A tangential rumination on community as archive and the repositories that hold them
by Maegan Broadhurst

Abridged transcript

Dance + Words Round Table on the Archive - Toronto. First speaker is Lucy Fandel, the moderator. She introduces the panel - Seika Boye, Travis Knights, Amy Bowring, and Mary Fogarty.1

1) As we waited for final lighting, camera, and audio adjustments, I could not help but note the physical and material constructs (i.e. panel composition, set construction, technical layout, number of cameras and the angles they are capturing, etc) in which the roundtable was taking place. The impulse began because I was seated directly behind one of the cameramen, noting what was in the frame and what lay outside the recording. I quickly sketched a floorplan for my own fallible memory before recording began.

Lucy Fandel: Welcome everybody. Hi. Thanks for being here. As part of this Dance Dialogue's roundtable series, we are inviting different artists, researchers, practitioners, to talk about different issues within dance. Today, we're talking about archive specifically, what this means to you individually, as practitioners, as artists, your experience in creating archives – we really want to have an idea of your own lens on these different questions.2 So, for starters, if you could introduce yourselves and share a bit about how you would situate yourself within this idea of archive or the archive or archiving.

2) This first roundtable of the series took place at 401 Richmond, a building I am intimately familiar with, having housed a decade of my career in the arts. Whose own history, since 1994, has focused on building a microcosm to shelter 17 artist-run centres and over 40 artists’ studios, film festivals, dance magazines, and arts nonprofits from a rapidly gentrifying city. Founder Margie Zielder cites urban activist Jane Jacobs and her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published 33 years before, as the impetus for 401 Richmond’s vision. A vision that always required strategic civic advocacy to maintain. Often acting as a barometer for the health of the arts within the city—as we saw from 2016-2018 when the building successfully advocated for a new Creative Co-Location Property Tax sub-class. The building acts as a living repository for the arts community and its history—a meandering thought as the set bustled around me. I started to think of all the organizational archives, past and present, housed throughout the winding hallways, basement storages, filing cabinets and stacked bankers' boxes under the desks of arts workers (more on this later). Each of us quietly documenting the intricacies of artist-run centres in Canada—filing away cobbled-together materials comprising blueprints for incorporation, political strife, cautionary tales, decades of advocacy, publications from defunct magazines and seminal works from Canadian art history—as an act of care by the community for themselves, for those before them and for those that will follow.

1:14
Seika Boye: My name is Seika Boye, and I'm a scholar. I'm a dance scholar, and my research uses archival material. So, I'm dependent on how people have stored memory, stored objects, catalogued things. I'm also very invested at this point in time in the methodologies of archiving, and thinking about how to centre the folks who are being archived. That's how I would situate myself now. But I'm always thinking about archives, all the time. When I'm walking down the street, when I'm teaching, when I'm dealing with my own family's materials, I'm constantly thinking about how we engage with the world around us, in the present, at the same time as we’re thinking about how to keep a record of it and what can be derived from that process.3

3) Circling back to my sketch of the roundtable’s floorplan, when annotating this transcript with my notes—I decided that the floorplan should be included—to point to contextual and environmental information left outside of the frame of the recording. This began as a simple task that swelled into an example of how a building—specifically 401 Richmond and the community it houses—is a living archive in constant negotiation with its own archival practices (or often lack thereof), institutional knowledge and speculative future-building in tandem. I am not making a case that 401 Richmond is an anomaly but rather a typical example of how the arts—no matter the discipline—organize and safeguard their history and future synchronously through intergenerational collaboration and the use of organizations as makeshift repositories.

Mary Fogarty: I'm Mary Fogarty and I’m an Associate Professor at York University in the School of Media, Arts, Performance and Design. I'm a B girl first. I started breaking before I started doing graduate work. My whole career has been enthusiastically interested in how the hip hop dance community around the world has archived their own dance and shared that dance around the world to build history and community and knowledge. From my earliest work on my master’s thesis (a long time ago), I was looking at how dancers in the 1990s, who were excluded from any kind of dance archiving in any kind of institutional form would videotape each other dancing and when they went on theatrical tours, they would go into local communities and videotape other people that were dancing from that locale and celebrate local histories of breaking. Since that point and that beautiful way of building community is an underground network, I've been looking at it ever since.

3:46
Amy Bowring: I'm Amy Bowring, I’m the executive director and curatorial director of Dance Collection Danse, which is the main national archives for dance in Canada. It's an organization I've been involved with for 30 years now. I'm trained as a dancer and a journalist, and I kind of fell into archiving, and have learned how to do this work through professional development over those 30 years. Now I live and breathe archives every day. I think about it constantly. It's my world.

4:24
Travis Knights: My name is Travis Knights. I'm a tap dancer. Happy 50th hip-hop. I consider tap dance in terms of breaking to be an ancestral connection. There’s a lot to talk about with the archives of hip hop. But, what am I supposed to do – “hi! I’m a tap dancer!” I'm going to say this, and I mean it in the most delightful way possible: I'm a nerd for the dance. I was introduced to it by my teacher Ethel Bruneau. From the first class she goes: “You need to know Bill Robinson, Sammy Davis Jr., Jenny Legon, Lois Bright, and if you don't know these names, don't know these people, you're in the wrong class.” From the very jump, she was teaching through oral tradition, which is what we do in tap dancing, in some schools. She would give me these VHS tapes, and they really informed me about what this form was all about. As I grew up and went to workshops in the United States, different tap-dance festivals, my favourite thing wasn't necessarily the classes, but it was the hang after the class. That's when the stories would be told. As I grew older, I made it formal, I started what I call a Tap Love podcast where, without shame, call up or approach a dancer or artist I had no business talking to. But because it was a podcast, now I had a reason to reach out and engage them in artsy fartsy tap dance or jazz-oriented conversation. The amount of learning that I’ve experienced through this process is something that is invaluable to me. It's a point of pride that it's available for the rest of the community.

