We become-with each other or not at all.
—Donna Haraway

Preamble
It is August 2024, and I am sitting in the quiet of an old Magdalen Convent laundry repurposed into an art space. I share the space with three art installations. An imposing pile of organic mulch and soil fills the space with heavy earthy scents. Craning my neck, I can see here and there, photographs of dancing bodies; they have been there for some time, and now, their paper slowly disintegrating, becoming compost. Next to the mulch is a screen on which plays a short video artwork. I see bodies dancing, reframed into vignettes, themselves cropped and melted into other frames that become lines that dissolve outside the borders of the screen. Pieces of elegant paper covered with beautiful handwriting are displayed on a few tables in the quietest corner of the space, one reading: I wanted to experience more. #034; and written in chalk next to it on a wall:

There is a Beauty in not everyone
getting what’s happening—
a Privacy. Scribe KCA #2

These installations are all part of a program called What Remains, an event celebrating a decade of the Keir Choreographic Award, an Australian choreographic prize and festival I co-founded, curated and produced, and which now has come to an end[1]. The installations accompany the launch of a book I was invited to imagine—an attempt to preserve but also to reflect critically on the contributions this initiative has made to the broader local dance ecology[2]. Uncoincidentally, the three in-situ installations are by artists who have also been documenting this event, for some, over its entire existence. 

None of these are my works and yet, I am looking at a decade of my own work. While these installations revisit, together with the book, the many dances that have been part of this initiative, they are not archives per se. Nor can they be said to exclusively belong to these artists as the material constituting them belongs to other artists and, for the scribed testimonials, to audiences. And although the invitation to respond to the Award legacy has been extended by me, I can hardly argue that I “curated” this program; I merely “orchestrated,” by offering the “documenters” the provocation of What Remains as a sort of a score to respond to the various archives of the Award. All this could be considered a somewhat luxurious public program to be accompanying the launch of a book. I can see with clarity now how much more it is.

As people start arriving, I become more aware of the dizzying perfume of the mulch, and as I watch how the guests discover and respond to the artworks - perhaps some even recognize their own scribed memories—I know that I am witnessing a form of collective remembering collectively curated, or perhaps even a form of collective composting, like Haraway’s “making oddkin”[3]. It is in this moment, of coming together again for the re-becoming of these works, that I can see a decade of my work at work, not as an archive but as an anarchive and I know that this is how I want my work to be remembered—as a score for collective becoming.

* * *

Philosophers Brian Massumi and Erin Manning have developed the concept of the anarchive to reckon with forms of remembering that are not recognized by the logic of archivisation.[4] While the anarchive can be considered, similarly to an archive, as a “repertory of traces”[5], it is the approach to these traces, or rather their “pull” as Manning explains, that is always activating and orienting[6]. For here, traces are not considered inert but rather “carriers of potential”[7] to be activated and re-created as part of other events, and it is this generative creative process, from the past but for future iteration, that gives it its impulse. Thus, the anarchive is not documentation of a past activity. Rather, it is a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation[8] and it is this pull toward and movement with these traces, that makes the flow of the anarchive radically different.

The What Remains installations are all examples of what escapes the logic of the archive and they all emphatically activate the principles of the anarchive responding to Manning’s interrogation:

“How else, beyond the archive, might we activate current traces toward future eventing? If an event is emphatically that which cannot be archived in advance of its eventing (because its eventing is precisely what makes it an event, and a pre-archiving of it would make the archive the event), what might be distilled from it, that which bypassed the archive and yet did the work of carrying the eventing forward?”[9]

By inviting the What Remains artists to engage with the archives creatively rather than retrospectively, I was asking them to move through the experience of the Keir Choreographic Award by making; and in imagining this public program to support a book launch, I had unwittingly activated a “seeding forward”[10]—an anarchival score to capture the imperceptible and the intangible that archives cannot hold but all that might remain of a dance and indirectly, of my work. Here, I will consider the potentialities offered by the anarchive used as a score to probe how What Remains as event and its artworks might be one potential method of documentation, as well as a way to consider the legacy of a dance presenter’s work while testing its capacities to generate a form of a collective curatorship.

Retrospectives in dance, of bodies of work overtime, are rare in this art form. Documenting dance still comes with the usual challenges due to its ontologically ephemeral condition shared with most live art forms. Choreographers and dancers, with a few exceptions, rarely get retrospectives of their work[11], in stark contrast with other fields of art. Revisitations of past dance events such as What Remains are even scarcer as documenting the work/ings of dance projects or institutions is not a (money and time) luxury many can afford. Of course, books are sometimes published, celebrating this or that performing arts organization or festival, but these are too often institutional self-congratulatory exercises, full of lush photos and official niceties, far from the compellingly discursive catalogues of the visual arts. Invariably, if there are events organized to revisit and remember, appeal to the event’s original archives to inevitably produce other archives (such as books, films, podcasts) and in doing so, they fix what has value to be remembered. The voices, perspectives or even personal archives of those who commission, curate, or produce dance events are rarely consulted or included, and the mechanisms or practices to document their work are close to non-existent.

