the personal is/as historical When it comes to discursive acts intended to make dance and history twist together in, say, more personal takes, the first thing that comes to mind is the way in which both fields have been changing their ways of practicing and understanding themselves along a many-sided ‘performative turn’, taking place in the arts and the social and human sciences since the mid- twentieth century. In the meantime, a whole ‘performance vocabulary’ seems to have taken hold of every domain of our lives, have you noticed (am I hallucinating?). Fact seems to be, history and dance, both utterly conjectural activities, both as personal as they are (intrinsically) collective and social, seem to have many sites of operation in common, all crucial for their practices: memories, documents, archives, remains, re-enactments, bodies, to name a few. All gone through their own performative turns, all time-based now. Now what?
