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Dancing with a difference: Reconfiguring the poetic politics of Aboriginal Ritual as national spectacle

Article from:The Australian Journal of Anthropology
Article date:January 1, 2000
Author: Magowan, Fiona

Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Poetic Politics of Aboriginal Ritual as National Spectacle1

This paper argues that indigenous dance is a poetic politics of cross-cultural encounter that engages Aboriginal identities with those of the Australian nation. I question the nature of this encounter in terms of a performative dialogue that is both musically and kinesically presented by indigenous communities and 'translated' into political discourse by the government. The sentiments of 'translation' raise questions as to how local ritual expressions of Aboriginal dance can mediate dialogue when presented as national spectacle. What is being meditated? What is happening in the process of evocation? In this performative nexus, I focus specifically on the poetic politics of Yolngu ritual as spectacle; the nature of performative dialogue in terms of shared dance forms between indigenous communities; the problem of the authentication of dance identities; and how corporeal dispositions of indigenous dance genres influence national sentiment by their symbolic power. I pursue these issues through an analysis of how ancestral dances have been repositioned in national performance venues, such as concerts, cultural centres and ritual arenas, as a means of asserting performative statements about indigenous positioning within the nation-state. The nature of this dialogue raises questions of authenticity and processes of authentication. It highlights indigenous concerns to control representations of indigeneity as national event, as well as a desire to convey something of the sentiment and sentience embodied in the poetics of their ancestral performances.

Introduction

Outside the High Court of Australia in 1997, following the Wik decision, something unusual was happening in the street; a woman began to dance. But, was this performance an expression of art? A ritual protest? A display of jubilation or pent-up emotion? A drama of conquest? I will argue that it was a combination of these and more. She was transforming a public space outside a legal building into a living, moving, ancestral arena, inscribing it with the politics of cross-cultural encounter. In this context, she did not seek to convey specific localised meanings of the dance to the public because the power of her expression lay precisely in the non-transparency of her dance movements. With the resonances of Mabo resounding as a faint plea for indigenous rights in the aftermath of the Wik decision, a strong profile of indigenous dancing is emerging across the nation. This shake-a-leg dance, the song of the Ngarrindjeri woman outside the courthourse in Adelaide, and ritual dances by Yolngu2 at the funeral service for Nugget Coombs, amongst others, have all been a means of expressing indigenous sentiment as performative politics, a performative mode that has no immediate cultural parallels in Australian politics.

In anthropology, there is a lacuna in the study of indigenous performance regarding the ways in which groups are creating their own variants of ritual dances for government or state occasions, for political rallies and interstate exhibitions, for tourists at cultural centres and at keynote addresses of academic conferences. Public performances may be unique and one-off occasions, or more permanent displays, but they all raise questions about how Aboriginality is being presented, contested and delineated in relation to Australian nationality. I will explore the various potentialities of indigenous dance through three performance contexts: early Australian concert programs of indigenous dance; the Tjapukai Dance Theatre and Bangarra Dance Theatre; national public events. I focus upon Yolngu in each of these contexts since I will argue that the dance traditions of Arnhem Land have played, and continue to play, a key role in the construction of indigeneity in Australia today.

While anthropology has conducted a lengthy waltz with performance in the guise of social dramas or cultural meanings (Geertz 1973, Turner 1974), far fewer studies have been devoted to the analysis of an anthropology concerning the politics of theatre and spectacle.3 Performance analysts have largely tended to ignore the potential of dance as a signifying practice, instead, viewing the dancing body as a text that cannot be 'read' (Gilbert 1992:135), decontextualising its movements as acultural and emphasising `an understanding of the universal, "natural" dimensions of the perfomer's work' (Hastrup 1998:29). These limited perspectives do not explain why dance is such a popular medium for indigenous performance: Why is it increasingly used as an arena for expressing and asserting indigenous rights? How is it a means of defining differences of indigenous identities? In what ways does it serve to cohere local identities, whilst forging links between other regions within Aboriginal Australia? And how is it a medium for establishing intercultural relations of power and politics in terms of a performative dialogue between Aboriginal Australia and the rest of the nation?

