Dancing Dandenong: The Poetics of Spatial Politics

Abstract

This chapter will provide a critical commentary on a collaborative multimedia performance that explores the politics of public space with specific reference to the new civic space in Dandenong. More specifically, it documents and responds to the dispute between the local Indian community and the City of Dandenong (who intend to demolish the “little India” shops to facilitate the new public space). Drawing on various theories about the relationship between community, everyday life, and public space (Carter, Foucault, Lefebvre), the chapter examines the socio-spatial interventions and effects of a dance improvisation in the areas bordering the new civic space in Dandenong, with a particular focus on the transitory social relations facilitated by performance—that is, on those dyadic relationships (self and other, inside and outside, centre and periphery) relevant to human interaction in public space. From the point of view of artistic practice, this chapter engages with the politics legitimated by state institutions and of what Warner calls “counterpublics”—oppositional groups who seek to use public space in subversive or unauthorised ways—in order to discover what performance might tell us about the tensions between the various spaces of public culture.