This study examines the artistic significance and value production of choreographer Park Kihyun’s re-enactment performance based on Lakeside Adagio of Act I, of Swan Lake, focusing on the concepts of ‘prototype/archetype’ and ‘re-enactment.’ The analysis examines the original dance notation and musical score to investigate how the prototype of the classical ballet was documented and structured. It also conducts interviews with the choreographer and dancers and observes the rehearsal process to explore the embodied memory and experiential performance of the ballet master and dancers in the re-enactment process. The study argues that the original value of the classical work is preserved and transmitted not only through the physical conservation of notation but also through the bodily archive of the ballet master and dancers. Re-enactment in classical ballet is understood not as a passive repetition of the original text, but as an exploratory practice realized through the interpretation of documentation and the creative execution of embodied knowledge.

This study aims to examine the contemporaneity of performance archive and reconsider the historicality of dance, focusing on practice and theory in contemporary dance. For this, I explored theories and discourses that arose in contemporary arts, and I have analyzed the cases of archive practice. Over past two decades, choreographers in contemporary dance have experimented contemporaneity and history through archive practice. This study focuses on historical concepts of archive in order to find the meaning of the choreographer’s re-enactment. In this study, I refer to Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault’s proposal on history and archive to construct the theoretical frame of this study. “Actuality” in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy is heterogeneous time modes of the past and the present in singular moments, and it presents reality. Foucault suggests archive as a system of transformation and severance. He exceeds common perception of linear history with an archeological approach. To examine how choreographers apply archive to their work in a level of choreography and body as medium of dance, I have chosen the works of two choreographer: Yvonne Rainer and Boris Charmatz. Rainer uses the methods of “repetition” and “representation”, which transmit from one body to others in her . She suggests performative archiving to produce new creations in the process of returning to the original. Charmatz writes new history, which is established between dance history and a dancer’s memories in the present time. They both emphasized that a body is the subject of both dance and real life because every segment of history inhabits the body. Therefore, there are no distinctions between archive and body in dance. In this study, I discuss performance archive being toward embodied actualization with the choreographic approach. Performance archive is not only a form or style of dance but also questions, engagement, relationships, and enactment of the objectivity and subjectivity of dance. In this light, the choreographic is the way to create both dance and history.