In attempting to tease out the embodied nature of dance as performative dialogue, I draw upon Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogic relations extending and reformulating his linguistic analysis to a performative one. As Bakhtin notes, `Dialogic relations are relations (semantic) among any utterances in speech communication' (Bakhtin 1986:117). Although Bakhtin clearly explicates the technical aspects of speech genres such as the boundaries of utterances,4 the structure of speaking in its vocalisation and pauses and the complex of utterances which he calls the speech plan, he is less concerned to detail how expressive aspects5 (ie. the nature of emotion and expression embodied in the utterance) work. He simply states that `utterances have contextual meaning that requires a responsive understanding, one that includes evaluation' (1986:134). While he recognises that each word has what he refers to as an 'emotional tone', 'emotional coloring', an 'evaluative aspect', a 'stylistic aura' and so forth (1986:86), he does not explain how these evaluative properties acquire and accumulate meaning within the same language, let alone across cultures. Aboriginal dance genres presented in various sites can be seen to be structured in a similar way to speech utterances as they comprise performative gestures formed from unique movement motifs which identify and distinguish dances pertaining to particular groups and traditions. These performative gestures in turn, embody moral rights, responsibilities, obligations and sentiments.6 Nevertheless, Bakhtin states that `it is in the utterance that the national language is embodied in individual form' (1986:63). If this is so, then the question remains as to what sorts of expressive elements of the nation are embodied in performative dialogue and in what ways?

In order to explore this perspective, I turn to Bourdieu's analysis of language and symbolic power to uncover firstly, the corporeal dispositions of dancers reflecting local social conditions.7 Secondly, I analyse to what extent these dispositions are generative and transposable in the eyes of Australian audiences and politicians. I propose that it is not so much in what is danced, or how it is danced that an understanding of performative dialogue lies, but how the expressive aspects of indigenous dance are interpreted so that the attitudes towards indigenous people and the nation are formed. With an explosion of sites for indigenous performance from television to the stage, the Australian nation is being confronted with a range of indigenous dance genres. The contemporary nature of public sites are part of the process of generating national sentiment and expectation about Aboriginality and, in turn, Aboriginal performers are taking the opportunity to engage in these sites to convey identities in specific ways. A key problem of performative dialogue is the playing out of 'recognition' (reconnaissance) and 'misrecognition' (meconnaissance) of symbolic power (Bourdieu 1991:2) in the relations between Aboriginal groups and the nation. However, rather than reducing performative dialogue to a top down reading of acts of symbolic power or symbolic violence, where dancers are seen to present an active complicity (1991:23) in response to the state, I argue that the symbolic power of dance lies in its ability to conceal as much as it reveals to performers and audience. Consequently, performative dialogue is a chess game of coming to know the nature of embodied sentiment between groups.

A brief history of indigenous performance

It could be asserted that indigenous performance, as a means of political representation, has its origins as far back as the 1920s and 1930s in the concert hall repertoire of soloists such as Harold Blair. Born on the Cherburg mission station, Queensland, Blair worked on plantations where 'the songs of the fields were to become the songs of the concert hall' (Wilding-Forbes 1993:39). Blair became a musical ambassador for his people and, at the time, he was one of few mission-born boys to make his name in the music scene of early 20th century white Australia. By the middle of the 20th century, performances from remote communities had become a common sight in the major cities of the nation. Indigenous performance was no longer relegated to rituals in the ruggedness of the outback, but the outback was being danced into people's homes on song recordings, and in formal concert venues, through collaborative projects between non-indigenous composers and indigenous performers. Orchestral works such as John Antill's Corroboree, 1954, highlighted the performance potential of the indigenous population, but only through the gaze of the concert programmer. Invariably, the imperial gaze came to resonate in the structure of the performances themselves. For example, in 1963, The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, in Association with the Welfare Branch of the Northern Territory, presented a concert entitled Aboriginal Theatre, billed as 'a unique entertainment never previously seen outside northmost Australia, starring 45 Full blood Aborigines from Arnhem Land' (The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, 1963). The program notes ascribed a savage or exotic otherness to the performers who were packaged into neatly schematised and imperialised glosses for ready consumption by the spectator.

