Reactivating the Record: Performance, Spaces of History, and Researching the 1990 Cambodian National Dance Company Tour to the UK

Abstract

This is an autoethnographic reflection about doing research on the 1990 Cambodian National Dance Company tour to the UK. Drawing upon research on performance, history and reactivation, I argue that the situated encounters, memories and experiences associated with performance documentation – the archival “record” – complicates our sense of performative endings. I reflect on the seeming inability to study an “original” performance and the passing of dance masters during the course of my research, whilst simultaneously finding pictures and reports about them in archives and online. Through this, I consider how the affective investments of performances linger, often for decades.