6:32
LF: I'm interested to know this relationship between memory and archive, and how these two things are related, how memory supports and serves the archive and how archives nourish our memories. I'd like to hear your point of view on this. How do you feel about how they're inter-related? How they support each other?

MF: I just recently put out an anthology called The Oxford Handbook of Hip-hop Dance Studies. The first chapter is by a dancer named Ken Swift. He's an original member of the Rock Steady Crew, probably the first big group of dancers that became known in NYC. They are featured in a lot of films in the early 80s. You've probably all seen and tried to do a little bit of the moves that him and the other dancers were doing. In the anthology he starts out by saying: “In 1977 I'm walking down the street with my friend, and we see this dance for the first time.” He's right in the opening of reflecting on the history of hip hop dance, thinking about it in terms of his childhood, his memories of being with friends, his memories of walking down the street. I think about that a lot especially when we’re thinking about all of the most interesting work happening in scholarship coming out of black radical thought. There’s a lot of consideration about what it is to walk down the street, to dance with people, to eat with people, to share memories with people; and where that happens in what kinds of environments. I'm really excited about the embodied archive, the way that people carry their histories through their dance, and as they share them with other people they can also share through their movement, they can live on after they've passed, through passing down that history. So, I'm interested in that question of embodied archives and memories; those are some of the ways I'm grappling with this.

LF: How do you see the relationship between memory and archives?

8:36
AB: I'd say that the archive is a placeholder for memory. It's a place where memory can transition, from one generation to another...and thus continue to spread that knowledge. To get down into the nitty gritty, a lot of the materials that we have in the dance archive include journals, so those are direct artist memories, created by the artist, edited and notated and recorded, there to pass onto other people. It's a real holding place for our collective memory about this art form.4

4) I agree that important pieces of our histories are within the minds and bodies of community members. Almost all of my knowledge of 401 Richmond and the archives it stores comes from intergenerational knowledge sharing through everyday conversations with coworkers, artists, friends—or, as Travis Knight mentioned, the hang after the class. Many times throughout the day, as I talk with colleagues, pass by galleries or use lesser-known tenant shortcuts, I recatalogue the most precarious archives in my mind, like a game of mental math. An attempt to ensure that I do not forget them and pass their existence on to other tenants, the same way I learnt. For example, when I walk through the maze of basement corridors, I worry about Fuse Magazine’s complete periodical collection (saved by a former staff member when the magazine folded after 38 years) amongst boxes of Images Festival catalogues in their storage room. Are they still clearly labeled, do staff know they exist, or have they been discarded during periods of staff turnover?

9:23
TK: I see archives as kind of like breadcrumbs. As a practitioner of this form, I've been doing this for 30 something years. 30 something years! I can tell you with full confidence that I have no idea what I'm doing. Yeah, I can do these steps, and yeah, I can recite this, that and the other. Yes, I can improvise within tap dance, but there's something unsayable, which is why the dance is necessary, which the music informs, and these breadcrumbs come to me in the form of people that have these flashes of brilliance, flashes of transcendence through the form. I'm constantly trying to get to that. Every now and then I do. When I'm not paying attention, or when the wind is at my back. I see the archives as breadcrumbs.5 In terms of memory, I'm a different person every day. The podcast is an interesting play on memory because when I put out a podcast eight years ago and listen to it today, I'm a different person. My perception of what happened then has shifted. Memory is a little bit tricky, necessarily dynamic, and ever evolving. But the archive remains as a breadcrumb of something that I'm moving toward.

5) Archives are most definitely breadcrumbs—often giving us bits and pieces but never the complete story—providing us just enough to return to—to understand—to reference—to revise in hopes for a better outcome. As I began transcribing my sketch into a digital format, I searched for a digital floorplan of the Bachir/Yerex Presentation Space (where the roundtable took place). I started my unfruitful search for breadcrumbs on the websites of FADO Performance Art Centre, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, SAVAC, Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, and Vtape, the organizations who make up The Commons.

The Commons emerged in response to the now defunct TMAC—an earlier assembly of media arts organizations—who formed in 2003 using CACTI’s preceding 1994 feasibility study as a roadmap. Their advocacy for a shared affordable space between 2005 and 2020—resulting in lengthy lawsuit with the City of Toronto and the space’s bankrupt developer—ended in the city cancelling their occupancy.

The Commons history has yet to be properly archived and currently exists through oral history and scattered meeting minutes across its organizations. Widening my search, I became perplexed why a digital floorplan wasn’t available for a rentable presentation space that exhibits and hosts performances, exhibitions and screening.

11:07
SB: A few things come to mind that have been mentioned. In memory we have our personal individual memories, and then we have our shared memories, and memories of our community, and I think of the archive pr archives as a space that collects memories based on some set of terms, so a dance archive or the archive of a nation state, or my personal archive at home, of my kids, the archives of my extended family, or my dance work, or my scholarship. The memories that are permitted to be in an archive are not often, maybe never, defined by the people or the person who hold those memories. As an archivist, or someone who writes about archives, when I think of my own memories dealing with archives, and I’m going a bit down a rabbit hole here, it's always about making a lot of choices about how I interpret someone else's trace of a memory. We do have direct access through journals for example but one person’s journal in five different archives will be read differently based on how it’s been framed, on how it's been kept or preserved. So, there’s so much interpretation that happens around memory based on how that archive has been defined. I think that’s an exciting tension and the more you come into that awareness I think, the more you can go into an archive and think about it as a less defined space. Institutional archives, I’m faculty at the University of Toronto, it’s a huge institution and a lot of choices have been made about how to preserve and share a history. But once you're aware of some of the choices that have been made, you can be a little more creative in how you interpret once you’re in there. And I think there’s an opportunity, as opposed to thinking about it as a limitation – I like at this stage to think about it as an opportunity.

LF: So, it creates the framework of an invitation.

