Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion is a series of encounters between Diana Baker Smith and the Australian dancer, choreographer and artist Philippa Cullen (1950-1975).
During her brief career, Cullen forged new connections between movement, sound and technology. She is remembered by her peers as a brilliant, genre spanning artist, who profoundly shaped Sydney’s early experimental art scene. When Baker Smith began researching Cullen in 2015, she found two boxes of archival material listed in the National Library of Australia, one of which had gone missing. The second contained records of one of Cullen’s most expansive projects. 24 Hour Concert, 1974; a collaborative, durational performance event, staged in multiple locations across Sydney, involving more than thirty participants.
Like many ephemeral works from the 9170s, 24 Hour Concert lives on only as traces - degraded video, blurry photographs, handwritten notes - and in the memories of those who were present at the time. In conversation with one of Cullen’s collaborators, composer Greg Schiemer, Baker Smith learned that 24 Hour Concert took place on the day when clocks are put forward for daylight savings, meaning it ran for only 23 hours. A second, hour long concert was planned for the following year, but Cullen died before it could take place.
The story of this ‘lost hour’, together with the documents, fragments and other anecdotes surrounding 24 hour Concert, became the starting point for a series of new works by Baker Smith. In keeping with the collaborative spirit of 24 Hour Concert, she worked with curator Bree Richards, dancer Brooke Stamp, artists Ella Sutherland and Samuel Hodge, and musicians Bree van Reyk and Miles Brown, to produce Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion - a multivocal dialogue across time and place, and between bodies. These collaborative works suggest that, while traces can disappear from view, they might also be embodied and performed in multiple ways through strategies of intergenerational care, rewriting and reimagining. With a commitment to speculative reinvention - as a way to carry the past into the present - Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion embraces and tests the generative capacities of Philippa Cullen’s archive.
Notes from talk @ Artspace Sydney
The lost hour
1hr improvisation - to stand in for the hour that was lost from Philippa
A work that can be crafted into a dance film, a performance, an archive
Objectivity in documentation and the archive
What is a generative archive?
The archive becomes a generative site when the archive becomes renewed
Contemplative collection
How may archival material aid the reactivation? Store and show choreographic work
Barbara Cleveland - to research
The archive acting as a site to think about what has been written and rewritten
The memories and oral histories in the archive - the archive produces all sorts of problems
The play between the personal and the institutional
It’s a place to start, to begin a conversation
Archival knowledge
Rethinking creating something new in dialogue with the present now
Archives don’t go and live neatly, they are generative
The work lives in collaboration with other people
Collaboration troubles the idea of genius art history that we are told of
Developing a catalogue of gestures that have emerged out of the archive (could relate to Leyla Stevens’ work)
Developing choreography together
Layers of collaboration taking place
What is the score?
Concepts to include in methodology & literature
Archive as a generative making place: a future-facing position that facilitates further questioning, while at the same time producing something altogether new
Scriptive things that invite a person to dance - Robin Berstein
Considering a score to be read, reiterated & reinvented?
A process of temporal gaps, narrative discontinuities, and disjointedness that put “the past into meaningful, transformative relation to the present.”
Embodied acts of remembering & misremembering
Speculative futures & narratives - speculative accounts of an event that never happened
Reimagined and remixed as a dance for cinema - perhaps this is what the dance is doing… the dance enacting an archive of a history… filmic/documentation
The archive is not a static place and like a performance it is both a “doing” and something “done”.
I’m a dance maker and curator working across moving image and photography. My practice is informed by ritualistic gestures, spatial encounters and transcultural narratives as well as counter histories. Working within modes of representation that shift between documentary and speculative fictions, I’ve been interested in the notion of counter archives and alternative genealogies, as well as the performance that lies within those spaces.
I used to think my work was looking at memories but now, I don’t think that’s it, I think it’s about speculative accounts about what was or what could be.