ORIENT: utsav 2008 Dancing across cultures

[Katerina Teaiwa]

Mudra Centre for Dance

presents

Utsav 2008: Dance. Women. Culture
2-8 June Street Theatre

FORUM: Dancing Across Cultures
 
10 am-11.45 am, Thursday 5 June, Old Canberra House, Liversidge Street, ANU.

The Forum is part a week long program of events coming together under the
banner of Utsav 2008, connecting cultural crossovers and the changing nature
of the feminine with emerging dance forms especially in relation to women¹s
rights, social justice issues, and exploring new and old relationships
between dance and society across cultures.

You are cordially invited to attend and participate in discussions during
the Forum. 

The Forum brings together local and international speakers with diverse
perspectives on dance and/or embodiment in their own practices and aims to
open up a new discourse embracing dance as artform, academic discourse,
spiritual transformation, a redefinition of gender, and political
empowerment.

(Utsav means Celebration)

PANEL

Jacquie Lo is a Reader in English and Head of the School of Humanities at
ANU. She has played a pioneering role in developing Asian Australian
Studies, and is presently Chair of the Asian Australian Studies Research
Network.  Jacquie's main research areas are in performance, postcolonial and
diaspora studies and her publications include Staging Nation: English
Language Theatre in Malaysia and Singapore (2004), and Diaspora: Negotiating
Asian Australia (2000).  Her latest monograph, Performance and Cosmopolitics
(co-written with Helen Gilbert, 2007) tracks the influences of Aboriginal
and Asian theatre practices in mainstream, avant garde and community theatre
practices in Australia and will be the basis of Jacquie¹s presentation.

Sulini Nair is a professional dancer in the style of Mohini Attam, a
classical  Indian dance style originating from the State of Kerala and
exclusively evolved for and by women.  She has won many awards for dance
including the Kerala Kala Thilakam and regularly performs all over India.
Sulini¹s focus is the embodiment of the feminine in Mohini Attam in the
context of Indian classical dance and its foundations in Indian philosophy.

Vasiliki Nihas is a cultural consultant based in the ACT. She has worked
extensively in the arts and in the public sectors, developing and running
training in Arts for a Multicultural Australia for all Australia Council
staff and facilitating the development of a National Dance Strategy.
Vasiliki will explore  dance as a gift of the divine muse Terpsichore,
interspersing her musings with stories that make Greek dancing a touchstone
for the feminine soul.

10 minutes coffee break

Kieran O¹ Callaghan is the founder and Director of the InSync Institute and
has conducted transformative programs for numerous individuals and
organisations over many years. A versatile and innovative thinker, he has
focused for the last 25 years on how to improve individual, organisational
and community life. Kieran has been active in large-scale projects to bring
together community leaders to promote peace, reconciliation and
intercultural harmony. Kieran will concentrate on the relevance of feminine
movement-based philosophy for men.

Jeannie Higgins is a clinical psychologist, a community and organisational
consultant and a yoga and mediation teacher with over twenty-eight years of
clinical, research, community and policy experience. Jeannie is a specialist
in traumatic stress reactions and works closely with the multiple systems
that impact on health, social and vocational outcomes. She will explore
dance as opportunity for transformation and transcendence of broken,
disconnected and fragmented hearts, spirits, minds and bodies in women.

Padma Menon is a choreographer/dancer who has worked internationally over
the last 25 years.  She started her career as a classical Indian dancer,
founding Padma Menon Dance Theatre in Canberra and is a former Canberra
Times Artist of the Year.  She has worked in Europe and for the last three
years in India, exploring the potential of dance to engage and empower,
including working with human rights networks in India to use dance as a tool
for empowerment and activism.  Padma will look at the current meanings of
dance particularly in terms of the nature of the feminine it affirms or
proposes.

Discussion 

The Forum will be chaired by  Katerina Teaiwa.
Katerina is Pacific Studies Convener in the Faculty of Asian Studies,
College of Asia and the Pacific at the ANU. Her research and teaching
interests are in the history and impact of British, Australian and New
Zealand phosphate mining in Oceania, popular culture and consumption,
contemporary Pacific dance studies, Pacific diasporas and visual
ethnography. She is a founding member of the Oceania Dance Theatre at the
Oceania Centre, University of the South Pacific in Fiji and has performed in
Suva, Santa Clara, Honolulu, New York and Canberra. In 2005 she convened the
first Pacific Dance Studies conference "Culture Moves! Dance in Oceania from
hiva to hip hop" at the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington and in 2008,
"Oceanic Connections" at the ANU featuring three Pacific dance communities
from Canberra, Sydney and Darwin.

Enquiries:  6125 2434 or Mary Varghese 62491265