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Records of music and dance held in archives and museums can take tangible forms – as audiovisual recordings, or as photographs and musical notation that capture performance. However, for these embodied forms of culture, an archival record can store only the shadow of a song or dance. In this book, we consider the ways that ephemeral cultural forms like these expose the limits of the archive. The contributing authors do this through collaborative and creative research that explores relationships between people and their material and ephemeral culture. In this introduction to the volume, we consider how embodied practice draws our attention to the limits of archival records, and to the aspects of performance, cultural maintenance and connection to culture not present in the archive. We also highlight the necessity of relationships, Country and creativity in practising song and dance, and in revitalising practices that have gone out of use. This thinking takes us beyond matters of access to archives and of democratising and decolonising the archive.1 We begin this venture with a reflection on recent collaborative efforts to re-embody a Ngarigu song, involving the three editors as research partners.2 We open with this case study to position ourselves within this research, to ground the introduction in our lived experience of co-designed arts practice, and to highlight similar approaches and methods that take form throughout the book.

Re-embodying a Ngarigu song

In April 2021, a renewal took place in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales of the Ngarigu “song of the Menero women” whose archival traces in the form of a piano arrangement Jaky and Linda had spent some years reinterpreting as a Ngarigu-centred record of performance practice.3 After considerable archival research, in December 2020, we (Jaky and Linda) had taken the next step in our process of enquiry by trying out the re-created snow increase ceremony song, feeling it in our mouths, throats and bodies as co-created vocalisation, with the assistance of percussion provided by Allan Marett. At this phase, each of us was tuned in to the other to find the tempo and tessitura that felt right and performable for us, that gave us strength to sing out and to imagine performing it with others – with the “Menero women” whose singing had inspired John Lhotsky to write the song down, and with the potential wider circle of contemporary Ngarigu people.

Jaky describes the ongoing resonances of the song as she returned to Canberra:

We all agreed that the next step was to take the song back to Country, and draw it into an “ever-widening circle” of community and kin.4

After the December 2020 imagining of how the song was performed in 1834, and an additional rehearsal at Sydney Conservatorium of Music in February 2021 joined by Lara Troy-O’Leary, the team decided to try to find the exact location suggested in the historical literature – Mutong.5 It was with great excitement that Linda and Peter Waples-Crowe first walked onto the rural property on the bank of the Snowy River on 14 April 2021 and gazed at what is very likely the place where Ngarigu women performed the song and Lhotsky also felt the “majesty” of this music. It stayed with Lhotsky as it has stayed with us, who have performed it again, on Country. When the group, including Jaky, Linda, Peter, Lara, Amanda and co-researchers, Jacinta Tobin, Neal Peres Da Costa, Graeme Skinner and Toby Martin, convened there a day later in glorious autumn weather, it seemed as if everything just fell into place. With the graceful curve of the Snowy River at our backs, and the view of the High Country before us, over several rehearsals we negotiated a performance of the song that felt supported by the environment. The point at which it really came together as a performance was when Lara, the youngest Ngarigu singer, asked to be able to lead because she had a feeling for how the song should sound. When she began to lead and Peter accompanied us on boomerang clapsticks, we all fell into a groove that we were able to repeat with an ease and naturalness that gave us a sense of completion (Figure 1.1).

Most remarkable was the effect of the reimagined snow increase ceremony song; it invoked the biggest dump of snow in decades. In May, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that an early and snowy winter was coming and by June snow was predicted beyond the alpine region for a very cold winter 2021.6 Winter 2021 continued to be the best cold season in long memory, powdery, beautiful, deep snow that many said was a miracle in the midst of climate change predictions of warmer alpine temperatures. This is what we imagined the song was meant to do and every time it has been sung by a community member since then it snows. To the Ngarigu, and other Aboriginal people involved in this project, bringing the snow is possibly the most important impact of this renewal of cultural practice.

