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WHAT CAN’T WE REMEMBER? AND WHEN DID WE FORGET IT? 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.
