Term · Method
Archive and Repertoire
Diana Taylor's distinction between enduring materials (archive) and embodied, transmitted practice (repertoire).
In The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), Diana Taylor distinguishes the archive — documents, buildings, bones, recordings, things that appear to last — from the repertoire of embodied practices such as dance, ritual, gesture, and spoken performance, which are transmitted through presence and participation.
Drawing on the Americas, she argues that colonial power privileged writing and dismissed embodied knowledge, yet the repertoire persisted as a way of storing and transmitting memory.