Across many cultures, the interdependent functions of the human body have been a rich source of metaphor related to social responsibility and the healthy functioning of communities. Traditional Yolŋu thought from Arnhem Land interprets the human body as a collection of living relations between diverse people and places. These relations are expressed as both metaphoric likeness (an elbow connection is like the relationship between brothers) and metonymic equivalence (the chest is country, a beating heart that nourishes and sustains). In this way, individual bodies form a living text of social and ecological responsibility, and constitute belonging and purpose. 

In this collaborative presentation developed with Wägilak ceremonial leaders Daniel Wilfred, Peter Djudja Wilfred, Benjamin Wilfred and Roy Natilma, we explore specific understandings of the body carried through Yolŋu manikay (public ceremonial song), buŋgul (dance) and yäku (song words; language). We ask, how can we understand the body though song, and song through the body? Not only do the structures of manikay and buŋgul map onto the body, but songs draw different people and stories together to sustain complex relations between kin and country.

From a linguistic perspective, the semantic connections carried within the body are also salient, showing meaning as always encountered, subjectively and materially, in relation. This raises significant challenges for the ways we approach collaborative research with Indigenous communities. 

The rivalry between the human and the automata continues to find enacted on the ballet stage. The most recent adaptation of Coppélia (Scottish Ballet, 2022) sets the nineteenth-century story in Silicon Valley, reflecting a twenty-first-century anxiety over AI technology. The various versions of the ballet are based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816), a gothic tale which adapts the Sandman folklore in featuring Nathaneal torn between his fascination for Olympia, manufactured by Dr. Coppelius / Coppola / Spallanzani, and his love for the girl, Clara. Hoffmann’s tale paves the way for Sigmund Freud’s theory on The Uncanny (1919). 

The ballet Coppélia (premièred in 1870) adapts Hoffman’s tale while enabling Swanhilda to master the tricks of Coppelia and rescue Franz from an impending doom. The story of the machine-doll gets a second life in another ballet, Petrushka (premièred in 1911), featuring a love triangle between three puppets, Petrushka, the Moor and the Ballerina at a Shrovetide Fair. The ballet derives from an ancient Russian tale. Petrushka falls in love with the Ballerina but she likes the Moor instead. Petrushka attacks the Moor in a rage only to be dismembered. The two ballets end similarly in an apparent restoration of human supremacy. 

Dance as an art form runs on human performance, and therefore, the ballet featuring automata capitalizes on a paradox, that is, human performing automata which imitate humans. The two ballets thus shed light on at once the limits and uniqueness of humanity. This paper focuses on the moments when the essence of the human undergoes challenge: when Swanhilda masters the movement of the automata in Coppélia and when Petrushka suffers from his unrequited love in Petrushka. These moments present a cauldron of humanity, which can be likened to the encounter between Frankenstein and his creature. This paper will examine motion in Coppélia and affect in Petrushka with a view to investigating how these two factors perform and underscore humanity. An embodied methodology related to dance will be adopted which shall combine Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the body as an open system with Silvan Tomkins’s affect theory in order to reconfigure the core of what is human as it is staged in ballet.  

Moving in the 'aftermaths' of colonial violence, we are weathered and awake to bring a wero (challenge) to social discourses where histories ripple through us as embodied knowledges (Wanhalla et al 2023).  19th century liberal humanism created the conditions for British Captain Robert FitzRoy (1805-1865) to claim authority over the weather in inventing the ‘forecast’.  But knowledge of the weather persists beyond the quantifications of science and metereology in the stories we tell and the performances we make.   In 'We-atherlands Sky & Bones' we embody weatherscapes as cultural memory work (Robinson, 2008) by peeling into the fragilities of environmental health through a dance of relation.   For the dancer their body is a Whare tupuna (genealogical house), a carved vessel of gestural traces and muscle memories (Williams, 2015). In this experimental performance we explore dance as a ‘practice of freedom’ (bell hooks), resisting the (in)corporeality of a humanity that persists in colonial-settler infrastructures. Through breath, voice, body and atmosphere, the cyclic rhythms of the taio (environment) locate us in movement, inviting thinking-with the ‘breath of life’, hau, hauOra.  Activating the air between us as a medium of exchange and contemplation we resist the mastery of the ‘man of reason’ (Brown & Reihana, 2019; Raymond, 2016).  Relational forms re-appear that reject identity politics in favour of affinities and alongsideness responsive to Vā-kā (the ignited and actioned space in between) (Smith & Wolfgramm-Foliaki, 2022). As such History gives way to geostories, ancestral story work and activā-tions of whakapapa.

References:
Brown, Carol, and Reihana-Morunga, Tia. 'Hau: Living Archive of Breath'. Performance Research, vol.25,no.2, 2020, pp. 69-78.
Paraha, Tru. 'Astrochoreography', Choreographic Practices, 2022  https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/chor_00020_1
Wanhalla, Angela, Ryan Lyndall, Nurka, Camille (Des) Colonialism, Violence and Memory in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. Dunedin: University of Otago, 2023.