Countermoves of the Transcultural: Moving With and Against

Countermoves of the Transcultural: Moving With & Against investigates and archives conversations with Asian Australian performance artists who are making work and interrogating choreographic practice across Australia. This writing is about working with as much as working against, attempting to expose, unsettle and create ruptures in the inheritances that come with working in a colonial Australian arts landscape. The findings emerge from a larger PhD research project titled Countermoves of the Transcultural: Curatorial & Choreographic Perspectives of Asian Australian Performance undertaken through Queensland University of Technology, supervised by Dr Steph Hutchison and Dr Leah King-Smith. The project examines how Asian Australian performance artists create performative works that shed light on submerged histories that traverse the familial and the global. Utilising curatorial perspectives, the paper asks how performance traditions are intrinsic to understanding Australia’s relations with its neighbouring countries and how these actions, in turn, encourage critical community dialogue and the re-examination of colonial histories. Through interviews with artists, curators, researchers, dancers and choreographers, this research study seeks to offer a trans-historical window through which to reignite and sustain connections between Australian, Asian and Great Ocean countries and communities, revealing ties across times, places and peoples, and how these traditions and connectivity are shifting with the advent of new technologies and new methods of storytelling.