Art–Music–Dance. Staging the Derra de Moroda Dance Archives

The starting point for this exhibition was the Derra de Moroda Dance Archives, which have been housed at the University of Salzburg since 1978. The interdisciplinary project took the treasures in this extensive collection as the backdrop for an artistic reflection on 1920s and 1930s dance culture and dance’s standing in the art museum today. The multifaceted dance culture of the time was defined by fertile creative tensions between classical dance and expressive Ausdruckstanz, between theatrical, ethnic, and social dance formats, spurring a quest for new ways to convey the effect of dance performances in a variety of media. For the first time, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg has commissioned a considerable number of new works to be produced for presentation in one of its exhibitions. In this way, the exhibition created a link between so-called (dance) modernism and contemporary art.

The show interweaved two distinct expositions: important artifacts from the archives were on display in five spaces that frame new works by contemporary artists that made their public debut at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. It surveyed the archive’s holdings in four thematic divisions: Dance elsewhere, Writing movement, Correspondences, and Conceiving modern dance. A fifth room was dedicated to Derra de Moroda herself. The itinerary lead through arrangements of selections from the archives in dialogue with works by ten contemporary artists from six countries in media ranging from painting, drawing, and collage across video and sound installations to performance art.

The archive is named after its founder, the artist, teacher, choreographer, scholar, and collector Friderica Derra de Moroda (1897 Bratislava–1978 Salzburg), who played a prominent role in the history of twentieth-century dance. In the 1920s—she was living in London at the time—Derra de Moroda started systematically collecting a wide variety of dance-related documents, laying the foundations for one of the earliest archives of its kind in Europe. The extensive collection now includes published materials on dance and neighboring fields from six centuries.