Situating the Body: Choreographies of Transmigration

Abstract

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.

Renegotiating Identity Markers in Contemporary Halling Practices

“…Whereas Hansegaard embodies the Norwegian in a way that follows the halling tradition's use of technique and bravura, Heide works with a deconstructive strategy, emphasizing small elements and using involvement of the audiences in a very different way. This corresponds with the claim made by Fensham and Kelada, who argue that choreographic works can be seen as broader dialogues of nation, power relations, and identity (2012, 407). In fact, even if the question of “the nation” might seem out of date in today's Norway, a desire to embody traditional dancing roots can be seen in the choreographic works of both Hansegaard and Heide.…”

“…Perhaps this can be coined, in the words of Chakravorty (2010), as a remixing of tradition and new elements. One could say, rephrasing dance scholars Rachel Fensham and Odette Kelada (2012, 395–410), that Hansegaard's efforts to revise his primary dance technique will not be successful in hiding his (originally) acquired impulses and imaginations. These involve working actively with dance styles and movements outside of the halling realm, as can be seen in his work 8.…”

Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa

“…8 In doing so, I argue, it also makes use of visual and scenographic image and a conscious application of 'the beautiful' in particularly striking ways to produce a 'visceral' performance event (Machon, 2009) full of affective power (Thompson, 2009), in which experience exists prior to analysis or understanding, and that draws audiences, theatre makers and the refugee community into an encounter that requires a 'kinesthetically empathetic' (Foster, 2011;Reynolds & Reason, 2012;Fensham & Kelada, 2012) engagement that challenges, implicates and provokes through feeling responses. 9 The intention of this section is to investigate the dramaturgical strategies employed in Every Year, and particularly what is meant by 'the immediate specificity of the body' in what I would describe as a choreographic dramaturgical approach that attempts to engage with a question posed by Stuart Fisher: 'how can dramaturgy engage with the aporia of an experience that is irreducible to the facts of a situation?…”

“…5-6) But, as Kalpana Ram suggests, this does not mean that refugees or migrants 'simply exist in the past' -they are future-oriented but this orientation to the future, or 'anticipatory orientation', is disturbed and characterized by anxiety (2000, p. 262), which is indeed true for the central character, Aggie, in Every Year. Fensham and Kelada (2012) argue that the versions of childhood that rustle through the bodies [of immigrants] is more than a memory of home. Indeed, it is the energetic connection between fantasy and subjectivity that sparks the transposition of forgotten languages, stories and spaces of inhabitance into the immediacy of an encounter with the experience of 'homing '.…”