In this idea of the archive, we’re talking about how in some cases they reside in institutions I’m wondering about how they reside in – you mentioned family, and other units – how might the archive reside within the body? Or in the community or outside of these institutional frames?

14:19

AB: Absolutely. The body holds an archive. A dancing body holds an archive of every movement one has ever learned or performed. There are triggers for that. You hear a piece of music and suddenly it triggers either moving memories or the actual movement itself. It's a very tricky aspect of archiving dance. We take the body archive with us. We can't hang it on a wall or put it on a shelf. It goes with the individual. It’s something I think about a lot. When you're talking about dance, you’re talking a lot about intangible cultural heritage. We're talking about an art form that is passed on orally and bodily from one body to another in the studio. The notation is difficult and only read by a few people. So those body connections are really important to this art form. How do we capture that embodied archive? As I’ve circled this thought around in my head over the years, I've started to come to the conclusion that I have to just let it go. Resolve to accept that the embodied archive can be recorded through media, through writing, but the actual movement archive goes with the body, and when the body's life ends, that archive is put to rest.

But it certainly can be passed on from one generation to another. We’re talking about traditions of movement that get passed from one generation to the other and it may get broken telephone like after a while but it’s still a way of passing it on.

LF: How do you see the connection between the archive and the body in the community?

TK: It's a big tension within tap dance. There are multiple camps. I'm sorry to put it his way, but on one end of the spectrum you have tap dancers that are raised through syllabi. My teacher, Ethel Bruneau, originally from Harlem, NY, moved to Montreal while touring with Cab Calloway. She comes from the soup of culture, and I was lucky enough to encounter her for many years and she transferred that orally to me. When she passed away, I was interested in finding a way to capture this and share it; I was thinking of creating my own syllabus. And my wife looked at me and said “What are you doing? Did you miss the point? What have you been doing all these years?” And I did miss the point. There’s something tricky about technology. And the archive is kind of technology where you capture something and preserve it. With every technology we accept, we give something up. More and more what’s given up is a connection with the other people. Oral tradition requires that you necessarily sit down with someone, and they transfer something. Yes, there’s steps and movements and patterns but there’s something unsayable that is transferred as well. The tension between oral traditional and physical archives is a tricky one and, of course, there's value on both ends of the spectrum.

SB: I want to make two points. I think there are syllabi and putting things down into a system. There's a process of validation that some people think happens through writing something down in a syllabus in a certain way, with a certain presentation, that is repeatable and recognizable and definable, and there's merit to so many aspects of that if it's about descriptions, but where it becomes problematic is when it locks something down and it isn't about the shared activated transmission in time and space with another person. I think in terms of embodiment and memory, we (scientists) still don't entirely understand what is happening in terms of muscle memory, and how the body remembers. Our sensory experience is so tied to the way we think about embodiment and I bring up sense and sensual memory because those are things that also can't be in an archive. 6

6) Defeated, I began designing a floor plan from scratch—and as if through muscle memory—only to remember that I had built a floorplan for this room years prior. In 2019, my collaborator Barbora Racevičiūtė and I curated ...any resemblance to real persons, dead or alive, is purely coincidental, an exhibition featuring Stan Douglas, Lee Henderson, Liz Knox and Eve Tagny presented by Vtape a year after The Commons opened to the public. After initial meetings with the artists, each one requesting the floorplan, a basic request for an artist to an artist-run centre. However, after reviewing our email exchanges, it was determined that there was no floorplan. Instead, I found a digital floorplan I created from two photographs taken from my iPhone of the original architectural plans for The Commons.

An episodic memory emerges from the recesses of my hippocampus.

I was part of an exhibition that was looking at eugenics in education and the forced institutionalization of disabled peoples and indigenous populations in Canada. One of the things that elder Mona Stonefish talked about was the smell of rotten potatoes that children were forced to eat. She has a physical memory of smelling those things and of having to consume those things, of transporting those things around a kitchen. If we think about that in relationship to dancing, and the things that we repeat, how we remember them, like Amy said, can be activated in so many different ways. So, archives certainly do have limits in what they can capture about movement, but I think what's exciting about a lot of directions that are taking place because of intangible cultural heritage and the efforts of UNESCO, are community-activated archival projects that are about shared experiences, and that the dancing isn’t only about a choreography. And that’s not to put down choreography. I grew up doing choreography. It’s one of the great joys of my life, and for the people sitting around this table. But there's something beyond those steps that is happening. You put it to rest but you can't capture it all. I think about photographs and about how often in archiving my own work I’m looking for a photograph of somebody dancing, but when I see a photograph of myself dancing, and I think this is true for many dancers – you have the memory but there’s often criticism of yourself: “oh I look like this” or “my leg wasn’t high enough” whatever, it’s so detached from my memory and experience of doing that dance. And I try to carry that with me when I’m being over-dependent upon certain types of archival ephemera, to understand something about the dancing, to really accept the limitations of material archival objects in order to maybe ask different questions to get to embodied memory.