The performers came from Yirrkala, Daly River and Bathurst Island, three completely distinct language and cultural groups, yet the program was structured without distinguishing between them. It began with two men from the Daly River demonstrating fire making, followed by an enactment of the Tiwi moon legend of Purukupali, and then a Yolngu didjeridu solo to the song of the thunderman from Yirrkala, in Arnhem Land. And so the program continued, alternating the regional items, including what was billed as a 'comedy and drama of the Tiwi from Bathurst Island'. The program appeared as if it had been organised by the white theatre director in a Western classical concert vein, with what might be regarded as a balance between solo and group items, serious and light-hearted pieces. There was no appeal to the disparate indigenous ritual contexts for each piece and no acknowledgment that the music and dance traditions of the different regions were quite distinct. Instead, the presentation reflected only a white conceptualisation of 'who or what was speaking through the bodily presentations and language', and a Westernised reading of 'what discourses were being inscribed on/in the dancer's bodies' (Auslander 1988:9).

The structure of the concert demonstrated that the organisers either had no clear understanding of the relationship between songs as they would have been performed in a ritual context, or, even if they had, the structure was of no importance to the audience in this white venue. Yet, the concert program claimed that, 'it is in this natural form that the dances, singing and mime of the Arnhem Landers have their most compelling aesthetic and spectacular appeal'. By removing the dances from their social and ritual logic, the Trust was repositioning the 'naturalness' of performance as theatrical art. The Elizabethan Theatre Trust had created a Westernised Aboriginal Theatre, masking these dances of difference with an Australian theatrical gaze. This white control of indigenous performance just over thirty years ago, raises questions as to how Aboriginal people are utilising urban places today to reconstruct local expressions of indigeneity. Additionally, how should the local politics of indigenous dances be read when they are generated in these non-ritual setting into the nation

Dancing into the nation

Let us return then to the dancing woman outside the High Court following the Wik decision. Through her quasi-theatrical performance she was transforming the urbanscape not through theatre as art in the Elizabethan sense, but rather through theatre as life (Hastrup 1998:30). Her ancestral shake-a-leg dance from Cape York combined theatre as ritual and theatre as life in the form of spectacle and demanded some sort of responsive understanding or responsive resonance from those who witnessed it. Encapsulated in her dancing at the entrance to a legal forum of white authority, her performative dialogue could be viewed as a response to the resonant aspects of the history of the Wik court hearing, as well as to the injustices of the past for all Aboriginal people in their fight for rights to land. In a moment of spontaneity, this woman inscribed her personal and political feelings into a movement sculpture that remoulded the space as indigenous history and politics in movement. Shown on television nationwide, audiences may not have understood the specificity of her movement motifs, but the expressive aspects of the performance conveyed her emotional response to a history of oppression. It was a performative gesture which evoked more than a thousand words as she kinesically infused largely white inscriptions of the symbolic legal space with indigenous sentiment.

It was a generative display in that it embodied an affective complex from indigenous tribulation to triumph, both revealing and concealing emotions in motion that were as evanescent as they were present. The shapes of her performative gestures were transitory, and yet expressive aspects of the spectacle would come to resonate in a multitude of ways for those who had witnessed it in the street and for the Australian population who saw it on the national news. This space would never be regarded in the same way again. Her performative challenge would perhaps cause viewers to ponder the medium of dance as a mode of indigenous authorisation, perhaps to reflect on their attitudes to the process of land rights legislation and perhaps some would try to grasp a sense of the weight of indigenous feeling. Although this was a one-off event, it could be argued that its element of surprise and challenge rendered it temporarily as powerful as dance forms that are repeated for tourists in other cultural venues. The extraordinary nature of one-off performances generates an awareness of the uniqueness of Aboriginal cultural forms in Western places. They bring an articulation of indigenous sacred power into secular space and open up new possibilities for absorption, reflection, exchange and cultural access. In doing so, they demand that the audience cognitively and emotively, at least, move into the indigenous cultural milieu to make sense of the performative gestures. The dance was a performative dialogue adding to and multiplying touristic and general public knowledge of indigenous dance genres as well as evoking particular ideas of power relations between Wik people and the nation. For the dancing woman and those closest to her there would be the memory of a polyphony of crisscrossing steps, 'conveying a feeling of history in process' (Carter 1991:15). The city had stopped being merely a means to the ends of production, but had become instead an end in itself (Callaway 1991:31). She had recreated the city streets as a kind of theatre where her public display served to substantiate her claim to indigenous rights and her authority to dance for land.

