Choreographic Practices - Current Issue

‘Dancing through the vege patch’ is an artist essay in the voice of choreographer Gregory Lorenzutti that provides readers with a reflection on Theatrum Botanicum: an interdisciplinary project which combined dance and holistic urban farming, commissioned for the third year Bachelors of Fine Arts in dance performance at the Victoria College of the Arts (VCA), University of Melbourne, 2022. Drawn from a series of interviews conducted before, during and after the creation of Theatrum Botanicum; choreographer, photographer and urban farmer, Gregory Lorenzutti provides insights into the relationship between knowledge production, place-based dance pedagogy and interdisciplinary practice with a particular focus on its role in tertiary education. In doing so, Lorenzutti reveals how creative methodologies can slip between disciplines and artistic forms to invigorate practice and deepen the relationship between body, space and place. This artist essay – emerging in and through a series of conversations – seeks to better transmit the embodied and affective dimensions of learning through interdisciplinary practices in dance.

This article explores how recent intercultural contemporary concert dance collaborations in Asia and Australasia address questions of authorship and the subjectivity that concert dance performances produce. The work examined here is Metal (2020), created by Melbourne-based company Lucy Guerin Inc and Ensemble Tikoro, a heavy-metal choir based in West Java led by composer Robi Rusdiana. This work is critically analysed in terms of the production of subjectivity in dance and the influence of culture, politics and hegemonic regimes of representation in contemporary performance. Metal, which features five dancers and eight choir-members, was created in both Melbourne and Bandung. The work incorporates the aesthetics of heavy metal music culture; but it is a shadowy and decelerated piece. It has a quiet, disappearing-at-the-edges quality and a dramatic structure that develops through a series of enigmatic interactions between two groups. In these meetings, body practices and cultural practices are negotiated in a process of gradual unlearning, problematizing the conventions by which performers are turned into subjects. It is the depiction of solidities returning to a state of flux. The work was partly inspired by the place of its creation: the slopes of the active Tangkuban Perahu Volcano. Motifs of shifting earth and molten flows are referenced in both the composition of movement and sound, and in the work’s dramaturgical structure. As the work progresses, the fragments merge, culminating in a long series of tableaux performed in a wash of red light. In this volcanic scene, the performers are finally suspended in a state of potential subjectivity or becoming-individual. In this way, Metal points to the possibility of a choreographic practice that is a reversal and return to plurality, a subjectivity that is not multicultural but properly transcultural.

This article is based on a movement practice concerned with the study of objects that are owned, inherited, passed on or lost. Through a choreographic lens, it looks at objects that speak to a cultural and colonial heritage, embodying critical questions of our attachment to ‘belongings’, to ‘belonging’ and to place. How do these objects sit within our bodies? Do they affect the way we carry our physical selves? What are the histories that we inherit together with things? And what of ourselves do we transfer onto the things that surround us. This paper maps a particular choreographic process between 2020 and 2022 passing through the period of the pandemic to look at the role of a movement practice in this transmission.

This article is centred on the performance Somewhere Between Truth and Its Telling, which was first performed in 2012. Since then, it has been archived and exhibited in the form of a video work. The performance references key incidents that contributed to its creation: (1) the making of the performance titled My Other History, specifically an archived conversation undertaken as actor research; (2) the censorship of My Other History by the Public Performances Board of Sri Lanka and (3) the embodied actions and objects in the composition of Somewhere Between Truth and Its Telling created in response to the memory of the conversation that preceded it. As such, this article employs selected photographs of the performances in order to position artistic choices made, as well as an exploration of the two interconnected performances through their relationship to the memory of war and the lived experience of traumatic events. The performance of Somewhere Between Truth and Its Telling thus acts as a reflexive framework that opens up a space where experiences of performance-making can be critically evaluated through embodied witnessing that supports an exchange or transmission of memory through storytelling and how accountability comes to be situated in the practice of performing from the lived experience of violence and trauma.

Ori Paraparau | Body Conversations is an embodied talanoa that engages in a reciprocal and shared vā. Being both a choreographic movement task and Mana Moana methodology, Ori Paraparau allows Moana dancers to warm up their minds, bodies, and the vā they share with one another. The idea of ‘recentring’ ourselves (a similar philosophy to decolonizing) is strong here as it better reflects our hyphened identities and the way we view and experience the world. Within the task we can see our moving bodies as waka/vaka that holds our histories, stories and experiences but also link us back to our ancestors. Our Moana identities are complex and vary between person to person, experiences and stories of our whakapapa bringing us to where we are today. Themes of belonging, childhood memories, returning to self, and the complexities of individual Moana cultural identities are explored and investigated within a comfortable environment. Through engaging in Ori Paraparau we may share, exchange, dance, cry and laugh our way through it whilst also building, nurturing and strengthening the vā.

In this article, I interrogate my work Encounters with Dr Yashoda Thakore and her guru Annabattula Mangatayaru who are from the kalavantulu community (a marginalized, banned and ostracized dance community) based in Hyderabad and Mummidivaram in Andhra and our historic collaboration with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO). Two extremes it would seem bridged together by the work I was doing with our platform/festival Sangam, created to provide representation for marginalized, under-represented and racialized South Asian artists in Melbourne, Victoria. Based on my research that spans fifteen years, the Encounters performance reveals the story of five South Indian dancers (known as devadasi/kalavantulu) and three musicians who toured to Paris in 1838, at a time when India was colonized by France. One significant encounter occurred in Paris when a teenaged dancer called Ammany and the rest of the troupe met several composers in Vienna including Johann Strauss I and Joseph Lanner. The MSO had been playing some pieces from this encounter (Indianner Galopp and Malapou Galopp) not aware of its historic intercultural significance. Yashoda and her guru were also performing fragments of their repertoire descended from Ammany not aware of this connection. My research forms the third part of this puzzle; of knowing only fragments until all of us came together. Each of us contributed to the anti-colonial experimental piece that was created, but whose story was this? Who had the rights to perform this story? To engage in this question, I explore the idea of cultural property and intellectual property (IP) rights, licensing and copyright agreements to embark upon a moral and ethical framework not used usually in Australian–Indian performance praxis. I draw from my work with BlakDance and its First Nations IP process to question and interrogate the complexities of sharing stories, the politics of making intercultural work in Australia and examine who profits from this process whether it is economic, symbolic, political or via cultural capital and propose a cultural IP framework for the global majority in Australia.