On Centers and Peripheries

I want to begin this short contribution to the Dancehouse Diary by discussing centers and peripheries in the unceded land we call Naarm whose custodians are the Bunnwurung and Wurundjeri people. As a migrant child, the turn to South Asian arts in a white Australia was my haven from racism in everyday spaces where I was often told, as an Asian, to go back to where I came from. I began practicing dance, already politicised from a very young age, questioning who or what belonged at the center and who was in the periphery here in Naarm. As I grew older, I began understanding that Asians were not recent entrants to Australia. As my friend and collaborator First Nations Yolgnu artist Sylvia Nulpintidj recently reminded me, her people and my people have been in conversation for over 4000 years but I do not forget that we, along with everyone else, are guests on this land and therefore peripheral to the centers that First Nations people have imagined for this space for over 80,000 years. Read more...

Protest as Practise

In 1973, political scientist, Gene Sharp, published a list of one hundred and ninety-eight methods of nonviolent action as a reference list for engaging in transformative civil acts. The list reveals the power of the body (especially in collectivity) to obstruct, declare, withhold, disappear, dismantle, deliver and perform. It contains commonly practiced methods such as sit-ins and strikes, as well as more niche ideas, such as lysistratic non-action and mock funerals. Read more...

On Exiting Capitalism

We tend to imagine that money infects or sullies art, but financial history could equally be narrated as one in which increasingly abstract figuration, surreal visualisation and aesthetic chaos seep into what is presumed to be the antiseptic, mimetic rationality of the market. Which is all to say, I’m for the abolition of capitalism (the rule of society by money) and also the abolition of “art as such.” And I think until we get there (and maybe after) support for the arts will always be dirty. Read more...