Film and Television Studies

‘Let the Games Begin’: Pageants, Protests, lndigeneity

Helen Gilbert

Professor Helen Gilbert

What are the chief pleasures and tensions embedded in the circulation of indigenous performances as global commodities made available for ‘reading across cultures?’ To probe this question, my paper focuses on the Olympic Games as a potent, if highly controversial, stimulus for the expression — and consumption — of indigenity in the neo-liberal marketplace. While the signal events for my analysis are the Sydney, Salt Lake City and Vancouver Olympics, all in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a longer historical view will help to weigh the exoticising effects of spectacle against the argued benefits of national and global visibility. Specific pageants and protests are discussed as constituent parts of performance clusters intricately connected to each other by the spatial, economic and conceptual structures of individual host cities. Conceptually, the argument draws from recent work in cultural geography and urban studies as well as in performance theory. The overall aim is to begin a comparative materialist analysis of pro- and anti-Games performances of indigeneity while offering some grounded theoretical insights into the ways in which such ‘inhabitations’ map into local and translocal commodity cultures.

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‘That primitive box space’ – transculturalism and black modern dance

Rachel Fensham

Professor Rachel Fensham

This paper considers the choreography and work of New York ‘black dance’ artist Eleo Pomare in the Netherlands and Australia during the 1960s and 1970s. With the ‘double consciousness’ of black subjects from the transatlantic (Gilroy), Pomare helped to create a radical dance aesthetics based on observation of everyday life, poetic expression, and social commentary. However, this ‘angry dancer’ adopted a position outside cultural hierarchies, by leading an integrated dance company and challenging black and white stereotypes. In discussing Pomare’s history, I will consider his role in challenging racial segregation in the Australian cultural establishment through the discourses of black power and modern dance embodiment;; strategies which have been adopted subsequently by indigenous dance practices.

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Mondialisation or World Forming in The Flying Circus Project

Ong Keng Sen

In The Creation Of The World, Jean Luc Nancy introduces the termmondialization or world forming, the making of a world. He prefers this to the term globalization for a variety of reasons. Mondialization evokes, for him, an expanding process throughout the expanse of human beings, cultures and nations. This is unlike globalization that seems to him to be the undifferentiated sphere of a unitotality. Nancy discusses globalization as “the suppression of all world-forming of the world”, as “an unprecedented geopolitical, economic, and ecological castastrophe”. Globalization leads to the opposite of an inhabitable world, to the un-world [immonde]. His primary concern is to create a world that is “the contrary of a global injustice against the backdrop of general equivalence”.

I would like to discuss The Flying Circus (FCP), an artist laboratory that takes place in different sites in Asia, as an instance of intercultural performance, through a close reading of Nancy. The FOP can be said to have occurred due to the increased mobility in a globalized world. It was initiated in 1996 when the art world exploded with cultural and artistic exchanges, its artists were both self-confident and hungry to experience the world. Since 2004, most of these artists come from city centers or art metropolises; they are often trained in universities in Europe or the US; they are acutely aware of the speed of world economy and the power of information revolution in its electronic forms; they participate with savvy in the contemporary art market; they embrace hybrid identities, multiplicities as often they come from diasporic backgrounds; they are actively engaged in creation, expression and art in their communities of choice. Despite all this, I would like to argue that the FOP is a study of world forming, closer to mondialization rather than globalization.

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Ong Keng Sen

1. Special Early Career Researcher (ECR) and Postgraduate Workshop.
   Following the success of the inaugural ECR/Postgraduate session at the ADSA Canberra Conference 2010, organisers are once again offering a special event for postgraduate students and researchers.
   Morning & afternoon tea and lunch will be provided.
2. Opening Night.
   Welcome to Country and Official Opening of the Conference.
   Drinks and Light Refreshments will be provided.

1. First Keynote Address
2. Papers from attending delegates.
3. Workshops
   Morning & afternoon tea and lunch will be provided.

1. Second Keynote Address
2. Papers from attending delegates.
3. Workshops
   Morning & afternoon tea and lunch will be provided.

1. Third Keynote Address
2. Papers from attending delegates.
3. Workshops
   Morning & afternoon tea and lunch will be provided.
4. Conference Dinner

Delegates will need to book for the Conference Dinner. The Conference Dinner is not included as part of the registration cost.

1. Performance as Research Colloquium
   Light Lunch and tea and coffee will be provided.

While the lunch and attendance at the seminar is free, we ask that you register your intention to attend via the conference website.