Dance historians often speak of reconstructing a lost ballet from choreographic notation, rehearsal notes, photographs, and reviews. The verb suggests that the past work lies scattered among documents and needs only to be reassembled. But notation records selectively. One system captures floor patterns precisely while abbreviating gesture; another specifies positions yet leaves timing to conventions its original readers shared. Reviews describe what surprised their authors, not what every dancer routinely did.

This incompleteness does not make reconstruction arbitrary. Sources constrain choices unevenly but genuinely. If three independent records place a dancer at stage left, a restager cannot move her to stage right merely for visual balance. Where sources conflict or fall silent, however, performance knowledge enters. Dancers test whether a documented transition can be executed at the indicated tempo; historians compare conventions from related companies; designers infer sightlines from surviving plans.

Film seems to promise escape from interpretation, but a camera fixes one angle, crops peripheral action, and converts theatrical scale into a framed image. A restager who copies only what appears on film may reproduce the camera's exclusions rather than the choreography. Conversely, using embodied knowledge to restore action outside the frame is not automatically invention without warrant.

The most defensible reconstruction is therefore an argument performed. It distinguishes choices directly fixed by evidence from those supported by analogy or practical necessity, and it records alternatives rejected along the way. Two productions can be historically responsible while differing in passages the archive underdetermines. This plurality need not dissolve the identity of the ballet. It shows that continuity can reside in a structured field of constraints rather than in a single recoverable sequence.

Audiences should be told which kind of reconstruction they are seeing. A program that simply advertises “the original choreography” disguises judgment as recovery. Disclosure does not diminish the performance's achievement; it locates that achievement in the disciplined negotiation between documentary limits and theatrical intelligence.

Commercial pressures can blur these distinctions. A company may advertise archival authenticity because it sells tickets, while quietly replacing difficult ensemble passages with movement suited to its current dancers. Practical adaptation is not necessarily irresponsible: a dangerous lift may require alteration, and a theater of different dimensions may require new spacing. But such changes answer present constraints rather than gaps in historical evidence. Calling both kinds of decision reconstruction hides an important difference in warrant.

A useful record would therefore classify decisions rather than merely list them. Some are documentarily compelled; some infer the most plausible historical solution; some translate that solution for current bodies and spaces; and some openly pursue contemporary artistic aims. A production may contain all four. Historical responsibility does not require eliminating the latter categories. It requires refusing to borrow the authority of the archive for choices the archive did not support. On this view, disclosure is not an appendix to reconstruction but one of the practices that makes reconstruction intellectually coherent.