Music, Dance and the Archive

Brings together both Australian and international work on Indigenous music and dance, with chapters centred around practices from Arnhem Land, Western Australia, the Tiwi Islands, the Torres Strait, Taiwan, Aotearoa/New Zealand and North America, and Indigenous scholars authoring or co-authoring more than half of the book. Combines practice-led scholarship with research-informed creative practice. Considers music and dance together as often inseparable parts of performance practices, an approach achieved through the interdisciplinarity of its contributing authors. Music, Dance and the Archive interrogates historical access and responses to archives by showing how Indigenous performing artists and community members, and academic researchers (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) are collaborating to bring life to objects that have been stored in archives. It highlights the relationship between music and dance, as embodied forms of culture, and records in archives, bringing together interdisciplinary research from musicologists, dance historians, linguists, Indigenous Studies scholars and practitioners. The volume examines how music and dance are recorded in audio-visual records, what uses are made of these records (in renewal of cultural practice or in revitalising performances that have fallen out of use), and the relationship between the live body and historical objects. While this book focuses on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music and dance, it also features research on Indigenous music and dance from beyond Australia, including New Zealand, Taiwan and North America. Music, Dance and the Archive is an insightful culmination of original, previously unpublished research from a diverse selection of scholars in Indigenous history, musicology, linguistics, archival science and dance history.