'PROLOGUE Whitefella says: 'Now I want you to condense 70,000 years of ancestral lineage, of continuous culture and creative practice, of complex totemic, skin and ceremonial systems complicated by 229 years of colonisation, survival, government and social policy that continues to actively oppress your peoples and sovereignty into a two-minute elevator pitch or marketing blurb, but make it exciting and make it accessible'.1 *·· Rachael Swain's recently released book, Dance in Contested Land: New Intercultural Dramaturgies (Palgrave, 2020), coincides with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Broome-based, internationally renowned Indigenous and intercultural contemporary dance company, Marrugeku. At first, the Sun King wanted to dance and the society of the spectacle was born, long before Guy Debord put it in a book; then 'pointes' took us to the skies and when we came back to the floor, Westerners scattered spectacle around the globe. Later, we got excited relearning to walk and ran outside of the theatre and we wrote manifestos to say 'no' to virtuosity, to moving and being moved, to glamour and transcendence, then 'yes' to conceptualising experience, affects and sensations, 'yes' to non-sense and illogics, and more recently, 'why not' to dancing on walls and roofs, in museums, in text, on screen or not at all.6 And as we moved from postmodern to non-dance to post dance to danses ďauteur, during the late 1980s - 1990s, the global interest in dance as idea, practice and product grew to be so impressive that it resulted in a surge of dedicated dance venues, festivals and infrastructure to create and present dance. In the undeniable process of intellectualisation (theory and praxis), contemporary dance took a somewhat narcissistic turn in its processes of 'self-isation'8 even as it expanded notions of choreography - the politics and critique of representation, authorship, agency, trans-individuation, queerness, and labour - to focus on 'expressive concepts that desubjectivise and disobjectivise relations between movement, body and time'. The dramaturgies that accompanied these intellectual dance meanderings have also evolved.' (Publication abstract)
