13 minute read
The Archives of Karen Jamieson Dance
by Charlotte Leonard
The archives of Karen Jamieson Dance (KJD), where I have worked as an archivist for the past three years, is both a performing arts archive and a living and evolving entity. It is growing, changing, and being continuously shaped by use and access, as well as time, money, and other resource factors. In this sense, the KJD Archives provides a case study to illustrate what is meant by the notion of “archives'' in the context of an active, non-profit performing arts organization. Through this examination, I hope to offer practical advice to those interested in getting a handle on their own archives, and to demonstrate how the work of KJD, particularly in recent years, has been closely tied to accessing and reflecting upon archival materials.
The Creation of the Archives
Founded in 1983, Karen Jamieson Dance Society has generated countless records of administrative, artistic, and cultural value, and continues to do so to this day. Materials pertain to Jamieson’s early career, Terminal City Dance, various awards and accolades, and the upwards of 100 choreographic works created over the past 40+ years. However, amidst changes in management, funding, and emphasis on the creation of new works, the handling of these bulk of records was not a top priority, and so they languished for several decades – in filing cabinets, boxes, off-site storage, and under the choreographer’s front porch through the rainy Vancouver months.
The first activity to give shape and substance to these materials was undertaken by Managing Director, Pamela Tagle, who pursued funding for digitization of VHS tapes through arts grants being offered in 2005, prior to the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. This application was successful, and rescued years of precious footage from further damage and degradation by creating digital copies that live on. Having video evidence of Jamieson’s work throughout the years in an accessible format was an important step in chronicling her significant legacy and impact. In conjunction with a website, these materials helped to convey to the public a sense of the company’s history, as well as clarity and context around the direction it was moving in.
The next innovative idea Tagle had was to recruit students from the University of British Columbia School of Information (UBC iSchool) Work Experience Programs to come and develop the archives further, while gaining experience towards their coursework and future careers.
This next phase of the KJD Archives creation saw a total of six UBC iSchool student work placements, of which I was number four. These placements – some paid Co-op positions, others for-credit internships – brought about the organization, documentation, and digitization of the records of all types of media, as well as the creation of several far-reaching and informative projects.
This student-led process began with the creation of multimedia inventory lists, which were based on existing library cataloguing systems, rather than archival principles. In many ways, this initial approach to the materials has served the company well, as instead of arranging by provenance (where the materials originated from) or the order they were found in, the choice was made to organize by choreographic works. This approach would not have been viable if the order of materials, their particular groupings and relationships to one another, had carried significant informational value, but as Tagle had re-filed everything, she assured all incoming students that this was not the case! With this freedom, we were able to make the collection findable, and usable in a way that reflected the work of Karen Jamieson chronologically, rather than attempting to preserve the messiness of several decades of different recordkeepers.
In the early days, as with many archives that were made up of inactive records needing to be processed, there was an emphasis on taking inventory of what was there and in what format. Several inventory lists of digital materials were made, and eventually, a catalogue of all analogue textual records was created. These lists were further developed to create the finding aid we have today, which is a list of all the materials we have relating to each piece. Once again, this document is non-traditional in that it does not represent boxes and files lined up neatly on shelves, but rather files and groupings of records assembled according to choreographic works and general administrative categories in a simplified, accessible way.
The Life of the Archives
The KJD Archives have been arranged over the years in such a way to serve the unique needs of the company. This organization is not rigid, and is designed to support the company’s activities, and provide access without barriers.
Some of these uses of the archives include crafting social media posts, newsletters, and other promotional materials, and populating and updating the website – the main resource for information about Karen Jamieson’s life and legacy, and an important vehicle for providing updates to members of the community, as well as funders.
The archives also facilitate scholarly engagement and the creation of new works and publications. We receive research requests for both academic and personal reasons, from scholars, artists, past collaborators of the company, and dancers from KJD’s Carnegie Dance Troupe who are applying for grants or jobs. The Carnegie Dance Troupe is composed of multidisciplinary artists and participants from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside community who may not have access to all the necessary resources to complete an application, therefore we also offer assistance with building portfolios and resumes, and providing materials by burning DVDs or uploading media to Youtube. In most cases, the researcher is interested in a specific piece of work or multiple pieces, and therefore, the arrangement by choreographic works responds to this tendency and enables findability.
The archives have also been leveraged in more recent years to support KJD’s creative work, by serving as the inspiration and material for new projects and providing primary source materials as evidence and content for retrospective endeavours. An example of this is KJD’s ongoing Body to Land Project, which looks back at significant works and reconsiders them in the present day. The current work under investigation is Stone Soup, a 1995 touring piece that tells a rich, landbased story of respect, asking permission, and reconciliation. Using documentation from the archives – performance video, photographs, textual records – and newly captured interview footage, a conversation takes place that reveals the significance, both past and present, of the cross-cultural work that KJD has engaged in throughout the years.
Through this work, the archives have taken on a life of their own and have become central to the company’s transition from a primary focus on the creation of choreographic works, to community outreach and engagement, retrospective and legacy projects, and transmission of the company’s mission and values to the next generation.
In order to facilitate this vibrant life of the archives, certain tasks have been necessary. As previously mentioned, organization, a sense of order, digitization, and written documentation have all provided the KJD Archives with enough structure to support the activities of the company without risk of information loss or opacity.
The KJD Archives are structured into three distinct record groups: Administrative Records, Choreographic Works, and Dance in the Downtown Eastside. From there, each individual file is named, its contents described, and, if there’s time, each item! Item-level description is not yet a reality at KJD; however, having a good sense of intellectual control over materials at a higher level has proven adequate for the needs of the company and researchers.
