Dancing Sydney Archive Project

Amanda Card

"We understand ourselves relative to the remains we accumulate, the tracks we house, mark, and cite, the material traces we acknowledge."

(Rebecca Schneider, 2001, p.100)

Most humans are collectors, but choreographers and dancers, like many performing artists, often get caught up in moving-on. Cheryl LaFrance (2013) thinks it’s almost unnatural for dancers to look backwards when they are “constantly thinking ‘forward’ about creating new works” (p. 12). It has also been regularly observed (and widely lamented) that the principle artifact of dance, the moving body, disappears. As an ephemeral art, dance celebrates and suffers from the promise and problems of its transience.

Dancing Sydney : Mapping Movements : Performing Histories is the initiative of three friends and colleagues Erin Brannigan, Julie-Anne Long and myself. This project hopes to play a part in making the past, present and future of dance in Sydney more visible. Since 2016 we have been organising and showcasing dance through research, publications, exhibitions, symposia, workshops, community events and performances (see dancingsydney.org)

For the Dancing Sydney Archive Project we partnered with Critical Path and the State Library of NSW and invited Frances Rings, Anandavalli, Martin del Amo, Branch Nebula (Mirabelle Wouters and Lee Wilson), Dean Walsh, Rakini Devi, Vicki Van Hout, Kay Armstrong, Julie-Anne Long, Narelle Benjamin, Alan Schacher and The Fondue Set (Emma Saunders, Jane McKernan and Elizabeth Ryan) to be involved.

Critical Path provided each artist with financial support and a research room (when needed), managing the project and supporting artists to find appropriate ways to document and share their research. Artists also met archivists, curators and conservators at the State Library of NSW who introduced the practice of archiving, stimulated discussion about what the Library collects, how they collect it, and what dance artists might want to think about when they do their own collecting. With the support of the State Library of NSW, Erin Brannigan is also in the midst of interviewing all the artists involved in the Dancing Sydney Archive Project and these interviews are being added to the State Library’s collection as they are completed.

The responses to the Dancing Sydney Archive Project’s provocations were as eclectic as the artists involved—I met with many of them to talk about their work. We discussed archives, their history, dived under their beds, into garages, across different online platforms, sorting through their back catalogue, their writing, dancing and film work. Some of their contemporary responses to their past archive are featured in this edition of Critical Dialogues. There are also other ‘traces’ of their research shared on Critical Path’s website.

For me this project confirmed the truth of what the former curator of the New York Performing Arts Collection, Genevieve Oswald, said in 1991:

experience has shown that [archives] cannot help but extend the range and depth of contemporary understanding and practice. The emergence of new archives can only offer greater nourishment and benefit to any tradition [...] It is also a fact that the growth of an archive has a direct impact on a community and a country’s sense of self or their personal self-esteem. (p.77-78)

The Dancing Sydney Archive Project has illustrated how stopping for a moment to acknowledged, explore, pay homage to (and critique) the past, helps validate the present and confirms the possibility of a future.

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REFERENCES:

LaFrance, Cheryl, 2013. Choreographers Archives: Three Case Studies in Legacy Preservation, in Lynn Matluck Brooks & Joellen A. Meglin (eds) Preserving Dance Across Space and Time, New York: Routledge

Oswald, Genevieve, 1991. One Approach to the Development of a Dance Archive: the Dance Collection in the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts (The New York Public Library at Lincoln Centre), in Isreal J. Katz (ed), Libraries History, Diplomacy and the Performing Arts, New York, Petragon Press, pp. 77-84

Schneider, Rebecca, 2001. Archives Performance Remains, Performance Research, Vol 6, No. 2, pp.100-108