My work on the archive inventory has come to end. Patsy continues to tie up some loose ends, like inventorying the audio materials and the digital moving picture materials, now that they are secure on two archival drives.

For Eiko & Koma, however, the archive inventory was never an end in itself, but rather an opportunity to develop their archives as an artistic resource that they can continue to mine. Traditionally, artists' archives are treated as objects to be preserved for future study by scholars. In contrast to this idea, Eiko & Koma are much more interested in how their materials are available now for artistic creation and curation. Many materials have already been appearing on this website, which is one example of Eiko's curatorial approach to their digital archives. The exhibitions that were mounted at Wesleyan University, the Walker Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center over the last three years are another way Eiko & Koma have used their archival materials to experiment with how to broaden their audience's relationship to their body of work beyond the event of a performance.

As we worked on the inventory, Eiko and I talked a lot about how this work - their creation of a working archive, and my writing about it - might provoke the dance field to think about the purpose and configuration of archives differently. This work is only just beginning.

-Rosemary Candelario