30 years of the Swiss Dance Archives Lausanne

In the 1990s, there was a Swiss Film Archive for cinema, the Swiss Theater Collection for theater, the Swiss Literary Archives for literature and the Fonoteca Nazionale for music. But nothing similar for dance.

This observation, reinforced by his own experience as a researcher, was the starting point for Jean Pierre Pastori when he imagined a documentation center for dance in Switzerland.

After years of effort and perseverance, the Swiss Dance Archives were founded in Lausanne in 1993. Lausanne was chosen because of its dynamism in the field of choreography (venue of the Prix de Lausanne, the Béjart Ballet, numerous independent companies), but also because the city's archives contain numerous important legacies for dance history: The estates of Serge Lifar, Clothilde and Alexandre Sakharoff and Alice Vronka.

The dance archive was initially created from Jean Pierre Pastori's personal collection and was later expanded through significant donations from the estates of important artists and personalities from the Swiss dance world: Alain Bernard, Simone Suter, Peter Heubi, Marianne Forster, Philippe and Elvire Braunschweig and the Béjart Ballet Lausanne.

The initial tasks set out in the statutes of the young association were as follows:

• Collecting and preserving all documents relating to dance, in particular choreographic activity in Switzerland;
• To enhance and develop the existing collections entrusted to the association;
• Establish a documentation center for the study and indexing of these archives;
• Making the archives accessible to the public by compiling inventories and organizing visits and exhibitions.

In 2011, the Swiss Dance Archives (Archives suisse de la danse) merged with the mediathek tanz.ch in Zurich to form the Swiss Dance Archives (Collection suisse de la danse). In 2017, the Swiss Dance Archives merged with the Swiss Theater Collection in Bern to become the SAPA Foundation, Swiss Archive for the Performing Arts.

Preserving traces in order to bear witness: The Swiss Dance Archive set itself the goal of preserving and making accessible the choreographic heritage. Today, the SAPA Foundation - with its focus on the performing arts - continues this mission with passion.