Choreographing Odds and Ends and Beginnings: a Dance Artist’s Archive

Julie-Anne Long

Last time I moved house I rummaged through an assortment of old cardboard boxes that had been sitting unattended in my backyard shed for seven years. I discarded the obviously mouldy papers and props and then stacked into new plastic storage boxes, piles of scrapbooks, dance ephemera and costumes deemed ‘in good condition’. I transported these odds and ends to the suburban garage of my new abode, where, predictably they have sat neglected for the past four years.

Recently, I turned my attention to this/them - as they are my archive. Engagement with my archive has been a kind of bricolage: a DIY project improvised from the diverse ephemera that happen to be available. Some remains have landed inadvertently or been abandoned in boxes by accident. Some fragments have a more meaningful authority and at some time or other, for some reason or another, I have deliberately chosen to hang onto them. Although now, I can’t always remember why. It does matter to me that this flotsam and jetsam is not discarded without some consideration. So, I am preoccupied with questions such as: How do I decide what to keep? How do I decide what goes with what? Why do I still have this stuff? What does it matter to me and/or to others if I keep it or not?

I am overwhelmed when looking at the visual stimulus in my archive – of images on postcards, from magazines and newspapers, high art and tabloid grabs, publicity material and personal photo albums. There are my primitive drawings of the music I was choreographing to, with numbers and symbols visualising structures, phrasing and emotional responses, as a tool for my choreography. I notice there are reoccurring images and hence persistent ideas, from then to now, 1980 to 2020. Then there is my interest in the female body, an oversized monstrous grotesque, a vaudevillian clown, juxtaposed with the curious banality of the everyday and small details from the domestic. It is obvious I am more interested in people than places, in the ordinary than the transcendent. I am not so surprised by what I have discovered in my archive, but occasionally I am caught unaware…

The most surprising discovery was unearthing a collection of letters from the time when I first came to Australia, written to my family who were in Auckland, New Zealand. These letters cover the years 1980-82 Melbourne/1983-84 Canberra (Human Veins Dance Theatre)/ and intermittent correspondence from my early years with One Extra in Sydney from 1985 onwards. As I rummaged through the letters, Cleo Mees captured my process on video. It was a curious process to watch back:

“… and my mom said to me a while ago I’ve got these letters of yours what do you want me to do with them and normally I would have said skip it but because I was doing this project I thought well I’ll look at them at some point so just keep them and next time I’m in Auckland I’ll get them. So I did. And it’s quite interesting ‘cause I had no idea no recollection of writing them…”

Scattered around the table there are piles of letters stacked on top of more piles of letters. All are folded, some are inside envelopes, each pile bound together by a fastening. She picks a batch tied in a bow with a red paisley stocking leg and unknots the bind. She unfolds the first letter and she reads to herself. We can barely see what she is thinking, although a hint of amusement flickers across her face. Mostly we are watching her concentrating. Her fingers flick at the edges of the paper. You can tell that the paper is good quality, this one a formal letter. A rejection letter perhaps? There are quite a few of those. Or, an acceptance letter informing her where to go and what to do... She picks up another letter, flicks the edge and unfolds it to read, a smooth gestural choreography, eyes scanning, oblivious of the camera documenting her every move. There are lots like this one. Ten pages written on onion airmail paper… “Saturday. Dear Mum, Dad, Nan, Greg and whoever else might be at home…” she laughs at the conversational, confessional tone, an intimate stream of consciousness that reveals a lot about her experience of dance through the social life around the work of dance. These letters are taking her back in time and each one suggests a story, an anecdote to entertain Cleo and the camera. Mostly she makes the stories funny with optimistic endings even though she also remembers “I was devastated! I thought my life was over”. She scratches her cheek and pushes her glasses up...

I’ve always used scrapbooks to record my artist notes and capture my practice plan. I like the scale of a scrapbook and find the blank page inspires the unforeseeable, encouraging contemplation, something a ruled line page does not do for me. Many of the scrapbooks in my collection are incomplete, with random blank pages interspersed between dense scribblings and notes from choreographic processes. Scrapbook curation and construction has become a key element of my archive project and has generated ongoing creative productivity. I have taken a selection of my scrapbooks and am remixing them, constructing what-is-now with what-was by inserting artist notes from my current creative work, ‘unentitled’ (2019-) into earlier scrapbooks of ‘Cleavage’ (1995) and ‘MissXL’ (1998-2002). Composition of the scrapbooks has given me insight into my dance work, highlighting links between my past body of work and where I am now, pointing to potential ideas for the future.

Postscript:

The opportunity to reflect on and reimagine my archive materials and hence my career, has been on the one hand very stimulating and on the other a bit disheartening given my creative outputs over the past eight years have been significantly more limited than the previous three decades. Although, it has given me a sense of the value of my work at a time when it is difficult to sustain an artistic practice and when opportunities for artists to produce work are intermittent.

This has been especially noticeable when working on the scrapbook aspect of the project. The dialogue I am beginning to create through inserting creative thoughts and stimuli from my current solo work ‘unentitled’ into past ‘MissXL’ archives is producing some interesting self-reflexive observations on my contemporary perspective, in relation to the work. This project has reignited my enthusiasm and commitment to new solo work and I believe this will continue into the future.

The Scrapbook construction is an ongoing creative project. At the moment I am unsure how I will share this or utilise it. A possible outcome may be that it will become a future exhibition element if the Dancing Sydney project goes in this direction. At this point the work I have done on the scrapbooks has given me a sense of perspective and visibility for my dance history.