Written by Rachael Swain and published by Palgrave Macmillian in the New World Choreographies series, December 2020.
Dance in Contested Land traces an engagement between Marrugeku and un-ceded lands of the Yawuru, Bunuba, and Nyikina in the north west of Australia. In the face of colonial legacies and extractive capitalism, it examines how Indigenous ontologies bring ecological thought to dance through an entangled web of attachments to people, species, geologies, political histories, and land. Following choreographic interactions across the multiple subject positions of Indigenous, settler, and European artists during a period of intense choreographic development for the company between 2012–2016, the book closely examines projects such as Dalisa Pigram’s solo Gudirr Gudirr (2013) and the multimedia work Cut the Sky (2015). Dance in Contested Land reveals how emergent intercultural dramaturgies can mediate dance and land to revision and reorientate kinetics, emotion, and responsibilities through sites of Indigenous resurgence and experimentation.
Swain’s book brings to the fore these indigenous dramaturgies for us to pay attention by seeing, listening and feeling. It reminds us that there is no seeing without responsibility, no understanding without accountability for action. It is an important, and most overdue, contribution to decolonial thinking in dance and to confronting the colonial implications (or denial) that exist in much dance theory and practice. — Angela Conquet, Australasian Drama Studies
Dance in Contested Land: New Intercultural Dramaturgies can be purchased as an eBook (entire book or by chapter) or hardcover copy HERE.
Cover image: Dalisa Pigram and Miranda Wheen in Cut The Sky. Photo: Rob Maccoll.
Written by Rachael Swain and published by Palgrave Macmillian in the New World Choreographies series, December 2020.
Dance in Contested Land traces an engagement between Marrugeku and un-ceded lands of the Yawuru, Bunuba, and Nyikina in the north west of Australia. In the face of colonial legacies and extractive capitalism, it examines how Indigenous ontologies bring ecological thought to dance through an entangled web of attachments to people, species, geologies, political histories, and land. Following choreographic interactions across the multiple subject positions of Indigenous, settler, and European artists during a period of intense choreographic development for the company between 2012–2016, the book closely examines projects such as Dalisa Pigram’s solo Gudirr Gudirr (2013) and the multimedia work Cut the Sky (2015). Dance in Contested Land reveals how emergent intercultural dramaturgies can mediate dance and land to revision and reorientate kinetics, emotion, and responsibilities through sites of Indigenous resurgence and experimentation.
Swain’s book brings to the fore these indigenous dramaturgies for us to pay attention by seeing, listening and feeling. It reminds us that there is no seeing without responsibility, no understanding without accountability for action. It is an important, and most overdue, contribution to decolonial thinking in dance and to confronting the colonial implications (or denial) that exist in much dance theory and practice. — Angela Conquet, Australasian Drama Studies
Dance in Contested Land: New Intercultural Dramaturgies can be purchased as an eBook (entire book or by chapter) or hardcover copy HERE.
Cover image: Dalisa Pigram and Miranda Wheen in Cut The Sky. Photo: Rob Maccoll.