The ability to see dance as having political potency within urban locales has come into vogue as a result of the accumulation and convergence of a number of historico-political processes. Since the 1970s, strategies of self-determination have meant that indigenous groups have been urged to take control of their own affairs, resulting in a series of indigenous land rights statutes, such as the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, the Native Title Act 1993 and the Wik Decision, which have strengthened an awareness of indigenous presence. The promotion of indigenous people within government institutions, such as the Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Commission (ATSIC), has also meant the voices of indigenous politics are at least being vocalised, if not acted upon, alongside white Australian agendas. Often in these contexts, 'dance is being used as a tool of empowerment and the focus of a participative arena' (Gibson 1998:168), but anthropologists and dance analysts have been reluctant to address exactly how it achieves empowerment and how this empowerment is being realised.

Performing and authenticating indigeneity

In order for indigenous dance to be viewed as empowering, its corporeal dispositions must be seen as both emergent from the social conditions of local performance practices and as embodying their simultaneity in performance. These dispositions are based on the processual element of ritual action, that is ritualisation, whereby indigenous dance embodies local conditions of social `creativity and constraint' which are 'simultaneous, copresent and co-dependent' (Hughes-Freeland and Cain 1998:3). As dance emerges from and embodies corporeal dispositions and, by extension, local sentiment, ritualisation is the politicising force of indigenous dance in non-ritual contexts.8

One of the issues arising from the desire for indigenous recognition, and ultimately empowerment, is the tendency for Aboriginal groups whose ritual practices have become obsolete to adopt other indigenous performance traits as their own for public appearances. During the 'Musical Visions' conference, held at Adelaide University in 1998, the keynote address was preceded by a dance performance of the local Kauma people.9 These welcome dances were performed without song to clapstick and didjeridu accompaniment punctuated by calls. The movement motifs were adapted from dances belonging to Yolngu in Arnhem Land. The leader of the group told me, 'Our Kauma elders no longer know the songs or dances, we just borrow from our Yolngu brothers and sisters'. What the Kaurna are borrowing are not just series of movement motifs, but some sense of the corporeal dispositions of Arnhem Land and a sense of the authentication of indigenous identity which is being reconfigured in Kauma terms.

Similarly, in July 1999, the University of Western Australia hosted the national conference of the Musicological Society of Australia which was opened with a welcome performance by the Nyungar landowners. The elder spoke over a didjeridu accompaniment followed by his nephew playing a didjeridu solo which he introduced by saying, `Nyungar don't have the culture of their forefathers today, but I want to welcome you with this didjeridu piece which I learned from some Yolngu at Yirrkala'. By adapting performative gestures from other places both Kaurna and Nyungar are reformulating corporeal dispositions for their own embodied expressions of indigeneity and cultural difference.

It should be noted that the Musicological Society was divided in its decision whether to hold the opening ceremony or not. Some felt that welcome performances were merely tokenism as no indigenous people were attending the conference, others that the Aboriginal voices in the region must be acknowledged. However, Nyungar themselves did not initiate the welcome. As institutions increasingly recognise the place of indigenous people in the political structures of white society, and request them to endorse their use of indigenous land through performance, we might ask ourselves to what extent is the nation responsible for the cultural borrowing that is arising from groups whose traditions have died out? What does it mean for these groups to perform dances that are often a hybrid, or direct imitation of other local styles? And to what extent are institutional structures responsible for the symbolic violence that is perpetrated against the 'authenticity' of indigenous performance?