The song, as published by Lhotsky, was not intended as a historical record, nor as a way for future generations of Ngarigu to understand it as an Indigenous cultural performance. It was to create an amusement for settler-colonists of his time with an engaging local flavour that drew lightly on the Ngarigu performance. However, it was in being faithful to that flavour that Lhotsky preserved so much of the original.7 In our next iteration of the research project we turned to the parlour music of the nineteenth century to understand how this music was received and understood by a non-Indigenous audience. Lhotsky’s parlour music was sung by Amanda Harris with Neal Peres Da Costa playing a nineteenth-century square piano in a concert at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music that brought to life archival records of music performed in Sydney in the 1820s and 30s.8 In the same program the corroboree version as performed by the research team in Ngarigu Country was again presented, this time in a public performance. The audience appreciation of both versions was resounding, but the corroboree song again worked its magic and stayed with people long after the performance, as reported back to the team.9

The song is now being embraced by Ngarigu of the High Country who see it as an important continuing connection with ancestral practices that are focused on caring for Country. Bringing the song back into Ngarigu cultural practice has been a very moving experience. Jaky, Linda and Amanda held a meeting online with the Tumbarumba Kunama Namadgi Indigenous Corporation in September 2021, and a further community workshop with the Ngarigo Nation Indigenous Corporation in April 2022.10 For some in the meetings it was a remembered song, and the experience transported them to a moment when Ngarigu corroboree practice was still a lived experience. One Elder, Uncle John Casey, spoke of having witnessed the song sung by women at a corroboree held to coincide with the drowning of Old Adaminaby for Eucumbene Dam in 1957, during the construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. Uncle John remembered that the song had been sung at a fast tempo, faster than how Amanda and Jaky first sang it for the meeting. When Linda sang it again at a faster tempo Uncle John commented, “You nailed it”, and there was a sense of real joy in the whole group that an Elder had embraced the song. In this way the song can now go forward into renewed practice, a process that was also discussed in that meeting. Ngarigu community members are looking forward to continuing to perform the song on Country in the early autumn, at the time of year when it was heard by Lhotsky so long ago.

The song will not necessarily have an easy path back into community use. In renewing a practice from archival records, the experience will always be one that has different meaning for individuals across a community. A collective sense of identification with a song such as this does not ensure it will have a collective practice for its future performances. Some are concerned that it may only be a song for women, as suggested in its published title “Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe”. Others would have it performed as Lhotsky witnessed it, likely men leading the song and accompanying on percussion with women singing as a group.11 Archival records become contested objects in community politics, open for interpretation and potential dispute. Nevertheless, from the point of view of the Aboriginal researchers and performers in this initial exercise there is great value in revealing archival records and ensuring community members are able to re-engage with and feel a sense of ownership of these hidden artefacts of cultural life that would otherwise remain just ink on paper.

Embodied research beyond the archive

These efforts to bring the song back into an embodied form through connections to widening circles of community have drawn our attention to a number of themes, many of which are explored later in the book. The first theme highlights how collaborative practices shape our understanding of embodied culture. As the initiators of singing this song, and as Ngarigu women, Jakelin Troy and Lara Troy-O’Leary felt the weight of the task – the difficulty of knowing how to sing something that had gone unsung for so long, that carried with it the possibility that singing it might connect them to countrywomen and ancestors; the discomfort of using their voices in unfamiliar ways, and in an awkward vocal range. Through shared time, experimentation, laughter and collective fumbling attempts, singing this old-made-new song became an increasingly joyful experience, and a less uncomfortable one.

The second theme highlights the way written and archived renderings of ephemeral culture can alter and obscure meaning. Experimenting with the piano version of the Ngarigu song as a collaborative process between a singer (Harris) and a specialist in historical performance of nineteenth-century music (Peres Da Costa), playing a nineteenth-century square piano, confirmed the findings of earlier processes of singing through the Troy–Barwick version. In collaborative learning and performance of the song, previous singers had found the return to a different tonal centre after the C section almost impossible to accurately execute. For Harris and Peres Da Costa, too, singing and playing the piano version confirmed that this decorated final section made most musical sense when it was imagined as a coda after at least one repeat, rather than as a core part of the song. The song’s structure in its piano form could be made sense of when brought back into sounding through the piano and through the bodies of the musicians interpreting it, in a way that its rendering on the page eluded.

