By Julia Munemo
Erica Dankmeyer ’91, Williams’ Artist-in-Residence in Dance

During this year’s Book Unbound initiative, at least one course hopes to “disrupt the idea that a book is a material object contained within a binding,” says associate theater professor Amy Holzapfel.

In The Body as Book, a collaboration between the theater and dance departments, “We’re asking what it means for the book to be embodied and alive,” says Holzapfel, who is co-teaching the course this semester with Artist-in-Residence in Dance Erica Dankmeyer ’91.

Holzapfel and Dankmeyer explain that dance and theater each channel, preserve and transmit stories, usually in distinct ways. “But these fields both communicate cultural memory through individual and collective bodies,” Dankmeyer says. “We’re highlighting the similarities, not the differences, because we’re interested in the performative component of each discipline.”

The course includes seminar-style classes on performance theory and studio classes that will have students learning on their feet. Toward the end of the semester, the group will move into Sawyer Library, where they will work to create a performance piece about transmitting information via the body.

“We’ve been asking how memory is archived in our bodies,” Holzapfel says. “The library is the perfect place to perform our final piece, because it archives the old and the new in one building.”

For their final project, each of the 14 students—some who have taken dance classes, some who have taken theater classes and a few who already straddle both disciplines—will develop a way to archive the performance using any medium but video.

“Dance and theater are often defined as ephemeral,” says Dankmeyer. “But repetition and re-enactment are forms of remembering, so performance is not what disappears but what remains in our memories.”