This may be due to the fact that the relatively nascent field of dance curation still grapples with basic yet fundamental questions, such as whether “this curator-producer-dramaturge-whatever figure”[12] may be a curator or a presenter and whether curating dance can be a form of expanded choreography (Gareis, 2023) or vice versa (Dupuis, 2020). Or it may be because these professionals themselves are not preoccupied with their own legacy. The testimonials of the many colleagues interviewed for my doctoral research, all dance-specialized presenters leading some of the most prestigious dance festivals and organizations globally, attest to this. Judging by the long silences when asked what remained of their work, it was obvious many had not even had time to think about it, endlessly busy with managing their venues and “getting things done”. Some had their own ad-hoc systems of keeping track of their work: editorials written to introduce a season, program notes and brochures of shows curated, and other such ephemera. Most of them considered that it was not for the presenter to be remembered, but for the artists and dances they presented. After all, we are the ‘shadow people’ as curator Andrew Horwitz says so beautifully.[13] 

And yet, documenting the work of dance presenters, as invisible as dance is ephemeral, is important because it is through such exposure of the field that scrutiny and critique—and therefore positive change—becomes possible. Furthermore, the exercise of looking at what endures of a dance presenter’s work is less about its legacy and more about a responsibility towards the durability of what it gives visibility to. For if a dance presenter’s job is to make dance visible to an audience, what does this presence-ing really mean? Does this work start and end with choosing a dance work, the finished “product”, marketed and performed on stage; or is it the actual dancing of that “product”, the event in its embodied liveness? Or is it the audience experience of it? Defining the actual object of a presenter’s work can indeed have multiple articulations that can steer curatorial intentionality, its ethics and ethos and equally, clarify what may need to remain of this work.

I argue that, from a presenter’s/curator’s perspective, what remains of a dance work is what is remembered by the audience, however incomplete or partial, and therefore the “becoming visible” of a dance is intrinsically intertwined with the “becoming visible” of a presenter’s work. The question becomes then, what tools are there to capture the many curatorial inner laborings and layerings made up of so many conversations, encounters, gatherings, rehearsals that presenters experience, witness, enable, as they journey with an artist or a project? What could render visible such a granular membering back of a work carried out in the shadows indeed, often unknown to or unheeded by the public? Traditional archiving methods could rise up to the challenge of capturing such new terrains, but would the result do justice to the live presence-ing nature of such a work? What else could there be that can hold and record without fixing?

It is in the process of co-editing the book on the Award that I realized that the book itself—in most circumstances such a formidable tool for archiving—was far from being an archive as it does not set out to retrace the history of the Award, rather it uses it as the springboard to commission writings about things that this initiative also was about: judgement, criticality, internationalism, community. While the book contributors were invited to seed new writings in resonance with these ideas, the What Remains installations for its launch were something else—not an archive and more of a score for remembering, unfolding similarly to a choreographic one. In dance, scores give direction of and for movement, but they are not needed for dance to happen, they merely give the syntax and the impulse, the rest is food for imagination and improvisation. It is not the body of the archive that was central in these installations, but multiple bodies of memories preserved by active archivists who have journeyed with the event as it manifested. These authors are “archivers” of a different sort, just as What Remains was not a retrospective. This is an “assemblage” of witnesses, who have transformed traces of the past into new modes of presence. While all the original dance works still belong to their authors, their photographic, video, scribed documentation became the petri dish of other works, each a different way of remembering, embracing the many and at times messy, random and ungraspable ways in which memory works.

It is precisely this “seeding forward” mechanism of the anarchive that I consider key to how we might document a presenter’s work.[14] The anarchive asks the presenter to consider that their work does not end when a show meets its audience, rather that this is where it might begin: with how it might endure in their memories. If dance audiences remember, durably, a dance, isn’t it then what it might truly mean to make it present, in the now-ness of its live eventing, and in its persistence in the future? This would imply that a presenter’s work should embed and cultivate practices of remembering that preserve the dance in articulations and activations with a view for a “future eventing” rather than calcify in the past. Hence the importance of understanding what other layers the event itself generates that can contribute to a taking into a future. Consequentially, the anarchive automatically orients the temporality and rationale of the presenters’ work toward the future while it plans its own future becomings. 

The anarchive does not cancel the archive in the process of rememoration, but it does not need it so much because it is a different kind of remembering that it seeks to activate: the “muscle memory”. Dance studies have long developed fascinating concepts such as metakinesis[15], kinaesthetic empathy[16] and somatic attention[17] that together with recent studies in neuroscience and neuro-aesthetics confirm that watching dance is a kinetically embodied act. We experience dance with the muscles, and we make sense of it with our senses. This means that a dance presenter’s work is also located here, in how it attends to activating affective responses. While these cannot be dictated, nor even anticipated by the archive, they can certainly be stimulated and nurtured.