The third theme concerns the assemblage of cultural objects for exhibition and the contextual layers that are overlaid through this process. The Ngarigu song was assembled in a new form through the meticulous work of Barwick and Troy in drawing together historical documentation, consulting moon records and maps, and applying their knowledge of musicological and linguistic principles to stripping back the overlaid European musical arrangement to its core elements. This work led to a new realisation of the song in the notation published in their 2020 article.12 In order to be sung, this version had to be brought back into relationship with singers, with Country, and with a community of practice. What that community looks like is a complex story. The singing of a group of women to mark a full moon, to recognise the seasonal change, and to effect an ecological action of bringing snow was one context, the writing down of the song during explorations of the natural environment of alpine Ngarigu Country by a Polish scientist was another. An additional context was the environs of colonial Sydney where the song was notated and where accompaniment was created by European settler “musical gentlemen”. Each context had a different kind of proximity to the cultural object of the song, both in geographical and temporal terms, and also in musical ones. The possibilities for making musical, cultural and artistic sense of this archival record of song then were multi-faceted, and our team’s responses have also taken a number of forms. These various contexts could begin to be interrogated only by bringing the song back into relationship with place, with singing and music-making bodies, with the articulation of language words, and with the ears of listeners.

Embodied culture and the archive

The themes that have emerged from re-embodying the Ngarigu song have broader relevance for working with records of cultural practice held in archives. By prioritising embodied expressions of cultural practice, this work has led us to think as much about the limits of the archive, as about its potentialities. Embodied modes of enquiry repeatedly destabilise the very definition of “archives” and can reimagine different forms in which cultural knowledge can be held and conserved for current and future Indigenous stakeholders. Re-embodying historical performances creates another kind of store of songs, dances and stories that has the potential for long-term continuities and safekeeping, and that points to other ways that cultural heritage records are “archived”. Some recent scholarly literature pushes the idea of archives in new directions, imagining archives that are interconnected places and bodies, that are inscribed in the senses, and that can be physically incorporated into creative art practices and take on entirely new forms.

In her chapter in a volume on Indigenous research methods, Māori literary scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville rethinks the forms that archives take in her field of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous writing. Evoking Epeli Hau‘ofa’s conceptualisation of Oceania as a connected “sea of islands” rather than as disconnected nations in a vast ocean, Te Punga Somerville articulates the forms an archive of Māori “texts” might take in a “sea of archives”:

Te Punga Somerville’s reimagining of archives that might exist only in their embodied forms and in their gathering together of people, things and ideas aims to foreground the ways that Indigenous people remain connected to their cultural heritage and each other, and to de-emphasise the idea that cultural heritage is scattered and disconnected in its archival housings.

This reinscription of records of culture onto bodies and places is also articulated by Achille Mbembe. Theorising South African archives, Mbembe emphasises the inscription of the archive in the senses. Archival objects are “removed from time and from life” and “have no meaning outside the subjective experience of those individuals who, at a given moment, come to use them”.14 In undigitised archives, the physical object is situated within “a tactile universe because the document can be touched, a visual universe because it can be seen, a cognitive universe because it can be read and decoded”.15

Returning to Te Punga Somerville’s evocation of texts that may also be sung, woven or danced, we are reminded of the ways in which not just text and visual records but also intangible culture can be archived. To add to Mbembe’s sensory categories in archives of performance, archival objects can also be located in an auditory universe because they can be heard. But songs that are only heard and not sung undergo a shift in their mode of communication, in their culture keeping and interrelationship. We can listen to a recording of a song, and watch a performance of a dance, but these records remain disembodied unless they are, in turn, sung and danced.

