How to (re) value Indigenous performing arts

The Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management, 2009

In this paper we look at the persistent debate over notions of access and excellence and intrinsic and instrumentalist rationales for arts practice within cultural policy discussion. Recent research into the Indigenous performing arts in Australia underlines the particular difficulties faced by the sector in balancing the demands of community participation, social inclusion and high-quality aesthetic outcomes. The balancing act has proven unsustainable for some Indigenous performing arts companies and their viability is now in doubt. This suggests that a re-consideration of the question of the purpose and value of the Indigenous performing arts is timely.

Iccpr 2008 Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Cultural Policy Research, 2008

This paper examines how Australian Indigenous cultural policies have contributed to the development of Aboriginal theatre since the early 1990s. In many respects, the flourishing of Indigenous performing arts exemplify the priorities of national cultural policy more broadly. These priorities include the assertion of national identity in a globalised world -a goal that is amply realised in the publicly funded Indigenous performing arts. The paper examines how government policies have assisted the growth of Indigenous theatre companies and the professional development of their artists. It draws on interviews with Indigenous theatre artists to identify their changing professional needs, and argues that cultural policies need to develop pluralist strategies which encourage a diversity of practices for the future development of the sector.

RESUME In August of 1982, theatre groups from around the world gathered in Peterborough, Ontario for the Indigenous People's Theatre Celebration. Some polarization developed, primarily between "culturalists" of the developed nations and the more politically involved groups of the Third World. The Celebration concluded with a concept of unity in diversity, and a recognition of the value of theatre in various forms as a means of combatting cultural genocide. En août de 1982, des troupes d'acteurs du monde entier se sont réunis à Peterborough, Ontario, pour le Festival du théâtre des peuples autochtones (Indigneous People's Theatre Celebration). Lors de cette rencontre, certaines différences d'opinion sont apparues, notamment entre les interprètes dits "culturalistes" du monde développé et les troupes politiquement engagées du Tiers-Monde. A la conclusion du festival, un esprit d'unité s'est quand même établi parmi les divers éléments de l&#3...

International journal of cultural policy, 2009

Media International Australia, 2010

Public support for both Indigenous filmmaking and the live performing arts has a number of common features: at a national level the present schemes were introduced in the early 1990s, and both sets of schemes aim to improve the capacity of Indigenous practitioners to tell their stories to national and international audiences. Yet, in the late 2000s, Screen Australia's support for filmmaking has contributed to well-known successes, whereas Australia Council support for performing arts has been withdrawn from two of the three state-based Indigenous companies. This article reviews the capacity-building strategies offered by the funding agencies to Indigenous filmmaking and performing arts. While the film policies appear to have been more successful than those in the performing arts, both sectors continue to experience obstacles to capacity-building for Indigenous practitioners and organisations.

M/C Journal, 2012

In recent years ecological thinking has been applied to a range of social, cultural, and aesthetic systems, including performing arts as a living system of policy makers, producers, organisations, artists, and audiences. Ecological thinking is systems-based thinking which allows us to see the performing arts as a complex and protean ecosystem; to explain how elements in this system act and interact; and to evaluate its effects on Australia’s social fabric over time. According to Gallasch, ecological thinking is “what we desperately need for the arts.” It enables us to “defeat the fragmentary and utilitarian view of the arts that dominates, to make connections, to establish overviews of the arts that can be shared and debated” (Gallasch NP). The ecological metaphor has featured in debates about the performing arts in Brisbane, Australia, in the last two or three years. A growing state capital on Australia’s eastern seaboard, Brisbane is proud of its performing arts culture. Its main ...

In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization, 2017

Indigenous arts, simultaneously attuned to local voices and global cultural flows, have often been the vanguard in communicating what is at stake in the interactions, contradictions, disjunctions, opportunities, exclusions, injustices and aspirations that globalization entails. Focusing specifically on embodied arts and activism, this interdisciplinary volume offers vital new perspectives on the power and precariousness of indigeneity as a politicized cultural force in our unevenly connected world. Twenty-three distinct voices speak to the growing visibility of indigenous peoples' performance on a global scale over recent decades, drawing specific examples from the Americas, Australia, the Pacific, Scandinavia and South Africa. An ethical touchstone in some arenas and a thorny complication in others, indigeneity is now belatedly recognised as mattering in global debates about natural resources, heritage, governance, belonging and social justice, to name just some of the contentious issues that continue to stall the unfinished business of decolonization. To explore this critical terrain, the essays and images gathered here range in subject from independent film, musical production, endurance art and the performative turn in exhibition and repatriation practices to the appropriation of hip-hop, karaoke and reality TV. Collectively, they urge a fresh look at mechanisms of postcolonial entanglement in the early 21st century as well as the particular rights and insights afforded by indigeneity in that process.

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics, 2016

The integration of Australian Indigenous arts in the field of contemporary art is the fruit of a complex historical process deeply rooted in social and political relationships. The Aboriginal art market has grown exponentially since the 90s and acrylic paintings and bark paintings have become international icons of Australian national identity. Aboriginal art has been, and to a certain extent, is still endangered by cheap imitations, fakes and the transgression of Indigenous artists’ rights and community protocols. These issues have been addressed by various inquiries and reports since the 1990s. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged from the scholarship produced by researchers, such as Howard Morphy (2000), Jon Altman (2005) and others. These scholars have investigated particularly the community-controlled art centres and outlined how it could be taken as a business model. In their studies, the art centres are presented as inter-cultural institutions, as both a commercial and a cult...