Dancing the Transcultural across the South

Abstract

In ‘Dancing the transcultural across the South’, Fensham and Kelada argue for the importance of incorporating the contribution of Dance Studies when examining the complex ‘entanglements’ of migration, interculturalism and globalisation. The article locates dancing within current intercultural debates, in particular utilising the idea of transculturalism to inform a concept of ‘trans/dans’, and foreground movement as localised expression. Culturally specific readings of dance as the articulation of moving bodies and site for experiential and artistic expression, can speak to the intricacies of social and political mobility. Embodiment is posited as central to examining how dance expands understandings of corporeal transmission and intercultural exchange in ways that are not restricted by monolithic categories of history, nation or culture. In this article, key scholars from Intercultural Studies and Dance Studies scholarship are referenced in order to map the rich territory offered by this productive interdisciplinary approach.

Keywords:

• transcultural
• intercultural
• dancing
• choreography
• embodiment
• translocal
• immigrant communities
• inner differentiation

Notes

1. An extended critique of Sachs and Lomax's influence on understandings of dance is offered in Susan Leigh Foster, Worlding Dance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 3–7.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Fensham

Rachel Fensham is Professor of Dance and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. Author of To Watch Theatre: Essays in Genre and Corporeality (Peter Lang, 2009); co-editor of Dancing Naturally: Nature, Neo-classicism and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century Dance (Palgrave, 2011). Her writing has appeared in Dance Research Journal, Discourses on Dance, New Theatre Quarterly and other book collections. She is co-editor with Peter Boenisch of the Palgrave series, New World Choreographies and has been Principal Investigator for several large AHRC and ARC funded research projects including Digital Dance Archives (www.dance-archives.ac.uk) and the Pioneer Women Project.

Odette Kelada

Odette Kelada is a lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication, Australian Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Melbourne. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including the Australian Cultural History Journal, Artlink, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal. She worked as Research Associate for Professor Fensham on the ARC Discovery Project “Transnational and Cross-cultural Choreography in Australia”, which included fieldwork in Malaysia with the choreographer Tony Yap.