The omission of the auditory from Mbembe’s sensory universes is indicative of the nature of archives as primarily visual records of history and culture. Two of the co-authors of this chapter collaborate on a large audiovisual archive that makes sound and moving image available through digitisation and online delivery.16 But audiovisual archives only partially supplement these lopsided sensory universes, which are made whole only by being reunited with people and their subjective uses of historical records. Te Punga Somerville’s sea of archives weaves together the historical records’ connected parts in order to restore the whole, or indeed to fashion new wholes. Mbembe and Te Punga Somerville’s rethinking of what the archive is, what it does and how meaning is made of it shows that it is only in interaction with the archive that its holdings are rewoven into their stories and histories. No di sembodied archive contains a complete record. Many of these visual and textual resources are, after all, the incomplete records of practised culture from societies where stories, histories, lineages and knowledges are passed down from voice to ear, and body to body. The embodiment of the stories builds a collective archive through the act of passing on knowledge from generation to generation.

Several scholars offer new creative responses to material archival records that bring them back into relationship to the body. Narungga poet and scholar Natalie Harkin builds on the practices of her ancestors to create new works of art from historical records, weaving shredded letters from her grandmother and great-grandmother into traditional Ngarrindjeri baskets. Harkin links her weaving of archived letters to the reclamation work of an international community of Indigenous artists:

This artistic practice not only makes sense of the incomplete, traumatic records of child removal and destruction of family and community relationships, but also interrupts the record keeping of the archive, weaving past, present and future into connection and continuity. It is:

Flipping the perspective of historical cultural records as the starting point for connecting past, present and future cultural practices, Robert Lazarus Lane describes Yolngu cultural custodian Wukun Wanambi’s “archival art”. Lane explores performance of ceremony and art making in which “the artwork becomes not merely a way to document something but is itself another iteration of that which it is documenting”.19 Describing Wukun Wanambi’s ceremonial activity, Lane upends the sequence of ethnographic documentation, arguing that ceremonial practice is already a practice of documentation and preservation:

The idea that ceremonial practices are already modes of archiving culture renders records of these ceremonies mere snapshots of the complex temporal, interpersonal and physical act of documenting culture. Archives make fragments of cultural practice, and artistic practices can again make whole culture out of fragmented archival records through processes of re-embodiment. They also turn “collections” of archival objects into new kinds of assemblages made up of interconnected parts that bring together past, present and future. This re-embodiment has the effect of reconstituting “collections” so that they are no longer defined by their collector (often an individual bound up in processes of colonisation), and instead are re-embedded in community and practice. People’s “belongings”, collected and exhibited in institutions, are brought back into belonging to communities of cultural practice through music and dance. In this process, assemblages in both archives, and in museums, might usefully be brought into a single frame of reference. Music, dance and archives are then only part of the story, taking in a wide range of performed cultures and of historical records of both material and ephemeral cultures.

Summary of chapters

In the chapters that follow, practitioners and theorists have come up with a range of approaches to understanding archival records of music and dance, and enlivening them through re-embodying and re-embedding them in the communities they came from. The eight chapters have a strong emphasis on collaborative research. These co-authored and sole-authored chapters use the methods of history, ethnomusicology, dance theory, archival studies and creative practice to think through the uses of archival collections in historical and contemporary performances of music and dance by Indigenous people. The collection is strongly located in the Australian continent where the editors and many of the authors reside, with a focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practices. This regional focus is complemented by contributions from authors across the globe, with chapters on Māori, Haudenosaunee and Indigenous Taiwanese music and dance. Though each chapter considers records from public and private archives, the living practice of music and dance is also strongly present across all chapters. These embodied performance practices draw on so much more than archives, showing that Country, place, ancestors go far beyond the fragmented records of culture in archival and museum collections.