23:02

MF: When I started my PhD, I wanted to do the research in Toronto; I was living in Scotland. I came back here to hang out with the dancers and follow people around and see what they were getting up to. At the time I was trying to keep it concealed that I wanted to think about how breaking competitions were judged. That was the back burner. I had my own burning questions. I went to stay with a local dancer in Toronto, Karl Alba who went by the name Bboy Dizzy. I went to study with him because he was looking at how to judge competitions in a fair way, he was one of the pioneers of asking those kinds of questions internationally. One night there was a little knock on the door and he looked out to see who had come over to his apartment and then he closed the door right away and grabbed a clipboard. He opened the door and there were three little boys in the hallway whose mothers must have sent them to him for lessons, he could teach them to breakdance. So he went through his curriculum; he had taught them some moves in the past and he wanted to make sure they could do the move before he let them in and give them another lesson. They actually had to do some freezes in the hallway to show that they each had the move. In that model there was a kind of master and apprentice; he’s teaching them there was also a peer-to-peer system where no one gets left behind. Because each of the boys had to do the move and if one of them couldn’t do the move, they had to go back and make sure that each of them could do the move. So, no one gets left behind in this model I saw when I was doing research. What fascinates me, and maybe it relates a bit Seika to what you’re talking about, and Travis, what are we recording, what matters – is it the lesson plans, is it the curriculum that he taught them or what is that intangible thing that is being taught. For me, with dance education, that’s the intangible – no one gets left behind. And how do we move our systems of archiving, into thinking about that where in the past there’s clearly been exclusionary practices that have involved symbolic violence for people who didn’t come from the dance styles that were recognized either by the nation-state or by the dance community in Canada let’s say. There’s something interesting for me in that relationship between pedagogy and archiving and what matters and who is valued and what we’re taking away from that, those kinds of experiences of sharing dance.

LF: In that case the memory shared is also creating a community at the same time?

26:18
MF: I think there's something in that master-apprentice model that also teaches us something about how dance and music work which is when Dizzy hears music that he’s heard before, he listens to it in a particular kind of way, but the boys are hearing it for the first time. So, this is really important for any kind of reconstruction project related to archives where we'll never experience things the same way with the same ears or the same body as the people who originally experienced it. There are things that just can’t be passed along with archives because we don’t have the same eyes, ears, experiences.7 And that's okay in this peer-to-peer model that he knows music in a way that the generation that will come next that will relate to different music in different ways. It’s all part of the life cycle of a dancer and a human.

7) During a non related work meeting, I ran into Co-Founder and Restoration & Collections Management Director Kim Tomczak, who was working on digitizing VTape’s video catalogue in the Research Centre. Having worked as an intern at Vtape in 2014—I mentioned my floorplan dilemma, knowing Kim was the technical heart and soul of VTape’s archive. Kim confirmed there was no such digital document but rushed over to an overflowing shelf of loose papers (labelled to be organized), pulling out a roll to reveal the architectural renderings. He proceeded to share details of how the renovations came to be using the renderings as a guide. I photographed the documents on my iPhone to turn into a floorplan. We talked about how the architects transformed the window-lit office—formerly housing Image Festival—into a darkened screening room. I pointed out the location of my desk during my first year at Images—before they moved the office to a floor below. We nervously laughed about how black liquid would seep through the wall above the desk—asking ourselves again why the building manager never fixed it and how the builders covered the problem with drywall.

LF: In this life cycle of the people who are experiencing, if you’re at a certain point in life and you’re hearing it later on for the nth time, as the technologies evolve as well for different forms of archive, how do you feel that those shift our perspectives around material preservation of dance? That relationship between archive and technologies we have for creating those archives or maybe activating the ones that are already there, that are in the body. Maybe we could talk a bit about that link?

27:56
TK (bangs the table): Back in my day you got to know someone - the master. Then the sign of approval was they gave you a tape, you specifically. I would consume it, and learn and grow, and it was conferred on me by someone, and the connection got deeper. Now with YouTube everybody has access to it, but what are we giving up with this new technology? In tap dance, at least, I’m seeing trends that are global, not just regional. A lot of the dancers are looking, sounding the same or very similar. I think we are in this growing pains phase of this technology. YouTube is powerful. Of course, when I was 15, I would have done anything to have YouTube and have access to all of these things, but instead I sought out people. I do value the richness of those connections, the richness of that particular experience, of the masters I got to meet, that are no longer here. I feel a responsibility to advocate and really push for the uncomfortable meeting of the minds and share that way. It's kind of this consistent genie story: be careful what you wish for. We’re getting it. Now, of course, these young dancers that I’m thinking of are amazing, they’re incredible, but on the other hand, I look forward to when they're 60 and have something to say.

30:15
SB: We know what they're missing by not being in a room together. And that's part of, maybe, the lament. And they're having an experience that we don't know.8 I keep thinking about these kids at the door, and them not knowing what it feels like to be together. In my work, I am also asking this question: what is the value of dancing knowledge beyond performance when you’re dancing? Through dancing together, we learn a way of being in the world that we wouldn’t have learned somewhere else. You need to be able to do the move. Being able to do a move is access; you’re allowed through the door, you can be at the party, you’re allowed into the circle, you get a solo, you’re in the front row. There's status, and power. People, believe it or not, people come into power through dancing or into powerful positions. We’re so often thinking about the power that dancers don’t have, that artists don’t have. But so much of that power comes from an embodied knowledge and understanding of being the world moving. I'm coming around to trying to not be so afraid of the technology. In the schools, how do we assess? We have to re-evaluate our forms of assessment that demonstrates knowledge through a certain way of testing, through a quiz or through writing an essay. We have to change and adapt in order to see that people know something. And sometimes that's going back to forms of demonstration that we've moved away from. In computer sciences students are writing exams and they’re writing their code in pencil.

I don't think it's an end, I do think there's a coming back around to the value of embodiment that was more distanced in the early ages of digitization, for example, when we were so excited about the possibilities of digitizing. We didn’t need as much space because we were putting it all on thumb drives. Maybe we don't need flash drives; we need archives that have huge dance studios. AI is dependent on information that has been put out into the world, whether that’s a video or, I guess it would be a digitized version of a dance, if we were talking about dancing and AI as different forms of knowledge sharing or knowledge generation, though it’s more piecing together than generating knowledge. I recently saw this demonstration of it. So I want to try and talk about it in terms of sampling, or citing, or riffing. If we do think of it in those terms, it is another form of scrambled archiving. There’s still the trace of the thing we did – it couldn’t function without it. We just need to know how to look at something that’s generated in a different way, it’s illegibility and not settle into the practices that we are familiar with. What is the legibility? How do we know what we’re looking at, that it required a former knowledge or expertise or an understanding of being together in order to do that. That doesn’t really answer the question but those are the types of things that are raised when we’re talking about those types of emerging technologies in relationship to archiving embodied practices.

