Countermoves of the Transcultural: Moving With & Against – The Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools

Countermoves of the Transcultural: Moving With & Against investigates and archives conversations with Asian Australian performance artists who are making work and interrogating choreographic practice across Australia. This writing is about working with as much as working against, attempting to expose, unsettle and create ruptures in the inheritances that come with working in a colonial Australian arts landscape. The findings emerge from a larger PhD research project titled Countermoves of the Transcultural: Curatorial & Choreographic Perspectives of Asian Australian Performance undertaken through Queensland University of Technology, supervised by Dr Steph Hutchison and Dr Leah King-Smith. The project examines how Asian Australian performance artists create performative works that shed light on submerged histories that traverse the familial and the global. Utilising curatorial perspectives, the paper asks how performance traditions are intrinsic to understanding Australia’s relations with its neighbouring countries and how these actions, in turn, encourage critical community dialogue and the re-examination of colonial histories. Through interviews with artists, curators, researchers, dancers and choreographers, this research study seeks to offer a trans-historical window through which to reignite and sustain connections between Australian, Asian and Great Ocean countries and communities, revealing ties across times, places and peoples, and how these traditions and connectivity are shifting with the advent of new technologies and new methods of storytelling.

About the author

Reina Brigette Takeuchi is a Japanese-Australian artist-researcher, curator and dance-maker interested in cross-cultural exchange and interdisciplinary collaboration. Influenced by her experiences living peripatetically across East and Southeast Asia during her youth, Takeuchi uses an auto-ethnographic approach to her art/performance processes. She has exhibited internationally and has performed for Ars Electronica Festival, SomoS Arts Berlin, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Late program. Her writing has been featured in Delving into Dance, 4A Papers and Kill Your Darlings; and was awarded the 2022 Woollahra Digital Literary Prize in Non-Fiction. She is currently a PhD candidate at QUT, focusing on Asian Australian performance for her research project Countermoves of the Transcultural: Curatorial & Choreographic Perspectives of Asian Australian Performance.

Artist contributor biographies:

Dylan Goh

Born on unceded Bidjigal lands, Dylan Goh is a cultural practitioner with 7 years’ experience as an artist, curator, dancer, and museum worker.

Drawing upon his upbringing as a second generation Asian Australian, Dylan’s practice centres around intimate vignettes of culture in everyday life. Often working with family and communities, he accumulates these acutely rendered stories to disarm audiences and engender empathy.

Selected projects include: “Interrogating Archives: Where is the Bubble Tea?” (2022) – an essay advocating for grassroot communities like Subtle Asian Traits to curate national archives; “Queer Haymarket Tour” (2022) – a walking tour employing dance, readings and performances to reimagine Haymarket, Sydney, as a precinct visibly celebrating queer Asian-Australians; and “Porpor and I (婆婆和我): the interview” (2020-21) – a video installation about intergenerational language barriers and food as a vehicle for love during the pandemic.

In a recent talk for Museums & Galleries of NSW, Dylan championed the idea of museums as spaces purely for the cultural practices of living communities, as opposed to storage facilities for object-based collections. As a New Colombo Plan Scholar, he is undertaking a 16-month fellowship in South Korea to explore the role of street dance in cultural diplomacy.

Charemaine Seet

Charemaine Seet is a dance artist and educator straddling post-modern dance and street dance practice. She has been a principal dancer in companies in London and New York and has collaborated with a range of dance and performance artists including La Ribot, Gilles Jobin and Doug Elkins. She continues to collaborate with Doug Elkins on a variety of film and performance projects.

Charemaine has been exploring the dance vocabulary of Teochew Opera, her dialect group’s form of Chinese opera for a long-term project “Sixth Daughter”. She also is currently leading a series of dance workshops at the Sydney Opera House, many of them embodying the architectural and engineering principles of the building.

She was a full time scholarship student with Merce Cunningham in New York. Charemaine founded Seet Dance, one of Australia’s most innovative contemporary dance schools. As an educator, she is primarily concerned with decentering Western aesthetics in contemporary dance. Her practice explores intersections of dance as movement, learnings, writings and research that remain true to their original contexts.

WeiZen

WeiZen devises performances and participatory works that occupy the spaces of uncertainty between performance, ritual and installation. She investigates methods of accessing the memory body through a combination of vocal-bodywork, improvisation techniques and the mimicry of spirit possession. WeiZen perceives spirit possession rituals as socially transformative and empowering, and her performance structures employ accoutrements and imagery work that locate and coalesce relationships between body, voice, sound and site. Selected performances and projects include: Evaporative Body, Multiplying Body (Keir Choreographic Award with Alan Schacher 2022); Dying- Differently, Possibly (social-installation, Cementa festival 2022); illuminations of created place (performance-installation, Willoughby City Council curation 2022); and Stories from the Body (SFTB) #1-#9 (2014–2022: Indonesia, Malaysia, Setouchi Triennale in Japan, Thailand, SOFT CENTRE Unfurl, Sydney Contemporary and Blue Mountains City Art Gallery in Australia).