A note about this archive by Antony Hamilton
It’s easy to imagine that archiving the work of a dance company would be a straight forward undertaking. There are the performance works with neat titles like episodes in a saga that will keep being written into the future indeterminably. When will the last episode be written? Nobody knows. It’s interesting to imagine looking forwards as well as backwards when thinking about an archive for dance. As Ros Warby once said to us many years ago in an improvisation class, “front body is back body”. Those words left a lasting impression on the way I perceive things, and I think of them often.
Looking at the chronology of ‘past’ works, they mark events across a program calendar as if time and space were as flat as an Officeworks wall mounted 12 month whiteboard planner. But the work of Chunky Move has been anything but flat, and certainly not quite linear. Chunky Move has been more like a bumpy expanding sphere, its surface moving outward, meeting artists and audiences at different points and moments, with occasional spikes and eruptions protruding from its vibrating surface. Over time, choreographers designers and audiences, together and in their own ways have contributed their voices, eyes, ears, ideas and passions to Chunky Move’s dynamism. But we have to give special mention to the many wonderful dancers who have committed their perpetually shifting bodies to the dialogue of performer and audience over 25 years- a dialogue in which each passing moment amplifies our attention and invigorates our senses.
There is something to be said about what dance lays bare in practice. Dance by nature leaves traces in the body. It is an intangible heritage, meaning that the true archive is held inside the practice of dancing itself. Therefore an archive in a digital context is really a thin document of dance’s intangible essence. Ask any dancer or choreographer, what is actually going on when they are attending to their body, working in the space between furious abandon and waiting stillness. The essential liveness of dance, its transient occurrence, and the transmission between dancer and witness are the real stuff that keeps this art form alive. For dance, the archive is intertwined with a persistent awareness of the embodied experience that can not be chronicled or replicated with descriptive words, and is unable to be substituted with still images, writing or video. Dance is permeable and ephemeral.
Documentation, while sometimes cherished as an artefact of the event, can only shadow something that can never be accurately repeated. So this digital archive for Chunky Move is hoped to be an ever shifting container of ideas, exchanges, experiences, memories, practices, images and data, that intersect with people, places, politics, fashion, gestures, style, passions, demands, and so on. The Chunky Move archive is a two dimensional layer of a rich tapestry, that seeks to extend out like a web over time, folding and stitching together the artistic work and lived experiences of those it has influenced, and will continue to influence and inform. In the spirit of dance, it should be a moving compendium and a restless work in progress.
- Antony Hamilton
25.11.20
In this, the company’s 25th year and one that for many reasons will go down in history, Chunky Move has begun a collaborative process of collating records and documentation to honour the company’s legacy, people and works.
This archive is an accumulation of historical records containing documentation collected over the course of Chunky Move’s lifetime. While neither fully comprehensive or complete, we hope it will offer valuable insights into the company’s past and more recent history.
We acknowledge that histories and archival pieces of work can’t fully demonstrate the immense breath of experiences of those who were / are a part of it. However, through this archive, we want to celebrate and honour the extraordinary artists, dancers, choreographers, creatives, producers, production crew and audiences who’ve contributed to making Chunky Move the bold, transformative, intoxicating, boundary-breaking, genre-defying company it is today.
We wish to sincerely thank the 300+ dancers, choreographers and collaborators who generously offered their permission to be part of this archive and a special thanks to those who assisted us to fill in some knowledge gaps. You may notice we are missing some credits and it is important to us that we continue to piece this extensive history together bit by bit. Please feel free to send an email to info@chunkymove.com.au if you identify any incorrect information and or can add to pages where there are omissions.
We also want to acknowledge the many staff who’ve worked at Chunky Move over the years and who may not currently be credited in the archive. Your contributions have been as valuable as those of our creatives so thank you for being an important part of the company’s history.
We want to extend our thanks to those who’ve financially contributed to enabling the company to thrive over the last 25 years. Our sincere thanks to ongoing supporters Creative Victoria, the Australia Council for the Arts, City of Melbourne and to the many individual donors, Trusts and Foundations who have generously supported Chunky Move.
The team at Chunky Move are deeply committed and excited to continue working on this archive and uncovering more and more boxes of video tapes, media clippings and photographs.
We hope you enjoy deep diving into this archive and trust it will transport you back to 1995 where it all began.
- Chunky Move