This brings to mind Martha Graham’s statement in the Barbara Morgan book, “Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs,” a 1941 collection of Morgan’s iconic photos depicting Graham’s early works. Graham states:

“Dance is an absolute. It is not knowledge about something, but is knowledge itself.”

In this book Morgan speaks of the loss of a life’s work, “the dancer’s fugitive art.” (Morgan, p)

This was famously echoed by Peggy Phelan in “Unmarked: The Politics of Performance”:

“Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being ... becomes itself through disappearance.”

(Phelan, p 146)