Notions of Access: Performance Practices in the Digital Archive

Video documentation of dance in India was the domain of government archival initiatives and prominent private presenters until very recently. Restricted access and limited dissemination by these institutions widened the gap between dance research and practice.

The digital archive, in its many forms, explodes the question of access. What does accessing performance through the online video really mean now - is the 'record' then an approximation of the original performance, or is it an invitation to find multiple focal points and create new spaces of signification? Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive), in its public domain performance archiving initiative, fuses the timeline of video to layered textual annotations which seek to investigate performance and its processes at various levels. It endows the performance with an afterlife, softening the focus on the staged moment in order to explore the histories that lead up to the performance. In its presence as an online archive with multiple areas of interest, Pad.ma flattens the archive, making it easily searchable; simultaneously, it uses metadata to establish new relations between material, opening them up to different sets of intentions.

This paper seeks to explore the ways in which Pad.ma may be a balanced model for digital performance archiving in its combination of liberal access and its insistence on using research to contextualise video material. The paper further proposes that an archive such as Pad.ma posits cohesive ways of accessing oral histories of performance in the digital age.