Embodying Performance Histories in everything that rises must dance

In October 2018, 200 women gathered in front of Somerset House, London, to celebrate female movement across time and space. The project, titled everything that rises must dance and created by Sasha Milavic Davies and Lucy Railton for Complicité, saw participants of different ages and abilities reproduce the minute everyday performances of women they had observed in and around the capital on a specific date to create an embodied movement archive. In this paper, I analyse the development process, resulting performances, and the response to the project in order to demonstrate how it offers an alternative form of performance history. In particular, I argue that it has created a performative way of storing and remembering the often overlooked or forgotten moments within a particular chronotope and (re)presents them on and in dialogue with historical sites of power. I reflect on my position as a participant in the project and the questions that it has raised for me regarding my own work as a theatre historian, including the tendency to work in a solitary manner and on text-based archival material. As such, I interrogate everything that rises must dance to not only highlight a different way of conducting and collating performance histories that places emphasis on the collective and the quotidian, but also to consider the personal, social and political importance of these histories. Regarding the personal, I discuss the particular significance that the historicized everyday performances at the centre of this project had for me, given that the performances being (re)presented were all observed on 18 September 2018, which was the day that my mother passed away.