Who does the story belong to? The politics of power in collaborative performance

Abstract

In this article, I interrogate my work Encounters with Dr Yashoda Thakore and her guru Annabattula Mangatayaru who are from the kalavantulu community (a marginalized, banned and ostracized dance community) based in Hyderabad and Mummidivaram in Andhra and our historic collaboration with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO). Two extremes it would seem bridged together by the work I was doing with our platform/festival Sangam, created to provide representation for marginalized, under-represented and racialized South Asian artists in Melbourne, Victoria. Based on my research that spans fifteen years, the Encounters performance reveals the story of five South Indian dancers (known as devadasi/kalavantulu) and three musicians who toured to Paris in 1838, at a time when India was colonized by France. One significant encounter occurred in Paris when a teenaged dancer called Ammany and the rest of the troupe met several composers in Vienna including Johann Strauss I and Joseph Lanner. The MSO had been playing some pieces from this encounter (Indianner Galopp and Malapou Galopp) not aware of its historic intercultural significance. Yashoda and her guru were also performing fragments of their repertoire descended from Ammany not aware of this connection. My research forms the third part of this puzzle; of knowing only fragments until all of us came together. Each of us contributed to the anti-colonial experimental piece that was created, but whose story was this? Who had the rights to perform this story? To engage in this question, I explore the idea of cultural property and intellectual property (IP) rights, licensing and copyright agreements to embark upon a moral and ethical framework not used usually in Australian–Indian performance praxis. I draw from my work with BlakDance and its First Nations IP process to question and interrogate the complexities of sharing stories, the politics of making intercultural work in Australia and examine who profits from this process whether it is economic, symbolic, political or via cultural capital and propose a cultural IP framework for the global majority in Australia.