Dance Archives: Looking back to the future

Claire Hicks & Elizabeth Chua

In creating this edition of Critical Dialogues, the focus in its most basic of terms is that of the dance archive and specifically that of choreographers with an established and significant relationship with the City of Sydney.

It marks the end of the first stage of a wider project, Dancing Sydney : Mapping Movements : Performing Histories, a partnership between Critical Path and the University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and Macquarie University, working with twelve artists/artist group from 2016 – 2020 as highlighted in Amanda Card’s introduction.

Some of these artists – Kay Armstrong, Narelle Benjamin, Julie-Anne Long, Dean Walsh and The Fondue Set – have contributed their reflections here in the previous pages, and others have shared in other ways. Martin del Amo wrote a reflection of his experience and conducted an interview with Anandavalli, and Kay Armstrong created a photo essay entitled FAUX ARCHIVES. You can view these sharings on Critical Path’s website. Earlier this year, The Fondue Set did a live sharing as part of Surry Hills Library’s Talking Bodies series.

In 2019, Martin del Amo and Vicki Van Hout were featured in In Response: Dialogues with RealTime, an exhibition in collaboration with RealTime and UNSW Library. The collection now lives online at exhibitions.library.unsw.edu.au/realtime where you can see an incredible archive of Martin and Vicki’s work. Erin Brannigan also conducted an interview with Vicki as part of this exhibition, of which you would have read a partial transcript of in the earlier pages.

In working with the twelve artists of Dancing Sydney, the interest of Critical Path lay not only in supporting these artists to start (or continue) the process of ensuring their dance archive is available for other practitioners and for future generations, but also to reflect upon what the opportunity for reflecting back on their bodies of work might tell them about what they are doing now and what they might do next; an active consideration of the continuum and the palimpsest process of art/dance making.

For this issue of Critical Dialogues, we have also decided to draw in the voices of other artists, Melati Suryodarmo and Ghenoa Gela, whose words you will read in the following pages. Our aim in doing so is to keep the space open for new voices in the wider dialogue of archiving dance, bringing further perspectives in considering the ongoing role that the archive might have for those working with an embodied practice.

You have also read pieces from Amanda Card and Julie-Anne Long, instigators of the Dancing Sydney project together with Erin Brannigan. At the end of this publication, you will see an artist’s guide to selfarchiving put together by Erin. If you have a practice that you have been inspired by this publication to archive, this tool-kit will come in handy.

Over the years, the artists have explored, raised, and responded to a range of questions (their own and collective asking) surrounding the following topics:

OMISSION TRANSMISSION REPETITION FIXITY, DISAPPEARANCE & THE PASSING OF TIME (EPHEMERA) CUSTODIANSHIP EMBODIMENT as a way of knowing, understanding, and learning

We hope you carry this with you.