This paper aims to ask questions about how interculturalism might be informed by thinking through choreography. It examines the techniques and strategies of two Malaysian-Australian artists, Chandrabhanu and Yap, whose transmigration has constructed new forms of subjectivity from the memories and histories of dancing bodies. It asks how embodied experience, that includes dance knowledges, adapts before and after other social and political adjustments? It will examine how their choreography develops as a means to imagine the self beyond hegemonic political and social models of identity. In this regard, we have utilised the work of Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis to theorise the concept of the situated imagination and Sara Ahmed to complicate an understanding of diasporic experience in relation to home and belonging. We 'trace the cross-pollination between various states' in migratory bodies as forms of intercultural embodiment. Through discussion of two productions we consider in what ways Chandrabhanu and Yap establish modes of performative, and thus affective belonging, to place and nation.
In 'Dancing the transcultural across the South', Fensham and Kelada argue for the importance of incorporating the contribution of Dance Studies when examining the complex 'entanglements' of migration, interculturalism and globalisation. The article locates dancing within current intercultural debates, in particular utilising the idea of transculturalism to inform a concept of 'trans/dans', and foreground movement as localised expression. Culturally specific readings of dance as the articulation of moving bodies and site for experiential and artistic expression, can speak to the intricacies of social and political mobility. Embodiment is posited as central to examining how dance expands understandings of corporeal transmission and intercultural exchange in ways that are not restricted by monolithic categories of history, nation or culture. In this article, key scholars from Intercultural Studies and Dance Studies scholarship are referenced in order to map the rich territory offered by this productive interdisciplinary approach.
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