The Pan's People Papers: A Glamorous Archive

The Pan's People Papers is a Transmedia project developing over three years by the artist-researcher Marisa Zanotti and the choreographer Lea Anderson. The project responds to the archive of the work of British choreographer Flick Colby and the 1970s dance group Pan's People (1968-1976). The project comprises 'papers' in different forms including live interactive online work on Facebook and Twitter (Paper 1: A Legion of Echoes: Sept 2015), filmed 'reconstructions' of archival dances, academic presentations and written documents, and an online archive of the project currently in development. This presentation will explore issues arising from A Legion of Echoes pertinent to the symposium these include: Artistic strategies developed in the creation of the work such as reading the dances of Pan's People as flawed documentation in need of correction and how dancers in the project were positioned both as users/reconstruction experts to correct these errors: The use of Conducttr software in developing the project. How technologies and processes might be devised to address archival issues in relation to reading or playing obsolete moving image formats such as those identified in the BBC's archival project whereby the equipment needed to play formats is broken or no longer available. This leads to a loss of archival documents. In creating The Pan's People Papers the body is considered as a technology. Public involvement in maintaining the archive on YouTube has been a key part of developing the project particularly in relation to questions arising in the research from the ongoing disappearance of Jimmy Saville from the BBC archive. The research is currently investigating how the language of the archival documents of Pan's People that are grounded in televisual techniques specific to the 1970s which 'glamour' a viewer suggest a strategy for archiving A Legion of Echoes through a specially designed platform