The Passing on of the Archives
Projects are one of the main ways that the KJD Archives are transmitted to the broader community.
A significant example of this is our first oral history and archival research project – Coming Out of Chaos: A Vancouver Dance Story (COoC). COoC reflects upon and tells the story of the 1982 collaborative performance work, Coming Out of Chaos, to unravel its influence and its place in the emergence of contemporary dance in Vancouver from the 1960s to the present day. My role as the archivist was to assist the project’s Creative Director, Emma Metcalfe Hurst, by doing archival research, writing, and helping to create and populate the resulting website - kjdchaos. ca, which was awarded a City of Vancouver Heritage Award for Living Heritage in May of 2023. COoC was also presented at several conferences locally and internationally, and went on to win the Art Libraries Society of North America’s Worldwide Books Award for Electronic Resources in 2024.
This project allowed us to not only use but build upon existing materials, with the creation of oral history interviews and through networking with local individuals and archives to capture and share information. Central to this project was the role of archives – emboldened by people – to tell stories, provide material for reflection, and make connections. The project is divided into narrative chapters telling the story of Coming Out of Chaos and its resounding impact on the Vancouver dance scene. Throughout these chapters, the archival materials provide context, aids for remembering, and visual support. In the fourth and final chapter, the discussion of the piece’s impact switches to address the embodied archive, referring to the transmission of Jamieson’s choreography to a new generation through mentorship to recreate a section of the piece, with archives close at hand for reference and reflection.
According to Karen Jamieson, “What is exciting about Coming Out of Chaos: A Vancouver Dance Story archival project is that it places the lens firmly and with intention on the Vancouver dance community at a certain period of time, on a very specific era. We see interconnections and entangled roots. We are made aware that artists – certainly dance artists – don’t operate in a solitary state, but are constantly influencing and being influenced by the entire matrix, the ground out of which they are emerging and growing from.” Taking this idea a step further, KJD hosted a live event in the Fall of 2021 that presented a documentary film about Terminal City Dance, followed by a conversation between Karen Jamieson, Savannah Walling, and Terry Hunter – the original members of the collective, whom the film featured. Terminal City Dance was an experimental performance collection, featured in the first chapter of COoC as part of the story of dance in Vancouver and its many interconnecting and branching points. The idea behind this event was to exemplify embodied archives in a live setting, through the real-time sharing of stories, memories, and impressions, occasioned by archival materials but transmitted through the lived experiences of those who were there.
These different examples of memory work involving archival materials demonstrate how we extend the term archive to apply to various activities that involve the collection, preservation, and transmission of knowledge more broadly. We find this extension is natural when it comes to dance archives, wherein so much of the knowledge and content is in the sharing and doing, rather than the static record. Through my involvement in this project, I’ve come to greater appreciate and understand the nature of archives as living entities, capable of emoting, memorializing, and telling stories that will transcend time. However, as other living beings, they cannot exist in isolation, and must be continuously seen, heard, and interacted with to evolve and shape the discourse.
The need for collaboration and discussion around archives is also relevant with regards to Indigenous Traditional Knowledge (TK) in our holdings. We have sought to open our archives up to dialogue and collaboration through our implementation of Local Contexts Notices. These Notices, which appear on our website as icons with attached text, are developed by Local Contexts – a global initiative that supports Indigenous communities with tools that can reassert cultural authority in heritage collections and data. They act to notify visitors to our website when we suspect attribution to a particular work is missing or incomplete and state that we are open to collaborate in correcting any missing information and ensuring respectful handling of materials. For more information, please see localcontexts.org. Inhouse, we have also written our own Traditional Knowledge (TK) Policy to act as a guiding document for how we manage Indigenous TK in the archives, and for future collaborations.
We have also been able to share materials and data originating from our Dance in the Downtown Eastside program by working with other related repositories. We began working with the University of British Columbia in 2021 to transfer a sampling of all of our Carnegie Dance Troupe materials to UBC cIRcle and the Downtown Eastside Research Access Portal (DTES RAP). This involved creating metadata for each dance piece and the associated items, and providing full credits and attributions to everyone involved, which is something that we always strive for. At an earlier point, we were also successful in receiving funding through the Irving K. Barber BC History Digitization grant, which allowed us to digitize a large number of our VHS tapes and house them on Arca Digital Repository – a platform that creates opportunities for sharing BC digital scholarship and heritage. The outcome of both initiatives was improved reach and access to the work of KJD, and greater discoverability for those who might be unaware, unlikely to contact the archives directly, or unable to visit in-person.
Conclusion
KJD’s approach to its archives centres around access, use, respect and acknowledgement. As such, we make every effort to extend the archives online and out into the community through various projects, data-sharing, collaborative initiatives, web-based outreach, and events. We provide as detailed a picture as possible of the whole of the archives through our public-facing finding aid and seek to provide as much context, credit, and archival materials as we can through our website and artist directory. KJD is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year with an event based around – you guessed it, our archives! See kjdance.ca for more information about this event and other upcoming projects and performances.
Charlotte Leonard is an archivist, librarian, reader, and lover of all things dance and movement. She holds a Masters in Archival Studies and a Masters in Library and Information Studies from the University of British Columbia, as well as an Honours BA in English Literature from Concordia University, Montreal. She is passionate about grassroots archiving for non-profit organizations, personal archives, and facilitating access to information. In addition to being the Archives Manager for KJD, she works as a full-time archival consultant in Vancouver, B.C.
Title image: Savannah Walling and Karen Jamieson in Coming Out of Chaos, 1982 © Chris Randle
