THE PERFORMING ARTS COLLECTION
1/ Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Cutting the Collection
May, 2016
Digital print zine
Edition of 100
A 10.5cm X 15cm, 52 page full-colour, double-sided zine with colour cover, a cardboard back, and a yellow spine.
Cutting the Collection is partnered by Thumb Through.
Cutting the Collection features treasure found within the digital archives of the Performing Arts Collection. Skimming the surface of their dance, theatre, and circus collections, we harvested digital copies of raged-edged programmes, costume designs, and juggling balls. A mixed bag of images we in some way responded to and thought we could combine within the pages of an A6 zine to be created especially for the Melbourne Art Book Fair at the NGV. Chiefly in the role of the fan, whilst also acting as the visually curious, we selected images of Moya and Fred Brown juggling cushions, c.1920s and Patricia Redmond and Owen Laurence performing as ‘Latasha and Laurence’. We collected more than we needed to tell a tale, all the better to whittle away the excess later on in the studio. This was our process. We dug about in the archives and left with a wealth of sepia-toned gems.
In the collages within Cutting the Collection, we have layered two or more elements one atop the other. In echo of the process of creating collages by hand, layers serve to mask or reveal, and all in some way to alter. And so you have illustrated costume designs replete with ruffled collars and long feathers atop photographs of stage sets for musical comedies. At first glance it might appear as though we have blanked out what was once a part of the scene, but the closer you look, the more you will see that the additional silhouettes are from a different period or of a different scale. A circus poster collides with a set from a vaudeville show. Our interest here is shape, yes, but mainly the new story it tells.
Pared back, in this way, whilst making these works we were thinking about the ephemeral nature of dance; the thrill of a live performance and the trace it leaves; notions of recording what was, whilst not ever able to capture or document it fully; and the importance of such collections. The transitory nature of all performance, filtered through our own memory of it or through the imagined memories documented by others before us, in the sense of the earlier material held within the Performing Arts Collection, is something we wish to explore further.
A live performance cannot be siphoned in its entirety into a recording (unless specifically created and/or staged for film). It cannot be ‘relived’ fully just by looking at a piece of staging; the work was beautifully fragmented before the curtain closed. The very idea of something so impossible to harness holds great appeal to us. Serving as an exquisite metaphor of life’s cycle, what occurred on the stage at the very moment can never be seen nor felt again. We are left with trace memories, borrowed or otherwise, with costumes that yellow and fade; we are left with silhouettes that tell a little of what was. This “state of vanishing,” as the choreographer Crystal Pite described, is both powerful and quite tragic.
﹏
RELATED LINK,
FEATURING TREASURE FROM THE PERFORMING ARTS COLLECTION, A TINY COLLAGE OF MOVING PARTS ON WET, WET DAY (MUSIC: MALMEQUER, PERFORMED BY BANDA DO CORPO DE BOMBEIROS DO DISTRITO FEDERAL, COMPOSED BY CHRISTOVAO DE ALENCAR AND NEWTON TEIXEIRA)
RELATED POSTS,
BORROWED AND CUT
IN COLOUR
WHIRL, WHOOSH, SWOOP
2/ Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Thumb Through
May, 2016
Digital print zine
Edition of 100
A 7cm X 12cm, 151 page full-colour zine with single colour cover on yellow card and a yellow spine.
Partnering our silhouette zine, Cutting the Collection, and featuring but some of the treasure found within the digital archives of the Performing Arts Collection, this full colour flip book, Thumb Through, sprang into life from a collage of moving parts created on a whim. One of nine new zines made especially for and released into the wild at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Art Book Fair in the Great Hall, NGV International, May 2016.
﹏
RELATED LINKS,
TESTING THE "THUMB-THROUGH-NESS" OF THUMB THROUGH, OUR FIRST EVER FLIP BOOK
TWICE OVER
OLIVE'S CAT FORT (OF THUMB THROUGH ZINES) RAPIDLY EXPANDS
RELATED POSTS,
FAIRGROUND BECKONS
WORK IN PROGRESS
Performing Arts Collection
Arts Centre Melbourne is the proud custodian of Australia's leading Performing Arts Collection
27th of May, 2016
One of the most rewarding things about being custodians of this great Collection is seeing the surprising ways in which people engage with history to create new work. The Performing Arts Collection is a valuable resource for students, historians, writers, documentary makers, designers and other arts practitioners seeking to find out more about Australia’s rich performing arts history. Every once in a while someone comes along and re-imagines the Collection in ways we never thought possible.
Artists and avid theatre-goers, Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison visited the Research Service earlier this year and found a treasure trove of imagery ripe for digital re-interpretation. The result of their investigations can be found in two new zines, Cutting The Collection and Thumb Through which were recently launched at the Melbourne Art Book Fair at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Gracia speaks eloquently about the thought process behind Cutting The Collection informed by "the ephemeral nature of dance; the thrill of a live performance and the trace it leaves; notions of recording what was, whilst not ever able to capture or document it fully; and the importance of such collections." You can read more about the creative process and development here.
Not content with one remarkable publication, Gracia and Louise hit upon the idea of creating Thumb Through as both a flip book and as a moving collage which re-energises the static images in new and unexpected ways. Both publications evoke the brilliant, always ephemeral energy captured (but not quite) in the objects left behind after the curtain has come down.
