Journal of Intercultural Studies

Vol. 33, No. 4, August 2012, pp. 363!373

Introduction
Dancing the Transcultural across the
South
Rachel Fensham & Odette Kelada
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In ‘Dancing the transcultural across the South’, Fensham and Kelada argue for the
importance of incorporating the contribution of Dance Studies when examining the
complex ‘entanglements’ of migration, interculturalism and globalisation. The article
locates dancing within current intercultural debates, in particular utilising the idea of
transculturalism to inform a concept of ‘trans/dans’, and foreground movement as
localised expression. Culturally specific readings of dance as the articulation of moving
bodies and site for experiential and artistic expression, can speak to the intricacies of social
and political mobility. Embodiment is posited as central to examining how dance expands
understandings of corporeal transmission and intercultural exchange in ways that are not
restricted by monolithic categories of history, nation or culture. In this article, key scholars
from Intercultural Studies and Dance Studies scholarship are referenced in order to map
the rich territory offered by this productive interdisciplinary approach.

Keywords: transcultural; intercultural; dancing; choreography; embodiment; translocal;

immigrant communities; inner differentiation

Rachel Fensham is Professor of Dance and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. Author of To Watch
Theatre: Essays in Genre and Corporeality (Peter Lang, 2009); co-editor of Dancing Naturally: Nature, Neo-
classicism and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century Dance (Palgrave, 2011). Her writing has appeared in Dance
Research Journal, Discourses on Dance, New Theatre Quarterly and other book collections. She is co-editor with
Peter Boenisch of the Palgrave series, New World Choreographies and has been Principal Investigator for several
large AHRC and ARC funded research projects including Digital Dance Archives (www.dance-archives.ac.uk)
and the Pioneer Women Project. Correspondence to: Professor Rachel Fensham, School of Culture and
Communication, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia. Email: rfensham@unimelb.edu.au
Odette Kelada is a lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication, Australian Indigenous Studies
Program at the University of Melbourne. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including the
Australian Cultural History Journal, Artlink, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and
the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal. She worked as Research Associate for
Professor Fensham on the ARC Discovery Project ‘‘Transnational and Cross-cultural Choreography in
Australia’’, which included fieldwork in Malaysia with the choreographer Tony Yap.

ISSN 0725-6868 print/ISSN 1469-9540 online/12/040363-11

# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2012.693818
 364 R. Fensham & O. Kelada

This special issue aims to investigate connections between dance, the intercultural and
‘transmigration’. It considers dancing as both a social and community practice, as
considered by anthropologists and sociologists, and combines that significance with its
functions in artistic and religious activity. As a non-verbal art form, dancing involves
communication that is mediated through performance and requires an interpretive
lens informed by interdisciplinary approaches. Utilising the concept of dancing, as the
articulation of moving bodies, this issue of Journal of Intercultural Studies will focus on
dancing practices in communities from the global South. As a collection, the papers
explore new ways of theorising cultural mobility, immersed in bodily forms, which
negotiate understandings of the intercultural and transculturality.
The impetus for this investigation arises from a conference on the ‘‘Choreographies of
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Identity and Difference’’ at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian
National University in December 2006. The conference was convened under the banner of
the ‘‘Transnational and Crosscultural Choreographies (Trans/Dans)’’ research project,
funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and based at Monash University (2005!
2009). Trans/Dans investigated the politics of Australian dance from 1970 to 2000 and was
led by Professor Fensham and facilitated with the project researcher, Dr Odette Kelada.
The first conference in Australia to involve consideration of dance and
choreography in relation to the politics of identity, it attracted a range of scholars
from politics, sociology, gender studies and anthropology working on topics across
the Asia-Pacific region. Participants were invited to reflect on how concepts of
embodiment, performativity, ritual and enactment work in these contexts and to
discuss what theoretical tools were useful in cross-cultural dance research. The
following year, the international conference, ‘‘Choreographies of Migration: Patterns
of Global Mobility’’, was held by the Congress on Research in Dance at Barnard
College, New York in November 2007 and we were able to extend the conversations
held in Canberra with other scholars working globally to understand the role of dance
and choreography in patterns of migration and cultural exchange. André Lepecki has,
for instance, suggested that many geo-political and bio-political questions are
essentially choreographic determining:

who is able or allowed to move ! and under what circumstances, and on what
grounds; to decide where one is allowed to move to; to define who are the bodies
that can choose full mobility and who are the bodies forced into displacement.
(2008: 1)

An invitation to contributors from the Canberra and New York conferences led to a
selection of papers for the Journal of Intercultural Studies that elaborate the necessity
of thinking transculturally about dancing and cultural mobility. The questions we
identified for this discussion of intercultural choreographies, included:

. What does intercultural dancing involve?

