Radical accounting as method: interconnections across time, space, and bodies in Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s archives

This essay contributes to digital history by proposing ‘radical accounting’ as a method for gathering data from archives to support analysis of bodily practices at a scale that encompasses the transnational, intergenerational, and collective. Taking as our case study the Black-centered, multi-racial concert dance company Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater established in 1958, we manually curated data from over 30,000 print materials held by the Ailey Foundation, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the Black Archives of Mid-America, among others, to document all the artists who contributed to the company, all the dances that they made and performed, and all the places around the world where those performers and performances were seen. Through close analysis of datasets and experimental data visualizations, this essay demonstrates how radical accounting surfaces historical interconnections across performing arts ecosystems and artistic practices. While data ethics often emphasize incompleteness, radical accounting offers an alternative model for rigorous practices of care, drawing attention to the contributions of performers, contexts, and repertories relegated to the periphery of dominant historical narratives, and showing how embodied knowledge comes into being between and beyond all of these datapoints.