Resumo
This essay arises out of an experimental research project undertaken within the costume archives of The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs – companies which were fixtures of the UK contemporary dance landscape from their inception in the mid-1980s until a sudden cessation of performances in 2011.
The research in question was unashamedly hands-on in nature, foregrounded by a closely collaborative relationship between an artist (choreographer Lea Anderson) and a scholar (writer and curator Mary Kate Connolly). This work confronts the ‘problem’ of performance remains – their material bulk and heft and, conversely, their mercurial and sometimes seemingly weightless nature. Their refusal to be pinned down as discreet objects whilst at the same time taking up significant physical space. Guardians of tacit knowledge and forgotten histories, vessels of the phantasmagorical but also – to look at it another way – aged trash.
Rather than summarising the work undertaken as already described in the recently published monograph, In Smithereens: The Costume Remains of Lea Anderson’s Stage (Connolly 2024), this essay is an informal reflection on a lengthy research journey centred on tactics of Disintegration, Preservation, Transaction, and Display. It approaches this reflection via a lens of ‘weight’.
The physical burden of a costume bundled into a stacked packing box in a freezing lock-up. The oscillating scale measurements of capricious, incalculable words like legacy, history, preservation. The load of a hardback book held in the hand or perched on a university library shelf or floating in a data storage cloud – nominally measured in grams of weight or gigabytes of digital space.
This essay compiles a list of weights; akin to totting up the balance in a ledger or itemising a research inventory, as a means of thinking more broadly, or intuitively, on what might be at stake in this kind of experimental small-scale archival research – relationally, logistically, and creatively. The writing emanates directly from the perspective of the researcher.
The list of weights tallied are archival orphans, cast out from the sanctioned narrative of the project – covert inhabitants of notebook jottings, exasperated SMS exchanges and expletive-laden zoom calls in the midst of a pandemic-stalled project. As the pervasive exclusivity of museological and cultural institutions persists – driving an increasing number of small-scale artistic companies to seek their own archival ‘solutions’ – the essay celebrates what could be termed guerillarchive tactics.
Experimental modes of archiving by the means at hand – logistically, financially, materially, and culturally.
It circles around the tensions between the artist and the scholar in collaboration, between the tangible and intangible, between the recuperable and the lost. It advocates for making and taking up space and weight, physically, virtually, and imaginatively, in our approach to performance remains.
Palavras-chave: Performance remains, Lea Anderson, Costume Archive, Guerillarchiving