LF: I think it does and also can those different technologies like AI that can scramble those sources or connections – maybe they can also facilitate a way in – there’s a lot of unknown there too.

35:00
SB: I think if there’s something to recognize - I mean that’s how we catch AI when we’re grading, “you don’t use that word in your regular writing”, so there’s a recognition of the change in the language someone might use usually. But also, if you want to use AI for prompts, if you recognize something, there may be something of use there. For sure.

MF: Now I’m spinning off what you’re saying. One of the things I found interesting to read about in the literature on the philosophy of mind, which is troubling the mind-body relationship, which has been troubled in many fields, is this idea of the extended mind. If I want to figure out how to get somewhere I might say ‘can you

draw me a map?’ and you might get out a technology, you might get out a paper and a pen and draw me up a little map and then I might use that map to find where I’m going. The philosophers that we’re looking at are saying this is extended mind, this isn’t in your body, this is environment and a technology and you’re using it to get where you’re going or, if you’re trying to figure out a math problem, you might need to use a paper and pen but not an extension of your mind. It’s kind of doing a little bit of troubling work there. How that relates to me and the archive is I started thinking about, well, everyone talks about breaking as this improvised form, they just see people jump out and battle, but what I saw was friends who has little books to remember your moves or a friend with you in case...so some dancers actually had a little bit of what are their signature moves, how did they remember them? What are those kind of processes? And some dancers, like Dizzy, would actually sketch out and draw the different moves. So that was something that kind of sat with me as I was exploring, as you do, thinking about dance studies and questions of notation. What are these traces about? And I let it go for a long time but when I started teaching in a dance department and hip-hop dancers started to do graduate work in dance departments which was very exciting. I had a student Joshua Swami who was a younger generation dancer started talking about notation, not because you talk about it in breaking scenes, but he was doing a PhD in a dance department, so the question was arising for him too. And he was saying well the younger generation have their phones and they’re using things like emojis, different things to remember what they’re getting up to in battles and again if we’re thinking about artificial intelligence or post humanism or any of these newer areas of thinking about we relate to our environment, to other people, with our bodies, it’s all there in this extended mind – how are we ...we’re already using this technology so when we compare those two generations it felt like the same thing. Even in cyphers when someone has a video camera, Sybella Grimes talks about this, we make a half circle like this and we dance for the camera, we’re inviting everyone out there to be part of the cypher. It's not that the technology’s disrupted us; depending on how we’re using it, it might be a way to actually engage communities in new ways.8 And I’ve seen that since my earliest research, these kinds of imagined affinities that people are creating globally, these kinds of ways of being with each other, can be inspired and created through video technology. I guess I’m erring on the side of I’m interested in these new technologies and like some of the most radical scientists today think that they might save us. Some say they’re our only hope now, the AI, to save us from climate change, that we can’t figure out the solutions anymore but hopefully some computers can figure out how to get us into smaller spaces with temperature-controlled environments so we might survive and some archives to remember a past world that was alive and different.

I usually bring up climate change after two drinks at any party.

8) Emerging artists and arts workers use archival practices and new technologies to advocate for systemic change within the sector—pressuring organizations and granting bodies for equitable change. Since 2020, we've seen emerging artists mobilize communities to advocate for labour rights and social justices causes using google sheets. The first was a google sheet launched after black lives matter, documenting the number of BIPOC artists represented by commercial galleries. The second was Hearth's Wage Transparency Google Sheet, encouraged arts workers from across the county to share their salary to advocate for living wage. Both successful, resulting in the community holding galleries accountable for more diverse representation—and the TAC adopting a strong suggestion to pay living wage within operational grant requirements.

39:30
LF: I’d like to ask you all about what we can learn from what’s missing in the archive, what is not there. You’ve touched upon it in different ways but ...whether that’s from our own archives or collective ones, or specific community’s ones. What do we learn from what’s missing?

SB: Sure – someone else’s ideal of something. When something has been left out, often we know because we went looking and it wasn’t there, we have to come around to realizing that it’s been left out. Often archives are presented as an authority that knows something or can teach something, but the limitations of an archive communicate a desire and by looking at what’s missing we see what was outside of that desire. That’s one way of looking at it; not the only way. To be specific, I research the history of blackness and dancing in Canada and you don’t see a lot of black people or a lot of dancing for that matter (you see some dancing in the archives of a nation state, for example), but where I did find traces of dancing was in a collection of labour histories that was edited by Dionne Brand called No Burdon To Carry, in the 1990s, of black women working in Southern Ontario in the 1920s and 30s. The dancing came up because...in oral history projects there’s a list of questions and everyone gets asked those questions and the questions are edited out and have this abridged essay and 2/3s of the way into it, everybody started talking about the social dances that they went to and those dances happened on a Thursday night because that was the night the domestics had off – and most black women worked as domestics during that time. And so, when something is missing there’s this desired thing of what somebody wanted to present but I think we also learn that thing that’s missing is probably pretty powerful that changed the way this other thing was perceived. And it also often means that someone just didn’t find it valuable, it wasn’t of importance to them. That’s not always a negative thing – there are a lot of things that aren’t in my list of an ideal archive – it doesn’t mean that they aren’t important or that I’m down on them, but that I have a certain objective and a project and things that I’m thinking about and that’s why they’re included in this thing. But of course, exclusions can be violent, exclusions can be very intentional and again we just have to attune ourselves to recognizing why something’s missing and it can be really exciting to figure out how to locate it. It was very valuable for me to realize that I can’t find people talking about dances, I should go take a look at these labour histories because people always talk about what they did on their day off. That was a great discovery, really fun, I think about it all the time. In terms of dancing and archives and history, we are at an exciting moment where value is being placed on different types of dancing, dancing that wasn’t intended to be on a western theatrical stage, for example. I grew up doing western theatrical dance practices –

ballet, jazz, tap, musical theatre, modern and post-modern dance – and I spent a lot of time in mosh pits at grunge concerts, Lollapalooza – those were my formative dancing experiences. But for a long time in the way I was taught history, only some of those dances were included and often this wasn’t dancing happening in Canada, they were elsewhere. It often means too, if something’s missing, that no one has invested in it, they haven’t spent the money to pay someone to go and do the research, they haven’t published the book, they haven’t built the archive – it can mean that missing thing just doesn’t have support.

