What the Body Remembers. On the Contemporary Relevance of Dance Heritage

In this multipart, follow-up project to the Dance Congress 2019 with its focus on dance practice, participants reflected on the history of 20th and 21st-century dance and the body of works it has left behind.

The event series “What the Body Remembers. On the Contemporary Relevance of Dance Heritage,” included an exhibition of archival documents, iconic photos and video clips of dance history. It was the first time that dance archives in Cologne, Leipzig and Berlin presented important works from their collections in a joint exhibition. Contemporary dance continues to draw inspiration from a rich history whose protagonists include Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman and Valeska Gert. In their day, these artists represented emancipation, liberation from gender roles and body images, utopian aspirations, political appropriation and social resistance. Their achievements created a “century of dance” comprising the dance movements of post-war modernity, German dance theatre, Japanese Butoh, modern and post-modern dance in the United States, and contemporary dance in France and Belgium.

The exhibition was accompanied by an international dance festival featuring some twenty prominent dance productions. Other accompanying events included a campus for dance students and alumni, a final publication and an extensive educational programme.

The presentation at the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) marked the conclusion of the Dance Heritage Fund, which the Federal Cultural Foundation financed from 2012 to 2019. The fund supported some 60 projects with the aim of preserving, studying and presenting the cultural heritage of dance in the 20th century.