In Chapter 2, Reuben Brown and Solomon Nangamu consider how archival recordings can sustain current practices of manyardi in Western Arnhem Land. They weave an intricate story of contemporary performances of manyardi, sung by Nangamu and his countrymen, that materialise ancestral practices and conjure connections between historical events, people and Country. They find that although archival recordings are often used to recall old songs and renew their practice, their use does not result in a homogeneity of musical style. And that while old recordings do prompt the singing of songs, singing is also refreshed by the presence of Country, gifting new songs and evoking old ones that can be passed down through subsequent generations.

In Chapter 3, Jack Gray and Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s dialogue performs an exchange between dancer and scholar, Māori artist and non-Indigenous observer, colleagues and friends. They explore Gray’s choreographic interactions with his ancestral house, Ruatepupuke, now in the Chicago Field Museum. In relating to Gray’s wharenui through dance, Gray seeks to engage not just with the physical house, but also with the intangible spaces around it. By bringing living dance practice into dialogue with the ancestral house and its history of removal from an ancestral home into the museum, Gray and Shea Murphy explore the ways this creative work bridges a kinship of both time and space.

In Chapter 4, Genevieve Campbell, Jacinta Tipungwuti, Amanda Harris and Matt Poll look at histories of collecting material culture alongside records of performed culture from the Tiwi Islands. They show how “collections” by museums and archives caused records of culture to be dispersed rather than assembled. Tipungwuti and her countrywomen in the Strong Women’s Group are re-assembling those disconnected parts of culture through renaming the material culture and by bringing their live performances back into dialogue with the material parts of cultural practice held in static museum displays.

Chapter 5 also brings performance into the space of museums and galleries. Rosy Simas describes her process of whole-body deep listening that awakens memory and evokes Haudenosaunee ancestors, culture and history. Simas theorises the Native body as an ever-evolving archive of genealogy, history, culture and creation. She details her creative work We Wait In The Darkness, a dance performance, gallery installation, and later museum exhibition that awakened collective memories stored in the body, allowing them to be communicated to a live audience. In this way, Simas conceptualises the body as archive for histories of performance.

In Chapter 6, Clint Bracknell describes a creative process of reanimating historical songs sung by the Nyungar ancestor  Miago. Bracknell demonstrates the way that Nyungar song revitalisation is dependent on incomplete and fractured archives. Exploring his collaboration with Gina Williams, he offers a template for music revitalisation of endangered song traditions. Their work brings traditional song practice into relationship with contemporary creative practice.

In Chapter 7, Marianne Schultz also looks back at historical performance records, recounting two parallel histories of international performances of Māori music and dance. The two singers, Princess Iwa and Bathie Stuart, and their touring shows between 1910 and 1929 showcased hybrid performance to international audiences. One Māori and the other Pākeha, each singer represented the cultural practices of Aotearoa New Zealand on public stages. Interrogating these histories of performance, Schultz seeks to reimagine the sound and movement missing from static archival records to enliven historical music and dance.

In Chapter 8, Chi-Fang Chao shows how embodied theatrical performances create accounts of Taiwanese Indigenous cultures that provide an alternative interpretation to the archive, constituted by historical Chinese writings and illustrations, Japanese visual records and modern ethnographies. Chao suggests that the productions of the Formosan Aboriginal Song and Dance Troupe preserve cultural memories in a form imbued with all of the possibilities of sound and movement excluded from static archival objects. Through these performances, cultural revitalisation and resistance to archival representation is realised through powerful social action.

In the final chapter, Jodie Kell and Cindy Jinmarabybana analyse new and old interpretations of the “Diyama” song in the Burarra language of Arnhem Land. Kell and Jinmarabybana show that among the multiple varying accounts and stories present in archives and oral histories, contemporary singing continues to construct cultural identity. They suggest that the differing interpretations of the “Diyama” song’s history by men and by women continue in contemporary realisations of song performance, and that both musical innovation and continuity of tradition make up the song’s story.

References