This cannot be more palpable than with SCRIBE, multidisciplinary artists Leisa Shelton’s scribed testimonials, which has kept trace, over time, of the audience’s “fresh” sensations captured immediately as they stepped outside the theatre. For each edition of the Award, artist-as-scribes were waiting in dimly lit quiet, intimate nooks of the venue for audiences to volunteer feelings and opinions, and if they were yet unsettled or unsettling, they would gently prod the feeling to form the thought. Scribing with majestic handwritten elegance, they are at once witnesses and chroniclers of both the audience’s labour and of the artists’ intentions, archivers of sensed (a)liveness, and now these beautiful libraries of affect are yet another layer that will make up what will be remembered of those dances. Their function is double-folded: each time they are displayed, they constitute a collective archive of individual affect with potential to re-activate their authors’ memories, but significantly, they act as re-sensing seeding devices enabling resonances with our own memories of the same dances or simply, to sense again and together what others have sensed before. It is a different kind of redistribution of the sensible[18], an interactivity that relays affect from body to body while blurring the lines between subjects and objects. SCRIBE is thus the ideal archival score capturing both the experience and the affect in the making, while it also “catches us in our own becoming.”[19]

Therefore, it does not take much for the anarchive to be activated and its agential potential to engage sensorially, rather than precisely with a past event, opening a vast creative terrain for presenters in anticipating practices to “carry forward” the viewers’ future memories while appealing to their “muscle memory” as a tool not for remembering but of member-ing forward, assembling the affect of the corporeal differently. This is possible because the anarchive allows for pursuing “a different kind of potential for feeling, not immediately structured, but in passage, in a swerve, veering away from the given, even as it takes the given up and attunes it to the new.”[20] The pursuit of these other affects activated by imprecise tools for rememorating opens up the possibility for presenters to escape the rigid temporality of the archive and its hierarchies of value, facilitating a different timing and hierarchy of how things need to be remembered. 

Etymologically, as Derrida reminds us, arkhe—archive, “names at once the commencement and the commandment.”[21] The anarchival score offers presenters a curatorial intentionality that democratizes the framing and the contexts of its framings and consequently, of what matters. It opens the possibility of valuing not only what has been “properly” archived but also the potentiality for anarchival projects that may witness and remember a dance with absences or imperfections or consider the interstices of its folds. Such examples are both the video and photo installations of What Remains. Photographer Gregory Lorenzutti’s installation takes the photographic fragmentation of dance captured on paper and returns it to nature, paying tribute to the disappearing nature of live performance, but also exposing them to a slow de-composition, from composition to compost, seeding new soil off past dances. Cobie Orger’s dance film uses the video footage of forty works to activate her memories filtered by a viewfinder. Referencing this partial view divorced from the spaciousness of a theater, her reframing, made of collage, cropping, skimming, and overlays, reveals a striking misremembering through re-member-ing of so many bodies and their movements. 

Both these works use a process of transduction, and in their shifting from the archive to the anarchive, they not only disrupt the time of the archive but mobilize multi-modal incarnations and embodiments that exceed both the original event and its archives. Neither of them could exist without the support of traditional archiving (photo or video documentation) but they all use them as “waystations” avoiding a linear mapping of the past, or a re-staging of what has been, and offering renewed embodiments. Importantly, the anarchival score liberates the curator/presenter’s body of work from the body of the institution and its institutional memory and all the data that need to be “officially” remembered: reports, brochures, publications, posters and other ephemera. It acknowledges that for a presenter, documenting all that dance does in the moment of its doings is either impossible or, institutionally and ideologically (mis)guided, and in both cases limited by the short term. And even more importantly, if the presenter’s work is often prescribed and enabled by the institution, how it is remembered cannot be contained by it, because the presenter’s anarchival work escapes the archive, the institution and as in this case, even the presenter.

But there is something else that the anarchive does well in its agential offerings, enabled by its transduction mechanisms. It can incorporate and embody at the same time, as it is composed of and composes with simultaneously, to create potential new bodies of works, events, affects—multimodal in their renderings, belonging as much to the initial authors as they belong to other artists, to curators or to audiences. This “becoming visible” recognizes that there is no one single custodian of what needs to be remembered; and importantly, that this “seeding forward”, while it can be unwittingly or creatively planned by curators—yet offering incredible potentials for curators to anticipate and creatively curate the anarchive of their own work—is an organically collective endeavour, a form of collective remembering collectively curated. Manning, paraphrasing the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, reminds us that “there is no general togetherness, only a togetherness in the event.”[22] If what remains of a dance presenter’s/curator’s work are these renewed moments of togetherness seeded from original works into new works into new affects collectively curated for, with and by active witnesses, then indeed there can be no better way of making a dance present.

Angela Conquet is a French-Australian independent dance curator, arts worker, editor, translator, and researcher. She is currently co-curator and coordinator of 2025 Lyon Biennale’s Forum program and a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.