As indigenous people seek to engage in a performative dialogue, there is a danger of misrecognising the generative power of their performative expressions at two levels. Firstly, whites may view these performances as local gestures indicating affiliation to country and encoding moral obligations to community, but the performative medium is not necessarily reflective of corporeal dispositions arising from their own cultural conditions. Secondly, there has often been a special weight laid on Aboriginal culture to be simultaneously 'authentic' in both a Western and an Aboriginal sense. Westerners further appear to misrecognise the symbolic power of indigenous performance by harbouring a tacit expectation that it must be true to itself by conforming to localised meanings of dances and songs (which most Westerners don't know), whilst also appearing how Westerners want it to look. This paradox is not new, mirrored previously in the 'natural' ideals of Aboriginal performance in the Elizabethan Theatre Trust concert. Despite the fact that change in indigenous performance has been ongoing since contact, 'purity' and 'naturalness' are still implicit in the logic that Aboriginal performance should reflect some illusory static and irretrievable past, whilst the West takes pride in its own culture being flexible and malleable enough to be able to cope with being in a continual state of flux.

Today, new processes of indigenous identity formation are taking place in the nation with the growth of performances not only for conferences, but for government speeches, at festival openings, exhibitions, and cultural centres. The deliberate (and frequently contested) exchange of music and dance styles between indigenous communities is generating a new arena of performative dialogue between the corporeal dispositions of regional styles which are combining to reshape concepts of authenticity and their affective load. Nowhere is this merger of performance identities better glimpsed than in the recent mushrooming of cultural centres that have been springing up across Australia. These centres employ indigenous people from their local communities as well as from other regions in Australia. For example, the Cairns-based Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park boasts an indigenous staff that is not only Tjapukai, but also employs one Yolngu member of the Djambarrpuyngu clan from Yirrkala in north east Arnhem Land, as well as Yalanji from Daintree and Mossman. 10

Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park began in 1987 as a small dance theatre company in Kuranda. It has evolved, according to its marketing sales pitch, into 'a uniquely authentic $9 million enterprise designed to showcase a 40,000 year old culture'.11 The ideal of showcasing culture is encapsulated as both a local and intercultural process of cross-- fertilising regional styles and cultural concepts. Just as various indigenous groups come together to participate in the local traditions reflected by the cultural centre, so some of these disparately located centres have employed the same Australian architect in a cross-- fertilisation of design. A number of centres have been created by the Melbourne-based, award-winning architect, Gregory Burgess who designed Galeena Beek Cultural Centre in Healesville, Victoria, in the shape of a hand, as well the Uluru Cultural Centre, the Brambuk Cultural Centre and the new Yolngu Garma Cultural Centre. It is in the resacralising of indigenous culture through the interlocking of movement, colour, light and sound in contemporary performance centres that the corroborree grounds of Aboriginal ritual are most obviously becoming theatres of national spectacle.

The poetics of dance: wonder and resonance in the Tjapukai Dance Theatre

In each of these centres, technical wizardry has intensified the public's experience and understanding of the performative dialogue between dancers and tourists. The expressive aspects of indigenous dance, originally termed the 'naturalness' of Aboriginal performance by the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, are intensified in these hi-tech sites that sometimes conjure virtual realities.12 Just how the expressive aspects of the performative dialogue in cultural centres are coloured by technical effects can be understood through the ideas of 'resonance' and 'wonder' which Stephen Greenblatt (1991) identified in art objects. In Greenblatt's assessment, resonance is the power of the performance to evoke in the viewer can appreciation of the complex cultural, historical and political forces, both internal and external, from which it has emerged', whereas `wonder is the power of the performance to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, and to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness and awe' (1991:43).

Certainly, the wonder of light has always been an important transformative element in highlighting the magical quality of objects, people and places. For example, for the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh to Melbourne in 1867, the whole city was illuminated in a spectacular display heralded at the time as the most remarkable the city has ever known. As Callaway notes, 'light was the key factor in creating this illusion, for the spell worked best at night ... it turned night into spectacle-light transformed the city itself into a gigantic work of art' (1991:33). Just as light was used in Melbourne to accentuate spectacle in darkness, it is put to similar effect in cultural centres. Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park uses lighting effects to engage the embodiment of Tjapukai creation. Their advertising logo, an egg cracked by two holographic streaks representing lightning that surround and infuse it with a misty, magical aura, is a predominant image depicting the origin of life in The Creation Theatre performances. In this dark auditorium, the audience is separated from the stage by a glass sheet meant to protect them from potentially harmful effects.