44:30
MF: You’ve made me think of so many perspectives. One of the things that I learned from David Lang, who has passed away but was a pop music scholar that I got to go to conferences and meet and talk to, he said the first question you should ask of any archive is what’s missing? And that’s the interesting question. I think it’s true. When I was doing a PhD in the music department I would go to the British Library and look for dance, which isn’t there, and I would think well that’s so unusual for a music library and focus to not have anything on dance, I think what’s missing from music archives is dance – you need to see how people are using that music so these kind of weird silos for me; there’s really a missing element there for archives. For dance, I want to say the same thing: the music is missing. Usually what is missing there is those dances that don’t take place in the venues where there’s a whole infrastructure art world devoted to covering it, whether it’s writing about it, or who is seeing it, that kind of thing, so in my work, and this circles back to what I was saying in the beginning, in a form like hip hop dance, people did it themselves, they archived their own dances. When I was doing my research, because I couldn’t find the things that I was looking for in archives, I would go to people’s homes and they would show me their collections and show me what events they thought were important and they’d show me footage and I got such a rich history that way because I’m sitting in someone’s home and they’re telling me why it’s meaningful to them. A lot of the work I see now in archival studies, which a lot of people in the humanities aren’t reading, in a lot of that work in archival and library studies they’re talking about well, how can we keep the community centred? Communities are already doing it and that’s what’s interesting about it I suppose, communities are already doing these practices so we’re not so much inventing them if you happen to have a job in an institution but maybe just listening to the way people are already editing out what they think is important and what they want to share about their cultural practices.

LF: So, it’s already there....

MF: I don’t mind when archivists say ‘well, where are the women?’ We’re looking at what a bunch of men thought was important and they didn’t include any women so why aren’t you doing that ... there’s a lot of excitement in those conversations across different fields or different communities of practice to challenge each other. It’s the only way we’re gonna do better in the future.

47:37
AB: Yes, what’s missing from the archive? It tells us a lot about hierarchies, about priorities, about privilege, about who was in charge when. The whole concept of

archives and museums is an imperialist concept. Imperialist nations went around the world collecting samples and pieces of architecture and taking them away and putting them in spaces where they could be preserved and where they could be protected. There’s still a lot of that going on where things are getting re-patriated because of this very patronising view that it won’t be safe in the place where it originated. In terms of dance archiving, I can say for the organization I work for specifically, when our founders created it almost 40 years ago, they focused on collecting theatrical dance, so dance presented in a theatrical setting whether that was outdoors or on a stage or whatever. And the reason for that was quite practical; it was about keeping the scope of the collection small enough that they could manage it. There were two of them and then there were three of us for a while. In 2018 we dropped the word theatrical from the collections policy, which meant that we could collect dance however it occurs in our society whether it is social practice, spiritual practice or a theatrical practice. And that just opens the doors wide because earlier in our history there was this hierarchy in Canada where ballet and modern or post-modern dance was privileged over other dance forms and therefore it got the money, it got the preservation. Bu these other forms practiced by the original people who were here on this land and then all the people who came from other places and brought their dances with them – dubbed as folk dance, and therefore less important than what we now refer to as Western theatrical dance. What’s missing tells us a lot about our own history and how we prioritise things. Of course, we’re at an exciting stage in social development where we’re expanding those horizons and we’re moving some of those barriers and inequities that have existed.

50:35
TK: I saw a documentary about Louis Armstrong recently and in about the first five minutes they talk about Louis Armstrong as a young child and he would organize these parties, he was in like a group home, and he’d organize these parties and he’d play and tap dance and then move – and I was stuck right there, wait, tap dance? The more you learn about the form, the more you understand how much it was like hip hop – jazz is a culture and there are so many elements to jazz that inform the music and inform the dance and it’s a dynamic play between all of these elements. Having said that, tap dance, in my opinion (please, please give me another perspective because I don’t want this perspective) is at the scene of this racial violence. Among the black community you’ll hear often ‘tap dancing for the white man’ because it’s associated with minstrelsy. So if you trace the lineage of tap dance, it begins when the drums are taken away in 1740 when the Negro Act is passed banning the use of drums and so the Africans did what Africans do: invent. The rhythms were passed on corporally and over time this thing becomes known as tap dance.

As an archivist, I am purposely excluding things. You talk about privilege – it’s privilege to purposely exclude things meaning that I am uninterested in the incredible talent, skill and charisma of Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Eleanor Powell ...I'm more interested in what was going on in the community during the Harlem renaissance when this critical mass of black folk moved from the south to the north, passing all of these northern cities, trading this culture among each other, necessarily because of Jim Crow segregation. I'm excluding things because tap

dance is understood as performative, theatrical, minstrel. But if you go further back, there’s this concept called Sankofa. I think it’s a responsibility of everyone, depending on how far they go in their respective practices, to collect the breadcrumbs and then really go back and get it for yourself. For me in my practice right now I’m going back. When it comes to these folk practices (which to me isn’t an insult at all), when it comes to practices of the people spiritual practices, it's about something more than commerce, bums in seats, entertaining, make ‘em laugh, all the minstrel things. If you removed black face from a minstrel show, is it still a minstrel show? Hell, yeah. And so, the minstrel show lives. It still lives in many different ways – in hip hop, oooo sauce!

