Meeting in the same space: Encountering, making and performing archive in Siobhan Davies Dance Table of Contents

This article will reflect on the experience of the collaborative process of making and performing Table Of Contents (2013–2014), produced by Siobhan Davies Dance. It follows Professor Sarah Whatley’s article for this journal, ‘Digital inscriptions and the dancing body: Expanding territories through and with the archive’ (Choreographic Practices, 5:1), and seeks to further examine and expand notions of archive from a position within a research, making and performance project. Running alongside the main text are blocks of questions generated within the research and creation process. The origins of these were collectively expressed in extensive conversations by the artistic team and then further processed and translated into my own working notebooks. The references included in this article have been selected because they often acted as a spur/provocation to the thought processes underpinning many of the creative decisions at the time of making. Later in the article, I will focus on one specific making methodology out of the five that I undertook within the project, in order to offer an example of how I addressed the area of archive within the investigation.