. How is mobility conceived both artistically and politically through dancing?
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 365

. How are community identities created and influenced by dance practices and
dance practitioners?
. How do dance practitioners inform projects of intercultural awareness?

Given diverse theorising of the intercultural, and the lively development of Dance
Studies globally, we have wanted this issue to make a contribution that provides fresh
perspectives on the question of how dance understandings, knowledges and research
might be of value to intercultural studies. We believe that this is best done through the
specificity of examples situated in localised contexts, and via close attention to the
embodied aspects of cultural difference and exchange. To locate dancing within
intercultural debates, the concept of transculturalism has informed our thinking about
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‘trans/dans’ and we will expand on this idea before providing a brief introduction to
academic approaches to ‘ethnic’, cross-cultural and intercultural dance practices.

*****
In a previous introduction to this journal for an issue on ‘‘Theorising the
Intercultural’’, Suzi Adams and Michael Janover note that intercultural questions:

can focus on the range of human diversity or the ‘border crossing’ or interaction
between cultural formations and subjects, whether their focus is ‘multiple worlds’
or ‘between worlds’, explorations of the intercultural inevitably overlap with
notions of ‘the trans-cultural’. (2009: 228)

For the purposes of theorising the historicity of moving bodies in cultural studies, we
are attracted to the potentiality of an ‘inevitable overlap’ between the terms of the
intercultural and the transcultural although some scholars argue they represent
alternate root conceptions of how ‘cultures’ themselves are conceptualised. Wolfgang
Welsch’s philosophical essay offers a provocative contribution when he posits that the
intercultural is a term that may carry the residue of problematic notions of ‘culture’
as socially homogenous and consolidated. As he states in ‘‘Transculturality ! The
Puzzling Form of Cultures Today’’:

The conception of interculturality seeks ways in which such cultures could

nevertheless get on with, understand and recognise one another. But the deficiency
in this conception originates in that it drags along with it unchanged the premiss of
the traditional conception of culture . . . [which] creates by its primary trait ! the
separatist character of cultures ! [and] the secondary problem of a structural
inability to communicate between these cultures. (Welsch 1999: 195)

This provocation by Welsh, suggests that interculturality originates from an ideology

of inherently separate cultures suggesting an autonomous view and mapping of
cultural traits, which ultimately cannot transcend bounded identities. This monadic
framing derives from Johann Gottfried Herder’s influential definitions of culture in
the late eighteenth century and persisted into the twentieth century with the
attribution of distinctive stylisations of dancing according to ethnic type in books
 366 R. Fensham & O. Kelada

such as Curt Sachs’s World History of the Dance (1963), and into choreometric
classifications of music and dance by social organisation or genotypical physique,
widely influential in anthropology (see Lomax 1968).1 In response to the secondary
problem identified by Welsch, one of the key contributions of recent interculturalism
studies has therefore been to investigate cultural communication between ‘‘mixed
intermingling and interacting cultural beliefs, manners and identities’’ (Adams and
Janover 2009: 228). Although this ‘mixed intermingling’ is by no means a simple
activity considering differentials of power status and geo-political realities.
Transculturalism, however, remains a minority term, not often explicitly defined,
in intercultural discourse although particularly appealing to those who theorise the
politics of mobility, social spaces and arts practices (Rodrı́guez 2007, Joshi 2008). For
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the purposes of our interest in articulating possibilities inherent within the mobile
term of the transcultural ! where movement itself is foregrounded as the dynamic of
modern societies, and of intercultural relations between bodies ! Welsch offers
transculturality as a lens that may resist traditional derivations of cultural schema.
The term describes interconnection and entanglement ensuing from various forces
including migratory processes to communication systems and economic interde-
pendencies. The general characteristic of culture emerges from ‘‘inner differentiation’’
and emphasises the ‘‘complexity of modern cultures’’ (Welsch 1999: 196). It is a
concept Welsch argues that is multi-meshed and inclusive, able to encompass the
global and the local, the universal and particular, where exchange and interaction are
key elements. We would argue that this emphasis on inner differentiation speaks to
the corporeal specificity of the body and an intricate spatialised coordination of the
self in the world; as opposed to an illusory conception of the body in culture or
society as unified. Modern cultures produce realities fractured by various forces such
as urban class structures, conflict, political regimes, migration and racialised
histories; and this complexity produces the subjectivity of an inner difference.
Transculturalism therefore offers us a way to avoid monolithic categories of thought
and identity such as those of the nation in the transnational or culture in the
intercultural. It also encourages forms of analyses that have traction with complex
readings of non-verbal expression and art.
Brazilian cultural theorist, Joaquı́n Rodrı́guez, for instance, argues powerfully for
the concept of transculturalism as a motivating model of production and analysis for
intercultural relations within the global art-system:

the symbolic dimension of mobility is inscribed in the very process and cultural
context in which (geo-epistemologically) new subjectivities are being negotiated.
(2007: 343)

