when transferring VHS tapes to DVD and discovered that the intervening years spent studying different somatic practices had given her the tools to tackle it again.

“It was enormously satisfying returning to it. Back in 1986 I had never heard of body-mind centring or other practices that are now central to me as an artist.”

Like Nunan, Davis was specific about the dancer she would work with. "I had seen Lisa Cahill perform at the University of Limerick and knew she would be perfect. She is a cocreator in this version of Continuum, not a young dancer being passed down knowledge from an older generation."

As a couple on- and off-stage, Loretta Yurick and Robert Connor have been drawn to the duet because it "can express a duality and set up shifting counter-balances between two individuals", says Yurick. In revising the duet Coupled Reflections, they saw the seminal seeds of later dances created for their company Dance Theatre of Ireland.

Fragility of coupledom

Finding the nuances between the two new performers (Anderson de Souza and Eimear Byrne) proved more elusive. “They weren’t a couple and hadn’t danced together before, so a lot of the fragility of coupledom found in the dance didn’t come naturally,” Yurick says. Nevertheless, unlike Nunan and Davis, they tried to rediscover the original as much as possible.

For Connor, the different approaches to remounting the works in Live Archive reflects each choreographer's individuality. "We were different people then and we're different people now," he says. "But as a process we have all found it an incredibly rich experience. It is educational, analytical and discovering history."

For Meehan, Live Archive could have a longer-term influence on dance practice in Ireland, where there is little sense of dance history outside academia. Some funding for Live Archive came from Coventry University, where she is a research fellow.

“In Coventry, there is a real interest in the impact of research outside the university,” she says. “So what is the long-term impact? Will a project like this make younger dancers record their choreography more comprehensively? And in years to come, will they revisit those dances?”

Live Archive will be performed at Dance Limerick on January 28th and Cork's Firkin Crane on February 18th.