Anke Charton takes the backstory of the canario, a baroque court dance, as an example to consider mixed methods in historiographic work. Marginalized knowledges, in particular, benefit from such an approach. Performance practices that have left few conventional traces behind can be explored more thoroughly if those traces are queried from different perspectives: reading archival sources against the grain, drawing on positionality, and engaging multiple temporal frameworks. The case of the canario illustrates the additional challenge – true for much of early modern Western theatre history – of working with a later, superimposed narrative that obscures an earlier, less-documented practice.