Given the fetishisation of cultural identities often promulgated by multiculturalism,

Rodrı́guez proposes that the transcultural provides for the more political admixture
of adaptations and transformations occurring within areas of arts practice outside
economically dominant centres of power. What is most fertile in recognising the
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 367

peripherality and hybridity of cultures and artistic expression is that the transcultural
admits to the potentiality and vitality of a mobility between:

other subjectivities which were not inscribed either in the body or in the memory of
individuals prior to displacement; other subjectivities which could not have been
imagined as future identities or as identitary perspectives before being embodied
through movement. (Rodrı́guez 2007: 344)

This suggestion of models of cultural otherness, identified with an intersubjectivity

of bodies, displacement and imaginary investment, takes us directly to discussion
of how dance discourses can significantly expand and enrich understandings of
intercultural communication, art and performance.
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‘Dancing the transcultural’ as referred to in our title invokes the contribution and
importance of Dance Studies, a field embedded in exploration of moving bodies,
corporeal transmission and the transaction of different knowledges, to this discussion of
cultural formation and communication. Outside Dance Studies, dance is often simply
described as intangible art and/or transitory joy rather than a potent politicised
structuring of reality with much to reveal about the movement of bodies on individual,
community, social, national and global levels. This issue aims to redress this by fostering
thinking on the ‘trans’ and the ‘inter’ as productively explored, corporealised and
spoken or seen through culturally specific readings of choreography and dance.
In so far as it is a performative practice, dancing is as an exacting art form, in which
the moving body becomes both a site of aesthetic pleasure and identity formation. As
such, dancing bodies involve a complex kinaesthesia, and the detailed articulation of
body parts, in relation to temporal and spatial coordinates. In addition, while appearing
present on a particular event or occasion, dancers acquire the attributes of dancing
through the repetition, incorporation and performance of distinctive stylisations of the
body over time. The dance theorist Susan Leigh Foster asserts therefore that dance
movement is ‘‘thought-filled’’, simultaneously resonant with the possibilities of
remembered corporeal investment, as well as hosting bodily action that promotes an
immanent potentiality (2002: 133). We see the dancing body as the inner differentiation
of a complex corporeal reality known to the dancer, and to others in performance.
In her book, The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory, sociologist Helen Thomas,
along with other dance scholars, asserts that dancing is a corporeality constructed to
convey social and cultural meanings, in explicitly learned and codified systems. As she
writes:

in dancing . . . individual embodied subjects/subjectivities enact and ‘comment’ on

a variety of taken-for-granted social and cultural relationalities: gender and
sexuality, identity and difference, individuality and community, mind and body
and so on. (Thomas 2003: 215)

In addition to this unpacking of cultural codes, the dance scholar Dee Reynolds has
identified the ‘rhythmic energies’ of dancing with a process of ‘kinaesthetic empathy’
 368 R. Fensham & O. Kelada

(2007). Influenced by new research in neuropsychology, Reynolds has suggested that

spectators find neuronal connections to affective, social or physical knowledge from
watching the efforts of tension and release in a group of dancers, and in that process
they might feel something different about how memory and experience have been
lived in another person’s body. To read dance performance transculturally is thus to
affirm the experience of dancing and viewing as a transmission between bodies of an
intersubjectivity articulating complex codifications of cultural knowledge.
Since the body has become a key term in social theory more recently, embodiment
has taken on a critical power of enunciation (Turner 1984, Csordas 1994). Both dancing
and embodiment, with their emphasis on materiality within culture, bring the variety
and complexity of our interaction with others, capital, globalisation and social
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exclusion into focus. We would suggest the value of embodiment to transcultural

