Dancing Indigenous Worlds: Choreographies of Relation

by Jacqueline Shea Murphy

Overview

The vital role of dance in enacting the embodied experiences of Indigenous peoples
 

In Dancing Indigenous Worlds, Jacqueline Shea Murphy brings contemporary Indigenous dance makers into the spotlight, putting critical dance studies and Indigenous studies in conversation with one another in fresh and exciting new ways. Exploring Indigenous dance from North America and Aotearoa (New Zealand), she shows how dance artists communicate Indigenous ways of being, as well as generate a political force, engaging Indigenous understandings and histories.

Following specific dance works over time, Shea Murphy interweaves analysis, personal narrative, and written contributions from multiple dance artists, demonstrating dance’s crucial work in asserting and enacting Indigenous worldviews and the embodied experiences of Indigenous peoples. As Shea Murphy asserts, these dance-making practices can not only disrupt the structures that European colonization feeds upon and strives to maintain, but they can also recalibrate contemporary dance. 

Based on more than twenty years of relationship building and research, Shea Murphy’s work contributes to growing, and largely underreported, discourses on decolonizing dance studies, and the geopolitical, gendered, racial, and relational meanings that dance theorizes and negotiates. She also includes discussions about the ethics of writing about Indigenous knowledge and peoples as a non-Indigenous scholar, and models approaches for doing so within structures of ongoing reciprocal, respectful, responsible action.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781517912680
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	01/10/2023
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Jacqueline Shea Murphy is associate professor of dance at the University of California-Riverside. She is the author of The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories (Minnesota, 2007) and founder of the ICR (Indigenous Choreographers at Riverside) Gathering project.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: Choreographing Relationality 1

Choreographing Relationality 1

Modern Dance and Modernity/Coloniality 18

Recalibrations of Relational Exchange 24

Intersections of Dance and Indigenous Studies 27

1 Choreographies of Relational Reciprocity 69

Hosts and Visitors, Aotearoa, 2009 69

Manaakitanga in Motion: Choreographies of Possibility Jack Gray 77

Hashtag Mitimtti: Where You At? Andrew Kendall Diane Kendall Tia Reihana-Morunga Deborah Cocker Toni Temehana Pasion 95

2 Choreographies of Perspectival Relationality 127

Dance Workshop, Riverside, California, 2006 Rulan Tangen 127

Expansive Relationality/Of Bodies of Elements 147

Identities and Accountabilities, 2019 Rulan Tangen 181

Interlude/Pause/Provocation 195

Refuge Rock: Otonabee River, Ontario, 2010 Tanya Lukin Linklater 195

3 Choreographies of Relational Abun-dance 217

Precarity 217

Abundance and Abun-dance 221

Emily Johnson/Catalyst 227

4 Choreographies of Relational Refusings 259

Yirramboi, Melbourne, Australia, 2017 259

Facing Refusal 264

Teachings in Listening 271

Indigenous Dance Works/Indigenous Dance Making/Indigenous Writing Rosy Simas Mishuana Goeman Tanya Lukin Linklater Daystar/Rosalie Jones 283

Conclusion: Closing and Opening 297

Acknowledgments 301

Notes 307

Bibliography 363

Index 379

Editorial Reviews

"This remarkable text effectively establishes Indigenous dance studies as a vibrant time-based field of inquiry. Crafting theoretical models in direct relationship to repeated practices of witnessing and experiencing, Jacqueline Shea Murphy models a rich future for scholarship as a shared encounter among stakeholders to performance. Urgent, important, and written to endure as a document of continued creativity, Dancing Indigenous Worlds confirms the intellectual possibilities of translating gesture to text and of moving with care."—Thomas F. DeFrantz, Northwestern University

"In Dancing Indigenous Worlds, Jacqueline Shea Murphy performs a deeply ethical, deliberate ‘witnessing’ of Indigenous dance making. In these stories of how to create radical relationality between bodies, land, history, food—and milk as more than food—the reader should be aware they are being readied; a space has been prepared, the invocations have been made, contemporary movements connected to dance genealogies, past brutalities cast in the surrounding shadows, the spotlight is on bright, and you must step into this world that has been danced for you. There is room for all, and everything, as Shea Murphy reminds us, begins with respect."—Michelle Erai, author of Girl of New Zealand: Colonial Optics in Aotearoa
 

"The widely varied contexts within Dancing Indigenous Worlds demonstrates the vibrancy of current respectful, relational, Indigenous choreographies."—CHOICE

 

From the Publisher