MF: TikTok

TK: I’m old enough that my heart’s been broken a few times within this form, and I can’t survive as a person smiling and doing whatever is expected of me within the tap dance zeitgeist because I’m aware that it's so much more. I'm aware of how integral it was during the Harlem renaissance and the heyday of jazz, where these black people, these intellectuals, these artists, are creating their own world on their own terms. It's an extremely powerful time. And it's something I want to honour in the way I approach the form, it's something I want to honour in the way I investigate the form. Yes, there's certain things I'm going to leave out. And I encourage everyone with a sense of agency to collect your own archives and pursue your own interests.

LF: And to find that specificity too about what it is you need from that archive that creates that for you.

55:53
AB: Can I just add to this ... the whole reason Dance Collection Danse exists is because dance wasn’t in the mainstream archives – it was actually when the collection came together after a major reconstruction project, the intent wasn’t to then start a dance archive, it was to offer the things that had accumulated to provincial, municipal or national archive and dance wasn’t in their collecting mandate – they didn’t want it. So, dancers did it for other dancers because we needed to look after ourselves.

LF: This ties perfectly into our final question about how you create the archive that you want or need or that’s missing. I’d love to hear from all of you and we can bounce around ideas as well about what would be your ideal archive for dance today. And in some ways, you’re all already working on it, already doing with the specificity of your own perspectives. I wonder if we can dig into that, what could that look like and what are some of the ideas you’ve heard that you’d like to weave in.

57:13
MF: I won’t be so long-winded with this one. I feel like my whole career's been devoted to looking at archives in different ways. I just recently did a chapter with Jason Newer for a book called HipHop Archives that was put out by Mark Campbell and Marie Forman. We explored the idea of what people like us who started out as

artists then became scholars would want to do with an archive and we kept going back to using it creatively. I thin even when I was 20, I went to a library, or an archive and I would watch Yvonne Rainer and I didn’t know the history of what Yvonne Rainer was up to but I know I thought what she was doing was interesting. I was kind of looking through for movement ideas and that sort of thing. We’re interested in an archive where you can dance in the archive, just any kind of creative practice where young people can see a lot of different forms and get inspired and also, as you’re saying, understand the cultural resonance of the form, where does it come from, why is it significant and how can it reflect what we’re getting up to today. I think pedagogically, history lessons is great

But that creative space where you could get some ideas and dance with your friends. Maybe an archive that serves to support an art community with a beautiful floor that anyone can come any time of day to just dance and create with people. Hardwood sprung floors, not Marley. Please, for the other dance styles. That would be really nice. That's my vision. Hardwood sprung floors.

58:55
AB: Oh, I have a vision. First off: properly funded. When you look at how much our nation spends on preserving our visual art history, our literary history, our film history versus our performance history, whether it’s theatre, dance or music, theatre and dance are way down at the bottom of the heap. And yet we are the most ephemeral of all of the artistic disciplines. So, first thing would be properly funding a dance archive. I envision a space where people can gather, where it’s a hub, where there is shelves and shelves of books, and you can come and take a book and sit down and read and dialogue with people. Proper climate control for different media, state of the art cataloguing system, adequate staff to meet the needs of both the community that wants to deposit archives ( a whole layer of work to itself) and meet the research requests and help people out and help them find things. As a researcher I find archives are sometimes quite intimidating even to an archivist, a reluctance to share. We should be sharing it and disseminating it as much as possible. It will serve the whole art form. If the history is out there, if the access is there ... I also believe in archives as a place as a catalyst for new creation.

I teach second year dance history, and the main thing that they do is create something new based on something they found in an archive, a new creation, a new design, a new choreography. I think that archives can be creative spaces. Yes, a studio, not just for mucking around, for reconstruction – so that we have something to pass on.

1:01:50
TK: I want to double down on this creativity. One of my fave jazz pianists is Thelonius Monk (demonstrates a song), it’s called Just You, Just Me. Just Us. Justice. Evidence. (demonstrates). In hip hop they call it sampling. Even though the user/listener may not know that they’re inundated with history, with archive, they are and it’s being preserved in a way that keeps the culture, the community, the creativity going and moving forward. It’s not dead. Jazz is not dead, it’s very contemporary depending on how you choose to use it. Yeah, creativity.

SB: Studio, funding, creativity. Wood floor. A space large enough that people. – researchers, users – are all together. Sending someone offsite to look at something without someone to share their knowledge. When we lose a dance, a lot of things are lost; when we lose a librarian or an archivist, worlds are also lost. So having those people together on site. A space where you can make noise, that you can have loud music and dance as well as a quiet studious place. Soundproofing. These are all really practical things because dance doesn’t belong in archives because it disrupts the idea of what it should be, right? Quiet, studious (no air), the windows, the lights not burning anything – they’re really contain climate-controlled but also controlled in so many other ways. And yes, a space for creativity but also for cultural transmission. Dancing isn't just an artistic practice. It contains politics, religion, culture, and there are disruptions to knowledge transmission based on the desire of the nation-state. People are told they can’t dance for all sorts of reasons. An ideal archive is also a space where that transmission can happen. And it doesn’t have to be on display. So, taking the transaction out of the expectations around dance. Draw the curtains, you can invite the people in your community who need to learn these dances that may not be available or there are protocols that they should not be available to others, but you don’t have to show us what you’re doing in order to use the space to do this important thing related to dance. In terms of intangible cultural heritage, those spaces are needed if we want the dances to persist across generations and into the future, people need a space in which to learn them. Diaspora is a real thing. People need a place to come together if they don’t live in the same location anymore. S this idea of a hub is really exciting. What else should be there?

AB: Exhibition space, room for lectures and screenings, discourse, good digitization centre.

SB: Yes, absolutely.

TK: This is all very tasty. Who do we talk to?

