Volume 10, Number 2, 2024 Performing (in) Place: Space, Relation, Action Guest-edited by Jenn Cole and Melissa Poll

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This article documents the process that led two groups of students enrolled in a course at UC San Diego to enter into a deeper and more reciprocal embodied relationship with the play Antikoni (a Nez Perce adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone), its author Beth Piatote, and with UC San Diego’s fraught history related to the repatriation of Kumeyaay ancestors. Building on Theresa Stewart-Ambo and K. Wayne Yang’s urgent invitation to think “beyond land acknowledgement” and to invest time and energy in creating a world beyond settler colonialism, this article examines how being entrusted with a story—Antikoni in this case—can serve to activate settler accountability and, potentially, usher in the relational shift imagined by Stewart-Ambo and Yang. This article documents how the students chose to reciprocate the gift that is Antikoni in tangible ways in the form of two staged readings and offers a reflection on how this experience can extend beyond the classroom and lead to lasting transformative work among larger campus communities.

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In 2016, Aljenljeng ended a thirteen-year hiatus and returned to the pop music scene in Taiwan with her first solo album, all in the Paiwan language, Vavayan. Formerly a Mandopop singer, Aljenljeng used to be known by the Chinese stage name Abao and sang only in Mandarin Chinese. Her choice to compose and sing the whole album in Paiwan signals a critical re-evaluation of Mandopop culture and its lyrical paradigm, which normalized Mandarin monolingualism as both the index of musical modernity in Taiwan and the lingua franca of Mandopop’s internationalization during the 1990s and early 2000s. Aljenljeng’s Paiwan turn was an effort to disrupt both Mandopop’s consumption of Indigenous music in Taiwan and the settler structure of feeling. Aljenljeng’s audiovisual expressions, sensorial experiences, and depictions of contact between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures in Taiwan generate meaningful Indigenous-initiated transcultural conversations. Aljenljeng’s video for “Minetjus” (which translates as “startled” or “shocked”) counters settler (over)consumption by placing settler, rather than Indigenous, individuals in the position of being observed, absorbed, transformed, and compelled to adapt. Amid the rhythmic naming of an array of Paiwan dishes in the song and video, the singer playfully cautions, “Don’t eat too much, otherwise your stomach will be startled.” Here, the Paiwan idiom for stomachache, “to have one’s stomach startled/shocked,” signifies both an openness to intercultural exposure and a rejection of the settler desire to digest and consume. Extending from the music tradition of the Paiwan, one of the sixteen Indigenous nations on the island, Aljenljeng’s work affirms intercultural curiosity on the premise of Indigenous sensory and emotional sovereignty, further fostering the possibility of interethnic dialogue in multicultural contemporary Taiwan.

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This co-written article considers the possibilities and limitations that community-engaged, decolonial pedagogies hold for challenging normative, settler-capitalist goals in dance education. Current mainstream discussions in US higher education demonstrate concern with utility and career readiness, especially in arts and humanities disciplines. In the performance-based classroom, these ideas can lend themselves to expectations of physical training to “prepare” students for a dance career. We argue that the alternative learning goals of not-dancing, listening to class attendees and collaborators, and working-for California tribal community partners can instead enable students and faculty to recognize and challenge implicit settler-capitalist frameworks and legacies of non-Native appropriation in undergraduate dance classes. We analyze a community-engaged, undergraduate seminar, titled Dance and Decolonization, which was taught by Tria Blu Wakpa, an Assistant Professor, with the assistance of her graduate student researchers, Sammy Roth and Miya Shaffer. This course asked students to support the cultural revitalization initiatives of individuals and representatives from three California Native tribes, which included archival research and dance revitalization efforts. We write this article as a conversation, following the pedagogical models offered by community partners who engaged students in dialogue, rather than teaching dances. We show how the course re-animated the space of the classroom to foreground Indigenous presence — an action which enabled students and faculty to identify and challenge historical and contemporary settler-capitalist power relations and, subsequently, recognize the constraints of learning about Indigenous issues in a land grant institution. In discussing the course, we offer strategies to work towards becoming "good relatives" from different community outsider positionalities: by not-dancing, listening, and working-for, we can be present to Indigenous presence and aim to be in relation with Indigenous peoples and land.

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Settler scholar and artist Alana Gerecke interviews settler choreographer Karen Jamieson about her decades-long career making site-based and community-engaged dances. In particular, Jamieson reflects on what she has learned about the complexities of orienting dance practice toward deepening connection with land, and of working with Indigenous collaborators in a respectful and non-extractive way.

EN:

Dispossession is not only harmful for the material deprivations it instantiates (though these harms are brutal, even genocidal). To the extent that dispossession occurs within a societal context in which possession is the ultimate virtue, dispossession further diminishes the social significance of those dispossessed; beneath a global regime of neoliberalism, to be lacking in possessions is to be rendered non-agential, unworthy of political representation, and, ultimately, subject to premature death for the profit of others. In the United States and other white-dominated nations, the sickness of white supremacy and its coinciding colonial incursions are rooted in liberal notions of property, doctrines of what can be possessed, what significance possession confers, and who is permitted to do the possessing. This possessive individualism benefits those who have longest held the ability to accumulate wealth via dispossession: already-wealthy white men. This social reality has ruinous effects for those whose cultural values are not predicated on possession yet are subject to the hegemonic forces of white supremacy. In this writing, I propose three “rehearsals of release,” replicable and mutational performances, that can be practically implemented in the lives of those with Settler inclinations. These rehearsals are designed to lessen tendencies toward dispossession and replace them with practices of de-possession, the exploration of a life lived in affinity with ongoing transfers and transitions of unbound matter rather than its monumental hoarding. While none of these rehearsals “solve the problem” of white supremacist neoliberalism, they permit practitioners to meaningfully engage with decoloniality in material, experiential, and intuitive ways and, with hope, encourage the emergence of a shared consciousness that turns away from dispossession and toward the circulation of care.