dance theater events that often feature archival audio, images, and research sources. Her work seeks to interrogate societal ideas of historical and contemporary womanhood and embraces Jewish themes and the activism and leftist politics which are central to her Jewishness. Hallie is currently a Fellow at the Performance Project at University Settlement. Her recent work has been shown by transvisions, Undiscovered Countries, The Craft, and 7Midnights Physical Research. In addition to her dance practice, Hallie’s poems have been pub- lished by Gigantic Sequins, Indolent Books, and Z Publishing House, and her writings on dance have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Contact Quarterly, Dance Magazine, and Dancegeist Magazine. She has held roles in dance archiving at the Library of Congress, Jacob’s Pillow, and Dance/USA. SARAH NGUYEN (she/they) is an information researcher and movement practitioner, investigat- ing the ephemerality of dance, the processes and ethics of preservation and representation, misin- formation crises among diasporic communities, and privacy of sensitive data. In collaborations with experimental video and audio artists, they use archival records, oral histories, and analog and digital technologies to reimagine memories of trau- ma. Previously, Sarah contributed to programs that advocate for openness and preservation of at-risk media: CUNY City Tech Open Education Resourc- es, Preserve This Podcast, software reproducibility with NYU Bobst, and the Mark Morris Dance Group Archives. Her recent works have been presented at The Craft, 92Y Mobile Dance Film Festival, the Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings Film Festi- val, and various technology conferences. Currently, Sarah is a PhD student at the University of Wash- ington Information School, and Archives Fellow for Dance/USA and AXIS Dance Company. 1 Sutherland, Tonia. 2019. “Reading Gesture: Katherine Dunham, the Dunham Technique, and the Vocabulary of Dance as Decolonizing Ar- chival Praxis.” Archival Science 19(2): 167–83. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09308-w 2 Sutherland, Tonia. 2017. “Making a Killing: On Race, Ritual, and (Re)Membering in Digital Cul- ture.” Preservation, Digital Technology & Cul- ture 46(1): 32–40. https://www.degruyter.com/ document/doi/10.1515/pdtc-2017-0025/html 3 Sutherland, Tonia. 2019. “Social Media and the Black Travel Community: From Autonomous Space to Liberated Space.” http://scholarspace. manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/59657 4 https://www.bam.org/dance/2018/halfway-to- dawn 5 Carbone, Kathy Michelle. 2017. “Artists and Re- cords: Moving History and Memory.” Archives and Records 38(1): 100–118. https://doi.org/10. 1080/23257962.2016.1260446 6 The concept of “jazz time” was brought up during a series of classes with Nia-Amina Amor, movement artist and educator (https:// velocitydancecenter.org/artists/nia-amina-minor/), during the Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation 2021 summer series. Their workshop series was titled “The Move: Experiments from Inside the Groove” where we explored the history of Black social dance, jazz, and rhythm through movement of our bodies.
which offers access to their materials— another gray area which I hope to acti- vate in my creative work. SN: Ugh, your piece and description is so beautiful, Hallie. It reminds me of the idea that there is no such thing as a neutral archivist or archives and each viewer brings in their own biases and relationships that shape the nar- rative. In contrast, my recent work is more about creating archives for the stories that have been traditionally invisibilized by institutional archives, so my intentions are to center the underserved voices even if they don’t follow “archival best practices.” In September 2020, a few personal life events happened in the midst of the pandemic and heightened social inequalities: I graduated from a Mas- ters in Library and Information Sci- ence program, I moved from New York City back to the West Coast, and I started an Information Science PhD program (first generation in my fam- ily). Also, I’d been growing out my long, pin straight, thick, black, vir- gin (no chemicals) and remy (cut and tied in its natural direction) hair for a decade and it was time to cut it. In light of these moments, I conjured an experimental dance film in preparation to shave my hair and start fresh. This is the contemporary history that moti- vated the dance film you saw in March 2020, 30 x 3 virgin remy: $200 OBO . Inspired by Jeff Friedman’s research on oral histories and “time conscious- ness and embodied communication,” I recorded an oral history with my mother about her life as a six-year-old in rural Viet Nam during 1972-1974. Her memories navigate her auntie’s long hair, how it symbolized luxury and malevolence, even though her auntie was the only family member who accepted her parents’ forbidden mixed Teochew and Vietnamese mar- riage. After my mother’s father was imprisoned by the Communist party and her mother was banned from bringing her mixed heritage children into her parents’ home, my mother’s
auntie generously took my mother and her siblings in to live and work on her farm. In collaboration with musician and video artist, Ramin Rahni, we cre- ated movement and music following the story’s disjointed narration that is common to many immigrants’ sto- rytelling of past traumas. After more than 45 years, this was the first time my mother was comfortable recalling and sharing these fragmented memo- ries, similar to the complex and multi- layer identities you mentioned, Hallie. To accompany the oral history, we browsed Library of Congress cat- alogs, Internet Archive, and other homegrown online libraries to pull inspiration from Viet Nam specific musical instruments, dance, apparel, and imagery. It was disappointing to find the majority centered images from a U.S. soldier’s perspective, exoticization of Vietnamese villagers, or tropical tourism. Luckily, I had access to old family albums. I digitized and incorporated these paper ephemera into the dance film. Similar to what you said, Hal- lie, there’s much labor and context involved in building an archive; I had to do the tedious labor to situ- ate the context of my mother’s bud- ding archive and set up a stable 3-2-1 backup plan — the foundational backup strategy that any person con- cerned with preservation should fol- low. In short, 3-2-1 means creating three copies of the object to be pre- served, saving each copy in three dif- ferent locations, saving one copy for daily access, and the other two for longer term storage. Existing archives do not represent my Vietnamese American experience, so I create dance using archival mate- rials as a means to regenerate mem- ories as a reimagined creative space, moving through and with trauma without letting the sorrow overpower potential joys and justices in life. HALLIE CHAMETZKY (she/her) is a performer, choreographer, writer, and archivist grateful- ly residing in East Harlem, New York City. Her choreographic work unites movement and text in
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