SB: Archives are physically exhausting places to be. Often you can’t have your things with you, you have to leave them to take a drink of water, you have to leave to have a bite of food, you have to use a pencil, you have to handle things very carefully which brings a lot of tension to your body, we all know it’s not really good for you, you have limited time to look at the objects which creates a lot of pressure and mental, psychic distress – obviously I’m talking about my experiences as an archivist but if you’ve paid thousands of dollars to go somewhere and you’ve applied for the funds to get there and you have 4 days and maybe the archive is open from 1 to 3:30...I’m always physically and mentally exhausted after I’ve done an archival visit, How do you make it comfortable? I’d really like to put my feet up in an archive. What can movement practitioners teach us about making a space that is comfortable to be in.

AB: Good chairs.

TK: The barriers to entry. The extremes you have to go to with archives, does that create a certain level of sacredness to you? Does that attune your focus in a way that it wouldn’t if it was more comfortable?

SB: I’m not sure if it makes it more ... I have a tremendous amount of gratitude to have the means to go somewhere ... there are all kinds of privileges that enable a visit. What I feel more sacred about is when I’m invited into someone’s living room, I’m thinking about Ola Skanks whose name was brought to my attention by the late Archie Alleyne, the first jazz drummer to cross over in Toronto in terms of the clubs that he played in – he told me about Ola and gave me her phone number (she didn’t have email). I went to her home, and she said I invited you in and I want to talk about racism, not dance. But then we started to talk, and 20 minutes passed, then 30, 40, an hour and in talking about dance she realized that we were having a conversation about dance that contained many things. And then she said I’ll be right back. She came back and pulled out this portfolio that had been under her bed maybe 15 or 20 years and it contained the ephemera of her dancing life. So, I feel sacred about when people trust me enough to share deep things. Talking about dancing can be very painful if you talk about the heartbreaks you’ve had. You’re not always going to hear happy easy stories. I hold deeply sacred gratitude for when people share the grandness of what dancing meant to them in their life, in all of the vulnerabilities they’re willing to share in that moment. The further I get along this road, the more I understand what people are offering when they share their stories. And I feel pretty sacred about archivist and librarians – they’re awesome and I’m grateful to them for sure.

Thank you so much for sharing each of you and the conversation can continue.

Pick-up (to be inserted)

1:11:39
LF: How does this idea of archives and preservation tie in with the way that technologies around are shifting, whether it’s through AI or digital technologies, through practices that are not necessarily embodied?

AB: Advances in technology in terms of archiving and dance archiving have been both a blessing and a travesty. Having the different means of, for example, digitization, improves access, it’s another layer of preservation that can happen. Improvements in cataloguing, open linked meta data, has been wonderful for archivists. But all that technology has added a whole other layer of migration. Hard drives aren’t designed to last, every five years you have to be migrating o even the gold DVDs and DCs that came out years and years ago and were supposed to be the pinnacle of preservation (cause gold didn’t corrode) still don’t last. You still have to keep pushing things over or you get into a situation where it becomes unreadable, the drives are not in computers anymore therefore you have to keep migrating to ways that you can access it.9 So, there’s that whole side of it. Then there’s the side of it that I, as a dance archivist, worry a great deal about and that is: there’s less and less analogue material being generated by the dance community. I have watched house programs disappear to my great angst. I see younger artists, my own students using

digital – it’s so accessible for them. They go into the studio; they’ve got their phones to record tons and tons of rehearsal. I worry about what happens to all that data over time. How are they backing it up? Are they creating oodles of data that some archivist is going to have to go through at some point and decipher. If we can’t keep it all, it’s digital space but it’s still space, right? So, it’s all of that side that I really worry about. We don’t generate photographic prints. There’s a disconnect in understanding resolution with photography. When we do publishing projects, we ask for photographs and we get low rez jpgs, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of education that still needs to happen in our community so that, as we embrace more and more digital technology in terms of getting art out to the world, we’re doing it in a way that is educated and knowledgeable, that there is a whole preservation aspect to it, so we don’t lose it. I worry about a gap in our knowledge of dance history in Canada in the early 21st century in this period of transition where we didn’t have a grip on how the tech worked, we didn’t fully understand it, it wasn’t fully part of our dance education – we just sort of did it the way everyone else in the world was doing it but they weren’t doing it in terms of a preservation ideal.

9) Issues of archival technology—particularly aging technology—make up most of my precarious archive recataloguing. When I visit Trinity Square Video, I think about their inaccessible video art collection—from early years when the gallery had an acquisition budget—because their contracts did not predict the need for migration rights. Will there be enough time, money or labour to digitize the collection before it deteriorates? At Gallery 44, I remind myself to migrate exhibition documentation stored on CD-ROMs from 2001-2010 to the organization’s cloud server. A task that has become more difficult now that our computers can no longer read them.

LF: And in the meantime, we abandon the older ways of doing it.

AB: Exactly! In terms of AI and dance history, I am not very worried at this stage because when one of those AI programs came out, I asked it ‘what was the role of Boris Volkoff in the professionalization of ballet in Canada?’ and it generated this crazy essay with people who weren’t alive at the same time – it was pulling from the internet whatever it could find related to ballet in Canada and chunking it together and it made no sense. So, we don’t have to worry just yet. Because we know it’s wrong.

LF: There’s an advantage to being under-archived in some ways.
Travis talks a bit about potential of neural link and the strangeness of it all.
It’s like the Matrix. Everything the science fiction writers write about, happens. Maybe there’s a movie in this, about an embodied archive.
Applause. Room tone.10

10) I think about my desk and the liquid seeping from the wall each time I enter this room. I thought about it again while the crew finished setup—is it still leaking—has it since dried? My mind wandered to the window view from my desk—how much the view has changed as Chinatown fights with developers and the City of Toronto to stave off gentrification. So even this simple exercise of documenting the roundtable’s floorplan illustrates the ad hoc nature of community archives and their inextricable ties to its members and—as mentioned throughout the roundtable—the need to consider intergenerational knowledge sharing as archive.

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