'A Dancing Archive' is a choreographic project combining video, dance, performance and archival material, which challenges the dualism between discipline and creativity, control and free will, past and present, live and documentation, object and subject. It was initiated by choreographer Artémise Ploegaerts and developed with filmmaker Louis Hothothot and dancer Elisabeth Schilling.

The piece looks at Elisabeth Schilling’s personal background, experiences and dance memories. She was born near Trier in Germany and first trained as a ballet dancer. She is now living and working throughout Europe as a professional contemporary dancer. Elisabeth has the particularity of working on embodying, disembodying, and re-embodying choreographic works and dance practices. She is full of traces that allow her to subjectively create movement material reflecting on a complex combination of discipline (or ‘authorial violence’ as André Lepecki writes) and personal choice-making and (re)interpretation. She constantly moves between shaping and being shaped. With the use of video documentation and live performance, audiences are invited to dive into the merging of past and present. It is whilst improvising or re-performing movement material based on different memories from her experience as a dancer that her body multiplies on stage. Those different media have allowed us to witness changes and sameness in order to try and apprehend the complexity, implicity and subtlety of power.