Living Archive

An associative poem

It is possible to identify someone by means of a fingerprint. One can also recognise a voice. A voice comes from within the body, it floats on the breath and in that sense it is one of an individual’s most personal instruments. Myriam Van Imschoot has had ‘a voice’ in the world of dance for many years: when she was a critic she wrote about William Forsythe, Steve Paxton, Marc Vanrunxt and others; as a historian she published work on Le Sacre du Printemps and on improvisation, and as a dramaturge she worked with Meg Stuart, Benoît Lachambre, Philipp Gehmacher and others. She is also the founder of Sarma, the digital platform for dance-related criticism, dramaturgy and research. From 2007 she started to develop her own artistic work and presented a series of sound installations, performance and video. In two productions by the theatre group Tristero, Living and The Search Project, she acted as coach and (co)director. Her career has moved from theory to practice, from spectator to maker.

In Living Archive she appears alone on stage and takes up the challenge of literally ‘giving a voice to’ her collected archives. It comprises a professional legacy of interviews and conversations with dancers and choreographers, but also of very personal audio relics: her first love-cassettes and mixed tapes, conversations with relatives and friends and – from the family album – sea shanties and radio messages her father intercepted during the Cold War.

Living Archive is an associative poem of sound and image, a collection of voices and sounds collected by Myriam Van Imschoot in which she herself appears as the guardian of the voices, as a ventriloquist who brings the archives to life.