Situating the Body: Choreographies of Transmigration

Abstract

This paper aims to ask questions about how interculturalism might be informed by thinking through choreography. It examines the techniques and strategies of two Malaysian-Australian artists, Chandrabhanu and Yap, whose transmigration has constructed new forms of subjectivity from the memories and histories of dancing bodies. It asks how embodied experience, that includes dance knowledges, adapts before and after other social and political adjustments? It will examine how their choreography develops as a means to imagine the self beyond hegemonic political and social models of identity. In this regard, we have utilised the work of Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis to theorise the concept of the situated imagination and Sara Ahmed to complicate an understanding of diasporic experience in relation to home and belonging. We ‘trace the cross-pollination between various states’ in migratory bodies as forms of intercultural embodiment. Through discussion of two productions we consider in what ways Chandrabhanu and Yap establish modes of performative, and thus affective belonging, to place and nation.