What can’t we remember? And when did we forget it?

The title is a quote from No Success Like Failure (2008) in collaboration with Wendy Houstoun

The Fondue Set - Jane McKernan, Elizabeth Ryan and Emma Saunders

In the first half of 2020, The Fondue Set took part in the Dancing Sydney Archive Project. In undertaking the project, we had two aims. The first was the practical task of going through what we had personally collected over the last 18 years of working together and finding a way to publicly share some of this material, making it digitally available in a range of formats.

The second was to work physically together in the studio to unpack the idea of our ‘fondue’ body as a living/ performing archive, again working towards a public outcome. We wanted the archive to concurrently represent the past and present, and were clear that we were not interested in creating a kind of monument to past work, but that that history continues through us. We had several sessions in the studio - two at Critical Path and one at IPAC in Wollongong - to begin to investigate what this living archive might mean. This period ran parallel with developing a presentation for the City of Sydney Talking Bodies series and it became hard to disentangle the two. In the end, we settled on folding them together and see the performance at the Surry Hills Library as part of this archive project. Indeed, performing improvisation scores has been a long part of our practice and the audience felt vital in finding this sense together again. We feel at this stage we have just skimmed the surface of what this body archive could be, but there is certainly a kind of vocabulary and a mode of performance that is conjured when we are working together that is separate from our individual practices.

This archive project is by no means complete, nor probably will it ever be, but in writing for Critical Dialogues, we wanted to find a form of writing that approaches the way we dance and improvise together – for it not to be held or owned by any of us, for it not to be complete, to act as a form of remembering in itself.

Talking Bodies, Surry Hills Library, March 2020

Photo by Katy Green Loughrey

Dancing Memory:

The fourth thing that starts gathering in the space between us. Remembering memory or forgetting what you knew but trusting it’s there. An embodied memory, a lived-in dance. The fourth thing of togetherness that gathers between us, thick and full of possibilities and remembrances. To form an archive, to archive what remains. Our lived dancing selves – how do we archive this? Three things making a fourth from the feeling of us. It feels difficult like writing down dreams. The memory of dancing is razor sharp – it’s instant, clear and brisk. Full of movements and stillness, forms, friendship, ideas and hilarity. There is the stuff - the paraphernalia? the detritus? Yes, we can look through a pile of old black spiral notebooks, ratty edges, paper, posters and lost photos – but this is documentation. Known so well when we are together, getting sketchy the further apart we are, and sometimes forgotten when we’re not together. It’s not what happened, it’s what it felt like or maybe it is what it is. It’s talked about, and danced about, and the gaps and missing pieces seem more in our head. Disappearing when we are apart, held in places within us. No, it’s another word that means excess of leftovers or the excessive leftovers. To capture something of the ephemeral, to actually record or relay something of our innate instinctive performative antennae is to go deeper into the unknown. Prompting, prodding, recalling, filling in, adding to, remembering, putting together the fourth thing of togetherness. Performances as milestones of memory but not only. In the dancing, I wonder where the gaps of what we’ve forgotten are? Remembered differently alone, sometimes totally forgotten until it bumps into togetherness again. What remains from performance - the costumes moulding; photos; videos in unwatchable formats; journals full of writing, full of plans, diagrams - but is this it? If we articulate it will it disappear? They’re for other people too. Can we dance a forgotten memory? Getting fleshed out in the space between us, as we all fill in blanks, unearth, prod memories of forgotten experiences, gigs, moves, places, states, conversations. There is something more tangible but less easy to name between us - our lived bodies, our lived memory, our body memory. But that moment when we know, deeply know, that now we will raise our arms as though it has been choreographed. In fact, I’m sure there are a million dances I’ve done in The Fondue Set that I can’t remember. So much ground covered and uncovered and covered. An energy or a force that exists between us in movement, guiding choices so loudly. It has been choreographed but over years. So, in that case what am I, or are we, actually remembering? It won’t shut up. Not steps but compiled, layered down. And what’s the value of memory? This is the unarchivable archive. I hold that balance delicately and openly, just like how we would dance together – leading, following, not following, responding, listening, mishearing, folding, collapsing, laughing, crying, lingering, whispering, shuddering and shaking. Is it history? A frame. The work we’ve done, the being together, a group consciousness that lies subconscious when we’re apart. We are in there somewhere.

Are we remembering or continuing to exist?

Talking Bodies, Surry Hills Library, March 2020

Photo by Katy Green Loughrey

It suggested that the ultimate fulfilment of a conscious being lay not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and cooperative it might also be said to represent the entwining of two selves. This notion of the unitary self being broken down, of consciousness not as an imprisonment in one’s own perceptions but rather something more intimate and less divided, a universality that could come from shared experience at the highest level.

Rachel Cusk, Transit