Local and Global Links (Asynchronous)
Listening in the Anthropocene: Arts-based Researchers Seeking to Effect Change Locally and Digitally View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jennifer Munday
The Creative Practice Circle (CPC) from Charles Sturt University has been sharing arts-based research and practice for several years. 2020 was the year we planned to bring their collective work together in a locally held symposium and exhibition in the Riverina, a rural region in New South Wales, Australia, along with an online Special Edition publication on the theme “Listening in the Anthropocene.” The aim of the presentation is to show the diverse works of the CPC and their guests that were curated to be presented in the locale, the exhibition space and symposium venue in Wagga Wagga, and how they demonstrate common concerns across diverse field of practice, and the fruitfulness of cross-disciplinary creative work around a theme. During the process of establishing themselves as a group of critical researchers and artmakers two webpages were created as vehicles of communication and documentation, as well as an online edition of academic writing and artworks, which respond to the ongoing online nature of the group. The intention of presenting artworks and ideas in a locale that resonates with the theme – in this case, the environment in crisis – has forged more global communication for the group by including online publication of the outcomes and artworks. The CPC members, as a research collective, have established themselves nationally and internationally as credible voices responding to world needs through their arts-based research.
Strong Houses, Strong Voices: Social Empowerment Through Community-based Creative Collaboration View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christine Scoggin
Strong Houses, Strong Voices is a practice-led research project that uses co-created first-person video narratives to present the lived experiences of a group of post-natural builders currently constructing houses within South African informal settlements. The research was conducted in partnership with South African socio-ecological initiative Qala Phelang Tala (QPT). QPT has developed a hands-on, regenerative approach to improving informal settlement housing that they call “post-natural”—building practices that use common materials such as tyres, bottles, mud, straw, manure, and water to create shack-replacement houses. Strong Houses, Strong Voices centres the stories and needs of the participating builders within the reflexive framework of community cultural development (CCD) practice. In this research, CCD is defined as a process in which arts and cultural practices are utilised by a community—with or without external intervention—to raise individual and collective capacities, empower community members to take collective action on issues that are important to them, and positively affect communities’ positions within the context of larger social institutions. Therefore, the research aims are focused on both delivering benefits to the participants, as well as creating new knowledge within the CCD field of practice. The research’s significance lies, in part, in the proposal and articulation of a transferrable model for community-based creative collaboration that can be used to support empowering CCD practice in other contexts. This paper describes and documents the process for arriving at the model and draws out key themes and questions, through an examination of the use of CCD practice in the research.
Embodiment at the Edge of the Archive: A Case Study in Creative Exhibition Curation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Seth Ellis
This paper examines the 2015 exhibition This Is My Heritage—which opened at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane (Meeanjin in the Yugara/Turrbal languages), and later toured to a number of Queensland museums—as an example of one possible strategy for de-colonialising not just museum spaces, but their archives and the objects within. This Is My Heritage in its final form invited twelve Queensland Indigenous artists, not into the gallery as makers — as is more often the case in Australian exhibitions foregrounding Indigenous culture, though they are still underrepresented in galleries — but into the archive as investigators. The participants were given access to the Queensland Museum’s collected Indigenous materials, and asked to find one that “spoke” to them across time, in collaboration with the Museum’s curatorial staff. In doing so, I suggest, This Is My Heritage presents a redefinition of “audience” for the museum as a shifting set of audiences, and suggests one possible means of reinventing the idea of access through affect. Affect is “prepersonal,” physical, and spatial; it is intertwined with emotion and meaning, but not to be conflated with them. Using affective strategies to mediate between individuals and objects provides an alternate mode of storytelling to the conventional, discursive, dialectic approach historically favoured by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM). This Is My Heritage approached this through the experience of the individual—not an abstract, hypothetical individual as a member of the visiting public, but specific individuals, with specific, entangled relationships to the archive.
Weaving New Borders: Al-Sadu as Cultural Praxis View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Khulod Albugami
For centuries, the pre-eminent craft of Bedouin women has been the ancient practice of weaving, dyeing and constructing tents, dividers and fabrics derived from, and necessary for, a nomadic desert life. The various processes of weaving these ‘beit-al-shar’a’, or ‘houses of hair’, derived from camels or goats is known as al-Sadu. These al-Sadu textiles provide the spatial fabric in which Bedouin society takes place: women design and weave the shakak which determines a tent’s size and the ru’aq which separates the women’s section. Motifs and patterns create links with the past: the fabric acts as a memorial recording the natural environment. Weaving offers a way of thinking about borders as connections, since the division between the tent and the desert, internal and external is always fluid. My current research focuses on how contemporary artistic practice in Saudi Arabia empowers women who have been at the forefront of a flowering in art from the Middle East, and how this relates to their major role in traditional nomadic cultural life. Al-Sadu weavers faced disempowerment not long ago as their spatial practices were threatened by machine production and urbanization, but a new wave of contemporary artists has recognized the value of the unique perspective provided by this un-traditional art history which provides the focus of my research. I am particularly engaged by the vibrant interactions between this ‘craft’ and radical contemporary Saudi art, which is becoming of major aesthetic and commercial interest everywhere.