Holograms of people, snakes, eggs and fish appear and vanish in wispy streaks of coloured lighting.

Just as museum artefacts are frequently displayed in 'a pool of light that has the surreal effect of seeming to emerge from the object rather than to focus upon it' (Greenblatt 1991:49), so the lighting in the Creation Theatre illuminates the egg from within, as much as highlighting it from above. The effect for the audience is a sense of mystery, wonder and curiosity, which they are evocatively invited to experience as the power of Tjapukai creation, if only they have the courage to dream. However, it is in 'The Dance Theatre' that the audience comes to truly experience the power of Tjapukai dances for themselves. Audience members are invited to take part with Tjapukai dancers whereby-whether vicariously, by watching friends and relatives, or by actively participating-'the audience is part of the spectacle, is itself spectacle' with the potential 'to reconstruct the nature and meaning of that spectacle' (Davies 1998:8). Five or six dancers begin with fire-making and sing a sequence of songs. During these dances, members of the audience are invited to come on stage and join in, but their efforts appear pantomimic, introducing a new element of comedy into the ritual aspects of Tjapukai spectacle. Thus, there is a continual shift in the potentialities of responsive understanding as the audience becomes part of the meaningmaking process and is partially entailed in its politics of performance.

The whole Cultural Park is designed as an exploration of wonder where tour groups are huddled through 'The Magic Space' of murals and artefacts that speak of early contact, to 'The Creation Theatre' and on to 'The History Theatre' screening a politically charged film whose disturbing imagery places the fate of Tjapukai people clearly in white hands, before going on to show how Tjapukai have recovered their sense of authority and dignity. Throughout the centre, ribbons of sound, streaks of colour and shadows of dance transform each of these theatres into an indigenous labyrinth of Dreamtime past and present. However, we might still consider to what extent these performances have acquired the same symbolic power as other Western theatrical forms. In a recent dispute over performance times for dancers at Tjapukai, Managing Director of the park, Mr. Freeman, argued that industry standards should not apply to Aboriginal performers. Although performers were doing as many as 35 performances a week, instead of the industry's regulation maximum of 12 shows, it was argued that they should not be paid equivalent to other performers in the entertainment industry, since they only performed for about twenty minutes, with some on stage for only four minutes (Meade, K. 1998). He justified this view by saying that the show was a cultural experience, not professional entertainment such as that presented at theme parks such as Movie World. It must be asked then, at what point is cultural performance professional entertainment?

Like the Tjapukai Centre, the nationally and internationally renowned Sydney-based company, Bangarra Dance Theatre has played upon lighting effects as part of the creation of ancestral evocation in their works. Bangarra highlights the emergent nature of lighting as grounded in the earth, arising from it and through the dancers whose power is evocative and enchanting. The principle of light is embodied in the name, meaning 'to make fire' in the Wiradjuri language.13 Like the Tjapukai Creation Theatre, the wonder and resonance of Bangarra's performances lie in the visual power of the dance and stage lighting, displayed in such a way as to heighten charisma, to compel and reward the intensity of the viewer's gaze, and to suffuse the dancers with a mysterious aura. No longer is the fantasy of possession relegated to objects of desire in the glass cases of museums, but Bangarra dancers have inverted the propensity to possess. Unlike art objects, these indigenous dancers are not possessions to be controlled by the West, but are themselves the possessors of something that is seen as most valuable and enduring, in turn, heightening a sense of the nation's nostalgia over their own somewhat ineffable identity. Thus, Bangarra performers come to be seen as having a distinctive indigenous identity since their dances possess the power to arouse wonder whilst simultaneously evoking and evading local corporeal dispositions. Consequently, indigenous differences are subverted to a collective sense of Bangarra's own unique corporeal dispositions and performative gestures.

