Dr. Emily Murphy (photo credit: Marion Voysey)
Dr. Emily Murphy is one of the recent recipients awarded funding through the SSHRC 2024-2025 Partnership Engage Grants. Dr. Murphy has partnered with Dance Collection Danse (DCD), the largest dance heritage organization in the country – a national arts organization that preserves Canada’s “living history” in dance performance.
The origins of their partnership start with a Rubbermaid tub full of photos. While collaborating with flamenco artists on a Canada Council for the Arts-funded digital film project, an artist requested that Murphy and DCD find a permanent archival home for historical materials. These materials are the records of an Argentinian-Canadian flamenco dancer, Angel Cansino Monson (1916-2004), which have been passed between artists and cultural organizations since his death.
“I wasn’t sure if DCD would be interested or able to take the collection,” explains Murphy. “But I had met [Executive and Curatorial Director] Amy Bowring before while doing archival research, and Monson appears all over the footnotes of other prominent artists, so I thought I would see.” When Murphy contacted Bowring, she wrote, “Short and enthusiastic answer is ‘Oh my god, yes!’”
The result is their project, ‘Preserving Canada’s Multimedia Dance Histories: A Case Study in Partnership with Dance Collection Danse.’ The project will respond to two problems faced by the DCD. First, arts organizations are experiencing a sharp increase in the needs for preservation as the artists of the “70s dance boom” age and consider their legacies. Second, while performance records have always been multimedia, the current digital age intensifies this quality, and artists and arts organizations need new, practical approaches to preservation that respond to these new technological circumstances.
At UBC Okanagan, Dr. Murphy is the director of the ReMedia Infrastructure for Research and Creation, supported by Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). In ReMedia, Murphy studies cultural history using a combination of humanities, embodied, and computational methods.
Together, DCD and the ReMedia team will pilot a new approach to research and archival management of dance archives, including the cataloguing, multimedia preservation, community knowledge, and research data management (RDM) needs for dance history today.
“Through this project, the DCD will benefit with updated grassroots preserving practices for multimedia dance history, an expanded network in Vancouver, and a broadened impact on the multimedia history of performance in Canada,” explains Dr. Murphy.
Producing the RDM Guidelines will build a foundation to support future public campaigns, and contribute to future multimedia arts and heritage policy at a national scale.
Murphy adds: “Our goal is to enrich public discourse on the history of the flamenco community in Canada and bridge this case study to multiple other dance communities.”