The Meanings of the Name: Problematics of the Concept 'African Dance'
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alfdaniels Mabingo
Dances and dancers from African cultures and communities are still grappling with the historical forms of colonial and racially-inspired marginalization and objectification. Suffering from legacies of colonialism and slave trade, African dance practices are still treated as low art and exotic fetishes in some circles of the Western scholarly establishment. In the realm of global education, research and practice these dance practices are treated as peripheral subjects that are subservient to Euro-American artistic traditions. Inside the African continent, indigenous dances are not accorded value within the academic contexts where Euro-American educational cannons are held as the basic standards. One of the sites through which marginalization of dances and dancers from African cultures has been projected is the concept 'African dance'. In this paper, I draw on extensive reading on available literary sources to problematize this concept. I unearth the historical developments that informed its coinage and theorization. The study further highlights the implications of this concept on the dignity, ontologies, and epistemologies of the dances and dancers from African cultures. The paper reveals the tensions that exist as a result of the misidentification of dances through theoretical homogenizations, which is perpetrated by teachers, institutions, media and practitioners in the global north. This paper adds to the existing discourses, which seek to liberate dances and dancers from African cultures and position them as valid and valuable knowledge in their own right.
Landscape, Isolation, and Belonging in Performance: The Art of Directing in Aotearoa/ New Zealand View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Vanessa Byrnes
Like a dangerous, potent play, the landscape in Aotearoa/ New Zealand is wild and dynamic. For theatre directors, this environment is a fitting exhortation to transcend the domestic and inhabit the epic through form. The relationship between inner and outer landscapes is especially apt, since theatre is a time-based art form that has the capacity to connect its audience with imaginative, humanistic landscapes: a larger, experiential sky. This paper draws on material from my unpublished PhD thesis and addresses key features relating to the unique situational factors facing the majority of theatre directors in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, and the subsequent opportunities that arise in this context. The enormous independence in Aotearoa/ New Zealand theatre directing - brought about by conditions, environment, and circumstance - is driven by the attitude, aptitude, and capabilities of a unique theatre directing domain. In a flourishing, post-colonial performing arts economy there is enormous potential to engage even further with these freedoms; to explore bigger connections and make the performing arts an essential part of how we live. While the tropes of theatre directing in New Zealand are varied and nuanced, there are common threads that weave together a characterized map of belonging. This follows questions of identity, craft, and belonging in pursuit of the ultimate act for directors; making dynamic theatre that is not flawlessly formed and confined by predictable definitions of ‘art’, but like a high country landscape, liberated, untamed, and, through it, essential and available to many.
Hybrid Cross-cultural Theatre: The Greek Theatre in Luxembourg View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katerina Diakoumopoulou
Theatriki Etaireia Luxembourg (THEL) is the Greek Theatre Society of Luxembourg, which was established at the end of 1987 as a member of the Cultural Circle of the European Institutions in Luxembourg. Since its creation, the Greek Theatre Society has presented around thirty plays in Luxembourg and Brussels. These were plays both by Greek authors and non-Greek authors (Shakespeare, Chekhov, Molière, Goldoni, Gogol, Ionesco, Feydeau, Vitrac, Cossa, Hachfeld, Ensler), as well as puppet shows, shadow plays, children’s plays, and musical shows. The performances are intended not only for the Greek-speaking but also for the non-Greek-speaking audience, thanks to subtitles. The paper examines the new hybrid form of theatre developed in Luxembourg in recent decades. Different theatrical traditions converse with each other and form a unique theatrical amalgam. The repertoire, the directors, the actors, the other actors, the performances, the composition of the audience, the reception of the critique are the elements that compose the limits and the conceptual framework of the hybrid theatrical phenomenon. The example of the Greek Theatre in Luxembourg is a limited local theatrical environment that, however, is representative and reflects world cultural exchanges. Regardless of the different cross-cultural theories, multicultural and intercultural theatre, are the points where cultures intersect and the cultural identities are being hybridized.