Bangarra's enchantment works by moving the audience to envisage a possible, secret world beyond what they see and which they would like to access as their own (Hughes-- Freeland 1998:3). Its success can be partly attributed to the enchantment generated by the collective ritualisation of hybrid dispositions of different indigenous dances as Stephen Page, Bangarra's artistic director noted:

The traditional aspect is the grass roots to what Bangarra is about ... Traditional Aboriginal dance ... is about building a bridge between urban blacks and remote blacks, it's a wonderful marriage for rekindling one culture and inspiring urban energy ... Without these traditional aspects, Bangarra wouldn't exist in terms of its creative development. (Womadelaide 1998)

That is why, for almost a decade, 'Bangarra Dance Theatre ... has been thrilling audiences and inspiring its artists' (Taylor 1998). Like Tjapukai, Bangarra mix their employees, foregrounding a Yolngu dancer as its star performer of traditional dance. Djakapurra Munyarryun has a significant influence in the majority of Bangarra's compositions and frequently appears as a centrepiece of 'traditional' dances as the solo artist. It was only by working with Djakapurra Munyarryun as the cultural consultant that 'the performance of Ochres in 1995 secured Bangarra's position as one of Australia's top dance companies' (Meekison 1998:4). Given Bangarra's eagerness to show urban indigeneity `connected to' some sort of authentic Aboriginality, what Bangarra in fact represents is, according to Meekison, `urban folk caught up in a process of cultural reinvention in which they have to draw on something truly "other" to constitute themselves as indigenous in the here and now' (1998:11).

Dance as national politics

Since Aboriginal music and dance have moved from the sand of outback corroborrees to street pavements and the polished wooden floors of theatres, exhibition spaces and cultural centres, we need to ask whether their politics of dance have really been transported and, if so, how these politics are reconstituting the identities of performers and spectators? With a heightened awareness and understanding of Aboriginal culture, political figures are having to actively ignore, rather than be ignorant, indifferent, or seemingly impartial spectators of dance. Aboriginal groups are performing statements of their indigenous rights when important political issues are at stake and politicians are being forced to participate in the conditions of indigenous dance contexts. In these contemporary performance events, the non-transparency of indigenous dance, coupled with the rising profile of indigenous politics, is forcing both politicians and the public to participate as co-producers of meaning rather than as tacit consumers. Particular interpretive moves are required in order to read indigenous dance as political text. One such creative move was required by the nation in 1997 when Prime Minister John Howard was led through the most secret component of one Yolngu ceremony, the Ngarra, or fertility ritual on Elcho Island.14

Clan leader, Richard Gundhawuy explained that Howard had been invited to view secret men's objects that no other white man had been privy to before and, consequently, he had been treated as a man of highest honour in Yolngu life. Whilst he had learned about the ancestral significance of this ritual, he failed to acknowledge that he had become a politicised ancestral subject, an ancestral agent with the expectation that he was obliged to return an equal favour-that of reinstating Native Title rights as they were prior to the Wik decision. Misrecognising the nuances of resistance politics in this dance, he added insult to injury by refusing to recognise Aboriginal cultural heritage as intimately tied to the land after engaging in a twelve-hour round of talks that ended in stalemate.]5 On this occasion, Yolngu had actively sought to manipulate an outcome by positioning him in the conditional cycle of demand and obligatory reciprocity of this ritual. In the dance, the Ngarra ground took on symbolic and political value equivalent to a Western courtroom and something akin to the street space outside the High Court. By mediating such a politically sensitive issue through dance, Yolngu were engaging in a repositioning of the Ancestral Law as simultaneously co-existent with, and equivalent to, Western judicial structures, in the hope of generating a favourable outcome for all Aboriginal people. The effect of leading the prime minister through the ritual was to place him in a particular performative dialogue, one that was bound by Yolngu modes of political control and authority embedded in the corporeal dispositions of the dances which brought him to the sacred shade. The ritual event raised questions about how politicians might need to rethink the taken-for-granted epistemological grounds on which they expect to negotiate political issues when they are continually being repositioned within indigenous performative contexts. In this ritual context, Howard misrecognised the symbolic power afforded to the dancers and himself, which lay concealed in their separate political agendas, because the ritual altered the takenfor-granted realms of Western experience. In this convergence of `the dreamed-of and lived-in orders of reality' (Geertz 1966:28) the meaning of the ritual was generating quite divergent dialogic relations between Yolngu and John Howard from their own epistemological standpoints.

