Cirrus@Austlit

(Publication summary)

'Bangarra Dance Theatre’s SandSong: Stories from the Great Sandy Desert weaves together the ‘voice and spirit’ of the late Wangkatjungka artist and activist Ningali Lawford-Wolf and stories of her Country in the Kimberley and Sandy Desert regions of Western Australia. Explored through a series of ensemble items in four acts, SandSong is impactful collective story-telling. The title, SandSong, draws our attention to Indigenous practices of performing history through cultural practice. In SandSong, as in many Bangarra productions, history is here now, and stories of the past are enacted by dancing and singing them today.' (Introduction)

'Two recent song compilation projects draw our attention in powerful ways to how songs are an (often overlooked) vector for oral history. Released as static studio recordings, these songs are also very much part of living practice. They capture poignant first-person accounts of history and are a medium for tradition and story to be carried in the present enabling future inter-generational transmission.' (Introduction)

'Nardi Simpson’s debut play Black Drop Effect is the “immersive” experience the Sydney Festival program promises. Sitting in the stalls, as the sky darkened behind the outdoor stage, I was immersed in the present moment, in January 2020, and in the past too.' (Introduction)

'From 1950, ‘ethnic dancer’ Beth Dean made her living on a lecture-demonstration touring circuit of the dance traditions of Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and North America. To assert her expertise, she claimed to have studied Māori and Australian Aboriginal cultures for a number of years. This article investigates how Dean’s didactic performances drew on American traditions of ethnic dance to present apparently authoritative representations of Indigenous cultures, supported by Adult Education Boards in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia and national arts organisations. I argue that Dean exploited the symbolic potential of ‘corroboree’ as a performance of intercultural communication to establish her authority to speak about and perform Australian Aboriginal dance.'  (Introduction)

Mid-century non-Indigenous travellers in the Australian bush found themselves confronted with a new auditory world, one in which the sounds of the city were absent, and the sounds of the bush unfamiliar. The reckonings of these travellers with aural encounters of people, place and animals often came to stand for a complex set of reactions to being in the bush. The way they listened to Aboriginal music being sung and played around them crystallised perceptions held about Aboriginal people and how they might be located in the Australian landscape. How non-Indigenous authors heard and performed culturally familiar music also reflected ways that they viewed themselves and was a means of bringing the familiar to alien surroundings. In this chapter, I combine accounts from diaries of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land with depictions from novels written within two decades of the expedition to give examples of the way Aboriginal music was heard by non-Indigenous travellers. In the process I tease out some of the perceptions of a range of commentators on Aboriginal culture that are revealed in these musical encounters. I also consider how this sound world was brought to bear on a musical composition by Peter Sculthorpe from a slightly later period and reflect on how the musical setting of Aboriginal song themes reveals similar preoccupations to these literary descriptions.'  (Introduction)

'Exchanges of cultural capital facilitated cross-cultural communication in a variety of Australian contexts, both before and after the arrival of Europeans in Australia at the end of the eighteenth century. In the absence of common languages on the colonial frontier, exchanges of music, dance, and painting can become tangible means of communication between people seeking to understand the culture of others. This book explores the circulation of ephemeral, physical and spiritual media across the lines that separate cultures from one another. Objects of cultural capital are transformed across landscapes and media through technology, people and their relationships with each other and with the otherworldly space beyond.' (Introduction)

'Circulating Cultures is an edited book about the transformation of cultural materials through the Australian landscape. The book explores cultural circulation, exchange and transit, through events such as the geographical movement of song series across the Kimberley and Arnhem Land; the transformation of Australian Aboriginal dance in the hands of an American choreographer; and the indigenisation of symbolic meanings in heavy metal music. Circulating Cultures crosses disciplinary boundaries, with contributions from historians, musicologists, linguists and dance historians, to depict shifts of cultural materials through time, place and interventions from people. It looks at the way Indigenous and non-Indigenous performing arts have changed through intercultural influence and collaboration.'(Publication summary)