December 13: Abigail Sebaly ARCHIVIST

Rauschenberg summed up the muscle of art and how it manifested in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company: “All of us worked totally committed, shared every intense emotion and, I think, performed miracles, for love only.”

Abigail Sebaly

So many of us who’ve been part of the art of dance recognize our experience in these words. Abigail Sebaly, the archivist who quotes them in an article for the Walker Art Centre Magazine, practices the extraordinary art of distillation, clarifying and sustaining the materials of artistic activity for us and the future.

The Muscle of Art: How Cunningham and Rauschenberg inspire us to flex. by Abigail Sebaly

At 1130 Jervis Street, home to MascallDance from 1981-2020, digging through a treasure trove.

Sebaly has brought this work to MascallDance, where she and Jennifer Mascall have voyaged together through accumulated historical materials of Mascall’s 40 plus years in the field and archiving them.

The process has to date been entirely funded through donations from supporters. Please join them and allow this work to continue.

Excerpted from conversation with Jennifer Mascall (JWM) and Abigail Sebaly (AS) as they archive, December 2019:

AS In an archival process, the presence of the artist isn’t a given. In my experience the artist is seldom present; they are not available for various reasons, and sometimes not eager. This is a unique situation, an exciting one.

JWM An example – I just opened a box filled with issues of SPILL (a 70’s periodical)..and to my great surprise it turns out I wrote articles in very many of them. Here I am, reading my writing. All of the ‘70s, it transpires, I wrote. I wrote articles, I wrote dances. When I came west and EDAM began, this just vanishes. It’s remarkable to see this and now I yearn to write. The process reveals how my memory of the world silences and overrides as the years bring new things. The process of archiving has taken me aback – here are written dances I don’t remember writing and correspondence so rich in detail and information, allowing all kinds of comparisons and insight into the changes in thinking, then to now.

AS I witness this process of discovery and the resulting connections - through-lines in work that are often not otherwise realized.

JWM The process is revelatory. And exhilarating… I think of that first day when Abi said “We can do this!” I love coming to work.

Housewerk at Hycroft / MascallDance

Abi, do you advise creators to partner with archivists along the way, not only in the late stages of a career?

AS Definitely. Being an archivist during such an unstable time in the world makes me keenly aware that freezing something in the past can’t be relied upon as a guiding principle. It is an enlivening and energizing process to archive a creative life. For researchers, archivists, creators and the public, it is not a dead and frozen form, but very much a generative and regenerative one.

Tell me about how you are working.

AS There are a total of 45 boxes, which we are dividing into 20, concurrently consolidating boxes.

Is there an interview component?

AS Each item is labelled, and I constantly ask Jennifer questions, trying to record details in the note section of inventory.

JWM There’s a shift in our rhythm this week I notice. Before, I’d say “look at this!” and Abi would immediately take a photo with her phone and record it. This week we are silent, throwing out paper, focussed. It’s very introspective; each item offers details that bring information flooding back, and throw me into a different place/time/relationship and so forth. Then I pick up the next item and hurtle into a completely different and equally detailed place, much if not all of which I’d forgotten or haven’t thought of for many years.

True Lies by Jennifer Mascall with Susan McKenzie and William Douglas.

AS The approach we’ve made is influenced by the fact that the organization has had so many different administrative workers over many years. There’s a lack of consistency in how information is ordered and many miscellaneous boxes. Traditional archival theory and practice has you maintain the original order, assuming that it may be the closest to a chronology, whereas in this case there’s a need to bring more consistency.

JWM That idea suggests a reverence for an instinctive knowing on the artist’s part that strikes me as not reflecting how very random many of us artists are, forging ahead, seldom looking back, wasting nothing. Emily Carr used to use her old paintings as wrapping paper.

What else distinguishes this particular process, Abi?

AS The AV materials in this collection. The breadth of materials from pneumatic tapes to films to mini-cassettes, CDs, DVDs, etc is different than most. We don’t know either the contents or their condition, and we can’t check, which complicates matters.

JWM Yesterday, Abi took out a box full of mini CDs and CDs and arduously labelled each item individually.

garden dances, MascallDance (image 1) Simone Kingman, (image 2) Kira Schaffer, (image 3) Susan Kania, (image 4) Ron Stewart / Susan McKenzie

What’s the most unexpected thing you’ve unearthed to date archivally?

AS Over the years, I guess it was finding John Cage’s astrological chart. It was wild, I couldn’t quite understand the symbols it was written in. Unexpected.

For me in this collection, it has been very powerful to look at the period in which Jennifer produced Footnotes, seeing connections with people in that project who transect with my own world and work like Carolyn Brown, etc. There was a sense of the interconnectivity of it all.

About Abigail:

Abigail Sebaly is currently pursuing a dual Master of Archival Studies and Master of Library and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her extensive professional background in the arts began as a dancer. She served as an administrative assistant to the choreographer Merce Cunningham and the director of special projects for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York. More recently she spent 3 years cataloguing and undertaking collections research on the Walker Art Center's Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection of over 4000 sets and costumes. In Canada, she has performed archival work for Jennifer Mascall, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery on the UBC campus, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity's archives, where she processed the 1982 Canadian Everest Expedition Collection

She holds an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, a Graduate Certificate in Performance Curation from the Institute for Curatorial Practice at Wesleyan University, and a B.A. in English and B.F.A. in Dance from the University of Michigan. She also received a Fulbright scholarship from the U.S. State Department to spend a year in Melbourne, Australia studying performing arts festivals.