RE-PLAY REPORT Frank Van Straten Fellowship By Amaara Raheem
Amaara and Antony looking closely at the past.
C.o.r.r.u.p.t.e.d 2, choreographed in 1998 by then Artistic Director of Chunky Move Gideon Orbazenek, physically depicted corrupted data in the digital age. In general, when data corruption occurs, a file containing that data produces unexpected results when accessed. Error. Alteration. Unusable. Overwriting. System crash. Malfunction. Chaos. Some of the words associated with data corruption and also with this dance work, which led Dance Australia to declare, “Chunky Move is heading full-on into the 21st century.”
In September 2023 when I was awarded the Frank Van Strated Fellowship the first choreographic move I made was to invite current Artistic Director and co-CEO of Chunky Move Antony Hamilton to re-play a section of an early work of Chunky Move.
This brings up the question ‘what is it to re-play something?’
Screenshot of the video C.o.r.r.u.p.t.e.d 2 (1998) now in the Australian Performing Arts Collection at Arts Centre Melbourne.
Antony remembered this section of the dance watching this grainy video.
One way to think about re-play, is a process by which to create a signifier that emphasises the pastness of an event. Or as Stefan Kaegi co-founder of theatre company Rimini Protokoll writes, to “recall events whose aftershocks are felt to this very day”.
Another way to think about it, as the organisers of the Re-Play It Again Symposium write, “Perhaps artists, of all people, are the ones most keenly attuned to this disjunction, aware, as they often are, that there is nothing new under the sun, that everything is a recycling of something else.” Or another way to put it, it’s as if the future is already in the past.
Antony chose C.o.r.r.u.p.t.e.d 2. He didn’t dance in the original staging of the work but was part of its re-staging in 2002. Antony hadn’t performed the work in over twenty-two years but even as we first talked about it in the small, fluorescent lit research room at Hamer Hall, the ghosts of the movement leaked out of his body, like smoke.
Antony remembering some of the choreography of C.o.r.r.u.p.t.e.d 2 in the research room at Hamer Hall (November 2023)
After an initial viewing of C.o.r.r.u.p.t.e.d 2, Antony and I had a week of rehearsal at Chunky Move studios in Sturt St, Southbank. These studios are in and of themselves an archive. Their very floors and walls hold so much history of this company’s work. So many movements mapped into this discreet pocket of air. We entered a precise reenactment of a section of the movement together. Me observing and notating the process. Antony reenacting the choreography. We watched the video repeatedly and watched the movements arise out of his body. With each repetition small details returned. In doing so, the point was less to re-stage the entirety of a dance work that happened in 1998 but to explore what happens when Antony - with his unique history of Chunky Move - constructs the past in the present.
It seemed inevitable that James Wright was the right person to record this re-play. In my initial email to James I wrote,
“Antony and I have been spending some time in the archive, and we've been talking about who would be best to make a copy of the copy! I'm particularly interested in you because of your own history with CM but also, looking at your website, your work in making so many records of dance / performance. The eye behind the many 'I's.”
James Wright has been documenting Chunky Move’s dance works for many years. He’s videoed most of the work choreographed by Antony Hamilton and the artistic director before him, Anouk van Dijk. To James’ question what is it that we’re trying to record I replied,
“Antony and I met yesterday in the studio and what we've come to is that we'd like you to video not so much a finished outcome - as a staged polished dance work - but rather the process of remembering a dance work, in rehearsal. The movement material is about 2 mins long but Antony is learning it from video and this is what we'd like to capture: the back and forth of remembering, forgetting, and the repetitive motion of returning - to something that is then changed in the act of re-doing - maybe what I mean is, I’d like you to capture the process of complicating time.”
James Wright making a record of the record.
I also invited sonic thinker, artist and researcher Dr. Jordan Lacey to come into the studio and audio record Antony in rehearsal. I wanted to hear the footfall, the crack in his knee every time he crashed sideways. To c.o.r.r.u.p.t. the viewing experience as it were.
Or more importantly to listen to the archive. And then to listen better.
Jordan Lacey testing audio recording equipment to capture the ghostly sounds of Antony’s movement.
What is my role here, as the Frank Van Straten Fellow?
My role is multifarious and still evolving. However in this instance, it was the glorious and utterly unique situation of being the sole witness of this re-play process. I stood in the carpeted room of the Arts Centre archive as amidst boxes and books wisps of movement escaped from Antony’s body-memory. I was reminded of choreographer Yvonne Rainers famous words, ‘the mind is a muscle’. Then I witnessed Antony return again and again to the video, weaving certain moves back together from this blurry, grainy, decomposing film and also, from a different image - his inner eye. A landscape of memory held in muscle, bone and flesh. At first full of holes but then over time, I witnessed how the holes became a whole.
My role here is to contribute methodologies that are conversational, relational, social and embodied rather than a historical analysis. To perceive Chunky Move’s archives through approximations, lived experiences, spidery webs, forgetting and remembering, through physical imagination, facts-as-fiction. To explore how a dance collection acts as prompts for stories, and how each archival image also holds stories in and of themselves.
Here’s an interview I recorded with Chris Thompson for Vision Australia Radio, in the archive room itself. Pouring over files and boxes and remembering our past - mine and Chris that is - for we met in those early years of the 90’s, when Chunky Move first began operation; when Chris Thompson was Artistic Director of St Martin’s Youth Arts Centre where - aged nineteen - I stepped onto the creaky boards of a theatre and felt, for the first time, those hot stage lights burn so brightly into my eyes as I fell down, down, down, like Alice, into Wonderland(s).
Listen to the interview here.
