Modern primitives leaping and stomping the earth: from ballet to bush doofs

Abstract

In the colonial history of black and white Australia, there are few recorded instances of public performances that draw together the traditions of Aboriginal and settler dance cultures to create mutually constitutive corporeal dialogues.Aboriginal academic Marcia Langton argues in an oft-quoted observation that settler experiences of Aboriginal culture have remained over time primarily visual and distant, both spatially and culturally, rather than embodied and contingent. 1 It is not surprising, then, that settler encounters with Aboriginal performance have manifested primarily in spectatorship rather than interaction.In this paper, we explore two uncommon examples of embodied performance by non-Indigenous dancers directly inspired by white imaginings of Aboriginal culture.Exercising concern regarding the motivations and political implications of performance, we first examine the modernist ballet Corroboree (1954) and subsequently the neo-corroborees of contemporary 'bush doof' culture. 2 The study of such hybrid performances is relatively new to Australian history so a significant 'knowable past' has been obscured from the historical agenda.3 While anthropologists studied the rich variety of traditional Aboriginal ceremony, the hybrid forms were neglected and settler Australians' enduring fascination with Aboriginal performance -albeit often patronising and grounded in racism -was largely forgotten.The absence of studies of Aboriginal hybrid performances produced for the entertainment of settler audiences is now being redressed in articles and compilations.4 In 2002, Michael Parsons published a history of the prototype public Aboriginal performances referred to generically as 'corroborees' that white audiences have avidly watched from early colonial times to the tourist productions of the present.5 Created within limits set 1.

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