Recollections from my 2019 Dancing Sydney Experience

Kay Armstrong

Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reac”h of accident.

– Thomas Jefferson

An archive is ultimately a set of traces of actions, the records left by a life. Its form multifarious, but generally organized into some sort of literacy, so when consumed objectively, each item somehow sheds light on the larger whole. On the surface, it seemed a relatively easy task. However, I was to find that there was much more involved than just collating records and creating an inventory of ephemera.

To begin with, I had great expectations – I’ll Marie Kondo the heck out of this, I thought, though I had forgotten that organization was not my forte and that opening one box was like, quite literally, falling down a rabbit hole. Hours disappeared, and I was no closer to an order or a sense of context for all of this, well, stuff. I didn’t realize how much I had kept along the way. How many boxes I had trawled across the 30 years or so of share accommodation. How much had survived (how much had been chomped on by my rabbit). How many pathways I had trodden.

At one point, I was sitting amongst a pile of old things – programs, thank you cards, 10x8 headshots, negatives, photographs, reviews – and felt an overwhelm that was inescapable, the weight of time and the search for some sort of retrospective meaning. So many questions. I wonder why I did that? What was I thinking at the time? Who was I back then? What would I think of me now? How did all of this connect to who I am now? Are there clues in what I’m doing now for what might be next?

Forget Marie Kondo pass me the Valium.

The physical act of trawling through boxes and a multitude of various analog storage devices (suitcases, basement filing cabinets, shoe boxes, lever arch folders, copious plastic sleeves) took days and days. I made piles, little mountains of things. Firstly, I categorized by dates, then by actual form – negatives, photographs, programs, cards, creative notebooks, posters, postcards, reviews, print media. Then I’d have to start all over again because none of these categories quite worked, and there were odd little bridges that fell between each mountain, ephemera that didn’t quite fit the suggested classification. I was really just making a different kind of circle of stuff every time. Then I’d find another box of goodies that took me down yet another rabbit hole. ‘Ahh, so that’s what happened from 1996 – 1998’. To say I was getting distracted and discombobulated was an understatement.

Self timer (Minolta SLR X300), Circa 1992, Halex Vargus Dance Theatre, Hay Plains – on the way to 1992 Adelaide Fringe Festival

Photo courtesy of the artist

How was I going to catalog this meandering creative career spanning 30 years? Sure the receptacle was dance, but I had inhabited all of its nooks and crannies, skirted all of its peripheries, lurked in its shadows, and in no exact sequence, there was nothing linear or purist about this. How to collect these tangles of time lived and make some sort of order and create access points. I also had a deadline - there was the live event to happen at my studio where I needed to somehow wrangle this ‘stuff’ into an experience for visitors.

After completing this first stage project for Dancing Sydney, I realize that I have only just begun the archive process. While lots of ephemera and photographs are tidily collated into folders, there are still hundreds of hours of moving image stored on what may as well be stone tablets – VHS tapes, Hi8 tapes – not to mention the giant box of mini DV tapes.

But aside from the remaining work, there are still huge questions that hover about me, not just which plastic sleeve to use, what container to best conserve asset quality, but most importantly, what do I want this archive to do and for whom.

The road is long.

The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know tomorrow.

– Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive: Une Impression Freudienne

Kay Armstrong created a photo essay as an extension of her sharing. View FAUX ARCHIVES at issuu.com/criticalpath

Left: Halex Vargus Dance Theatre Cabaret at the Wharf Circa 1990Right: 100th Monkey solo work for Dance Sites, STRUT, WA Circa 2013

Photo courtesy of the artist.