archival thinking

context

methods

why it matters

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AUDIO INTRO

We found that context depends on the perspective of the archive: artist-driven, institutional curation, the involvement of collaborating artists, dance improvisation as well as choreographic form. Documentation, the politics behind the impulse to archive, and the systems in which it occurs are also included.

CONTEXT

Tonya Lockyer, Seattle:

Stories really capture what happened. In Russia, in 1998 there was a conversation about CI. Two people began to dance together, but for one of them it was only about concrete shapes—moving from one to the next. They didn’t realize it was a moving form. They had only seen the photographs, not recordings.

Meeting Notes

Margi Cole:

Create a valid space to move away from product-driven work.

Writing

Pat Graney, Seattle:

There's an assumption with certain generations and folks who are younger sometimes, that immediacy is the documentation, is the experience.

Video
Writing

J’Sun Howard:

…more incubation residencies with full support…

Dayna Hanson:

Over time, I’ve noticed that documentation has become more of an aesthetic pursuit for me, as the lines between the original work and its archival document have increasingly blurred.

Writing

Pat Graney, Seattle:

To me, the most important thing about archives [...] is the context [they provide].

Video

Angie Hauser, Seattle:

[I'm thinking] about archiving in the scale of history, [in] that includes multiple generations beyond the people that are living now.

Video

Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jacob’s Pillow:

I think there is something about the accidentalness of what gets left, and what gets found, and what remains.

Video
Writing

Jane Jerardi:

I think it would be interesting to test out more networked structures.

Cori Olinghouse:

I often take up each project as a hybrid archival-curatorial intervention, built with a particular context and audience in mind, in connection to the needs and interests of the artist and the communities the work inhabits.

Writing

Ni’Ja Whitson, Columbus:

How much agency does a performer have since it’s not their work and not their archive?

Meeting Notes

Tonya Lockyer:

Yes, archives need to collect all this important stuff. But archives also need to tell good stories. Or, another way of putting it: archives are never objective. Just as a researcher’s race, gender or class influences their interpretation of an archive; how the archive is constructed, located and monitored influences the researcher. If you are creating an archive to resist disappearance and erasure, it helps to have strategies for manipulating the system.

Writing

Raja Feather Kelly, Seattle:

I keep trying to think about what like what's my personal relationship with the idea or story, like what is archive? And when I heard when I heard you say this like I those words I was like if he knows the words that we would use when we describe like how we make performance. You know like can we can we get? All of our you know, year two year, four year process into this hour into this 50 minutes. How can we get all of this exploration of movement into this one movement so that it represents this thing?

Meeting Notes

Jacob’s Pillow ///////////////////////////////

Dana Whitco:

[When you mentioned] creating for yourself or maintaining for yourself a mode of hyper-contextuality, I wondered whether that is a resistance to some forces that you feel in the world?

Video

Reggie Wilson:

Is this for our own dramaturgy? Is this for another choreographers dramaturgy? Is this for historians?

Video

Angie Hauser:

I think the moment of improvisation is a certain kind of archive, maybe in quotes or italics or something that it is the archive of the practice.

Video

Rachel Boggia:

A lot of non-proscenium oriented dances [...] are really underprivileged by video documentation.

Video

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko:

I feel like this hyper-contextuality is a part of me defending my own perspective.

Video

Presentation: Bebe Miller

Dance Fort, The Making Room, and other projects sharing the creative process.

Video
Notes

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