While this ritual event demonstrates that Howard was involved in a local performative dialogue, the use of dance as a political forum is a relatively recent one. As a result, the expressive aspects of particular dance dispositions have shifted in their locus and sentiment over time. For example, although Arnhem Land dancers chose which songs and dances to perform in the Aboriginal Theatre in 1963, their structural sequence and location was forced to conform to the predetermined norms of white performance. By contrast, it is evident that Tjapukai, at the Aboriginal Cultural Park in Cairns, are consciously creating and embodying expressive tones of indigeneity through wonder and resonance to create primarily a poetics of spectacle, albeit with political resonances. By 1997, we could witness a national politics of performative dialogue emerging in the intercultural nexus between Yolngu dancers, the Australian public and politicians, where the signficance of the dance could truly be said to be 'performed' not `pre-formed' as it had been in the 1963 Elizabethan Trust concert, or at the Tjapukai Cultural Park. Instead of containing Yolngu performance within an imaginary Western schema for indigenous dance, such as that encountered in 1963, Yolngu people are choosing to be agents in the performative process. Through their own modes of ritualisation Yolngu are displaying local sentiments and corporate feelings though dance with the aim of enfolding Howard and the nation into their own performative dispositions. The purpose of Yolngu performative dialogue is to bring Howard's political agendas into the midst of their own mytho-poetic and judicial structures where the moral obligations of ritual are national politics.

Dance as political sentiment

There are those who would claim that although they can appreciate the importance of ritual as the politics of indigenous life, it should have no place in the decision-making processes of the nation. Still, there are others who would lay claim to the expressive weight of ritualisation and invite the nation to participate in it. On the death of Nugget Coombs in November 1997, a journalist for The Age wrote:

... it was an extraordinary memorial service for an extraordinary activitist. It was extraordinary because few Christian churches in the world could have housed a service so rich in different beliefs. The Very Reverend Anthony Doherty, Dean of St. Mary's described the occasion as a national rite of passage ... something we can all participate in. (Stephens 1997)

Some white Australians believe that the nation can and should share in an indigenous cosmology (Meade, A. 1998). Implicit in this assertion is the idea that we can somehow experience a healing by participating in ritual. The healing power of ritual has often served as a criterion by which to distinguish the commoditised and commercialised aspects of popular entertainment or high art from other kinds of activity. Yet, there are arguments to be made for 'a continuum between healing and entertainment' (Hughes-Freeland 1998:14). Perhaps indigenous dance is one means by which reconciliation can be manifested between indigenous and non-indigenous performers and spectators.

Conclusion

I have argued that indigenous dance goes beyond the historico-political conditions of its performance because it has the evocative power to entice, involve and take captive the nonindigenous spectators in a poetics of responsive action moving them beyond local experience. Dance is compelling because it merges resonance and wonder both with and without a knowledge of the cultural and historical conditions of its production as an encounter with enchantment. However, it seems that it is largely due to a Western misrecognition of local corporeal dispositions that indigenous dance, whether in a street, a theatre, or a cultural centre, comes to have a life of its own standing as a microcosm for the politics of all indigenous peoples. Within this microcosm, the dialogic relations between dancers and spectators are embedded in their particular readings of each other.

Consequently, we can no longer view indigenous dance as classical or high art as it was once presented in the 1963 Aboriginal Theatre program. Instead, indigenous dance should be examined as an expressive, active and ongoing performative dialogue with the nation. Wherever indigenous dance emerges in the nation, it represents a corporeal site in which competing ideologies resonate behind Dreamtime wonder. Still these are early days. Critical analyses of Aboriginal dance as indigenous politics are almost non-existent. It is as if analysts of political agendas and politicians choose to be performatively blind to the dances of difference and differentiation that they are confronted with on a regular basis. Although neither they nor theatre audiences in the past have seriously questioned how they might be entailed in the construction of an imaginary museum of indigenous dance, we should realise that today we have a responsibility in the way that we come to view indigenous dance, not only as a theatre of life but as a declaration of support for the intercultural state of the nation.

[Reference]

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[Author Affiliation]

Fiona Magowan Anthropology, University of Adelaide