The Body as Archive

When most people hear the word “research,” they picture Bunsen burners and artifacts, datasets and libraries. But in dance reconstruction, research rarely resembles its conventional counterparts — it does not begin in a laboratory or remain confined to the page. Rather, the primary evidence unfolds through revisiting, remembering and reinhabiting work shaped by time and shared experiences. 

For Iyun Ashani Harrison, this embodied mode of inquiry framed his restaging of John Taras’ ballet “Firebird” for the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH). The ballet tells the story of Prince Ivan, who defeats an immortal sorcerer and rescues a princess, with help from a magical firebird. Harrison, an associate professor of the practice of Dance, is no stranger to the seminal work. 

He performed the ballet during his time with DTH, where a Caribbean set designed by the late Geoffrey Holder distinguished the production from the original 1910 Russian folktale. “Firebird” quickly became one of the signature works for the company during co-founder Arthur Mitchell’s tenure as artistic director — and a defining touchstone in Harrison’s artistic development.

DTH last performed the dance in 2004. When plans were set to remount it for a 2026 world tour, the company’s artistic director Robert Garland reached out to Harrison and Naimah Kisoki, a former DTH ballerina, to join the artistic team tasked with bringing the ballet back to the stage. Their work began in the archives, as research often does, but with a reconstructive approach.  

A VHS tape capturing a 2004 performance with Harrison and Kisoki started the process while additional videos were unearthed. Together, the recordings documented two decades of performances, with each piece building depth to a layered archive of memory and movement, but with a challenge. Harrison shares that these were not pristine digital archives. They were blurry recordings captured by cell phones held up to library televisions, as the VHS tapes regularly cut in and out.

While the archives may not have been perfect, within those glitches lived vital clues. Alongside Kisoki and Garland, the three triangulated memories against video evidence. At times, Harrison and Kisoki would make interpretive decisions, selecting what felt most compelling across video versions.

“The video of our performance was clear choreographically, meaning we could see patterns in the movements,” Harrison says. “But when we compared that performance against the archives from the 1980s and 1990s, we could see that some of the initial architecture of the choreography had been changed over time — we had information now that we hadn’t had before.” 

Comparing the recording with archival materials from earlier decades revealed how the choreography quietly shifted over time. In an earlier version, the dancers in the “monsters” section created a bold X-shaped pattern — a striking detail that didn’t appear in the 2004 performance. Harrison notes that such moments may have been removed over the decades based on the size of the company or the venues, simplifying formations to fit the respective scenario. 

Other omissions, he explains, could stem from who did the restaging. Principal dancers, who often become rehearsal directors, may not carry embodied knowledge of phrases originally danced by the corps de ballet (the main ensemble of dancers), allowing those details to slip away unnoticed. “As scholars, we understand what traditional humanities archival research looks like,” Harrison says.  “However, dance research can also be archival — but often in nontraditional ways.” 

He explains that those nontraditional ways can be the result of unequal access to resources. Many early dance performances, especially works by artists of color or under-resourced companies, weren’t formally documented, and what survives are fragments: grainy videos, oral histories, rehearsal notes and memories. “Dance reconstruction research is the process of stitching those fragments together and testing them in real time to see what resonates in the body and in front of audiences,” he shares.

That inquiry continued in the studio at the University of North Carolina School of Arts, where Garland, Harrison and Kisoki worked with students to further refine the ballet before carrying it to New York to rehearse with the Dance Theatre of Harlem. The production will travel to Paris this month, returning to Virginia and New York City later in the spring. 

What started as the rediscovery of a performance video from the early 2000s expanded into a deeper understanding of how choreography is transmitted, altered and sometimes lost over time. Through fragile archival footage, embodied recollection and collaborative decision-making, this reconstruction of “Firebird” shows dance research as a living process. 

“Restaging ‘Firebird’ became a convergence point for my research: archive and ephemera, theory and practice, pedagogy and professional production,” Harrison says. “It shows that dance research isn’t only about preserving the past but also making informed, ethical and creative choices that keep a work alive — precise, dynamic and resonant across generations.”