1 - Bring attention to the vast amount of theoretical and historical documents that exist in the fields of dance, performance and art.

2 - Encourage the younger generations of dancers and performers to engage with the library, documentation, and making history.

3 - Inhabit / incarnate a physical space to unfold the archives left by the wide community of artists who have gathered here, and to open up a physical, tangible and continuous web of information, papers and visuals.

4 - Establish ongoing exchanges and residencies with academic institutions.

Happening in parallel with the dancing, training…

5 - Curate events that revolve around and that experiment with books, documentation, and archives. 

6 - Provoke artists to go further with their writing and documentation processes.

The Living Library project is keen to see how academic, performance and dance theory, as well as our writing practices, can take deeper roots within the Ponderosa programs, workshops and educational endeavors.

As a living and moving archive, we intend to rethink, rewrite, demystify, translate and recycle the texts and documents that have been created—without allowing them to idle on the shelves.

Having said that, the Living Library will also function as a platform to support artists in their personal writings and publications. Most publications are written by writers and dance critics. The American dance magazine Contact Quarterly is still on of the only publication written by artists for everyone.

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