Rosemary Butcher: the digital archive

The online archive, 'Rosemary Butcher: The Archive', represents the realisation of the final major research target of my AHRC Fellowship. In research terms, the archive looks not simply at questions of memory, formative experience, and the development of artistic signature, but equally at how these may be realised online, while allowing other viewers to explore more than three decades of creative practice. It takes up currently urgent issues of archiving performance practices (see for example AHDS on issues of documentation), and focuses on how, after the event, 'creative process' and decision-making might be recalled. The online archive looks at and realises my sense of the most effective means to provide a wider audience with a timeline, producing a (reassembled) history of creative activity over a 'professional lifetime'. It suggests how that creative practice resonates with 'performance histories' of contemporary dance from the 1970s onwards. The digital medium allowed me to work constructively with digital design (Why Not Design), to provide a photographic gallery framed by visuals from my most recent works (e.g. Hidden Voices), plus performance details, reviews, and 5 DVDs exploring different thematic clusters - e.g. 'body as site' - which emerged at key historical moments. The research enquiry into how memory can be unfolded took me to a number of key artistic sites and museum-holdings in the US and UK, visiting accounts of the work of Bill Viola, Yvonne Rainer amongst others, with which my own creative practices resonate. It suggests that creative practice can be triggered by exposure to 'new work' by other practitioners, and it suggests that the specifics of 'signature' emerge from ways of seeing and doing that are singular (Massumi) but also coherent with that other work in contextual terms.