dance studies extends beyond its capacity to deliver a mode of analysis that draws
attention to the specific attributes of a dance or to community modes of expression.
Rather the intersubjectivity of communicative action and the standpoint of embodi-
ment highlight the complexity of any cultural enunciation particularly at the points of
entanglement between and within cultures. In the dynamics of transnational societies,
after modernity, dance forms have become active sites for witnessing this multiplicity of
social experience. In addition, the embodied dimensions of cultural interaction and
mobility are in keeping with an evolving politics of transculturality in dance.
Historically, the relationship between dancing practices, ethnicity and community
identity was foregrounded 30 years ago, when Gillian Bottomley (1979) wrote about
the role that Greek dancing played in assisting newly arrived immigrants to negotiate
between the ‘traditions’ of a home nation and the ‘modernity’ of a new host nation.
In localised adaptations of ‘folk dancing’, Bottomley (1992) later suggested that
participants could enjoy embodiments that gave expression to remembering the past,
as a communal belonging, as well as sanctioning alternative forms of authority and
pleasure in the present. Such writing is representative of earlier intercultural
approaches that viewed dancing as indicative and reflective of the uniqueness and
autonomy of a cultural identity. Albeit a form of dancing in transition as immigrant
cultures adapted to the demands of a new home and host nation.
In her seminal essay, ‘‘Listening to the Call of Dance’’, social anthropologist Kalpana
Ram responded to critiques of dancing marked as ethno-specific by multicultural
discourse; she argues that learning and presenting traditional dances is not necessarily a
conservative search for lost authenticity because it can make the past manifest through
‘‘a certain skilful way in which cultural subjects respond to the novel and unprecedented
demands of the present’’ (2000: 364). In her studies of young Indian women learning
classical Indian dance in Australia, Ram identifies strict ‘‘criteria for virtuosity,
appropriate ‘feeling’ and for the experience of a kind of ‘integrity’’’. Dancing, as she
suggests, provides an embodied experience of the different kinds of rhythmic patterns
that render living with social complexity an actuality. In particular, dancing invokes
certain primary experiences of the world including those of ‘‘relationality, coherence,
intersubjectivity, embodiment, temporality and a certain ‘givenness’ to the world’’
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 369

(Ram 2000: 363). As such, Ram argues that this dancing of immigrant communities
presents cultural research with an important paradox; the ‘call of dance’ leads theorists
to consider the experience of social practices that ‘‘move away from or at least muddy a
dichotomous understanding of politics and poetics’’ (2000: 359). We concur with Ram’s
proposition that dance is an ‘embodied form of knowing’ rather than a knowledge
extracted in the form of discursive statements, which calls for a revision of the
opposition between ‘tradition’ (a poetics based on essences) and ‘politics’ (an
instrumentalist practice of power). As we stated earlier, dance and politics are not
antithetical but rather irreducibly enmeshed and entangled; in keeping with the
meanings of transculturality proposed by Welsch.
Even dances that appear to represent quintessential cultural signs such as the hula
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for Hawaii and the haka for New Zealand are indeed transcultural. Christopher
Balme, writing on the colonial histories of both hula and the haka, notes that these
dances are also ‘‘focal points for the cultural identity formation of their respective
cultures’’ (2007: 121). His research investigates changes that took place in dress codes,
musical accompaniments, symbolic and mimetic movements of these dances for the
purposes of tourist display, for presentation to the European, or as activities designed
for local cultural survival. His findings indicate that ‘‘hula and haka were subjected to
a complex dynamic of cultural borrowings and redefinition that incorporate
historical exigencies, aesthetic innovation and cultural identity formation’’ (Balme
2007: 121). Dancing the hula or the haka today, whether in tourist bar, sporting field
or village festival, is therefore to embody ongoing processes of transcultural exchange
and geo-political definition.
Dancing also provides opportunities for subjects who cohabit in cosmopolitan
cities to enact a translocal diversity by mixing up gendered and multicultural codes,
previously separated by the nation-state. These decentred lateral associations may be
as crucial to identity formation as any connection based on a shared place, original
form, or desire to return to a real or mythical homeland. In Sheenagh Pietrobruno’s
study of salsa in Montreal, she compares the non-Latinos who begin learning the
dance, and tend to exoticise or sexualise the moves, with those who come from Latin
culture, often themselves ignorant of the dance’s diverse history (2006). Although a
culturally marked dance might be seen as merely sexual expression, or as a gesture of
devotion, or even trivialised in the form of overt display or contest, Pietrobruno
argues that ‘‘listening and dancing to Salsa . . . represents as much their willingness to
connect with a spirit of Latin identity as it does their desire to establish cultural
boundaries within the host city’’ (2006: 88). Once the dance is viewed from the site of
the dancer, an experiential change in attitudes develops, which knows dance as a
practice ‘‘with a value in itself, rather than seeing it primarily as a precursor to sex or
as a vehicle for sexual expression’’ (79). The complexity of executing the moves, and
of performance, become ends to which any dancer aspires in the ‘inner differentia-
tions’ of their body. Therefore, even when aspects of intercultural or multicultural
dance become globalised, and vulnerable to commodification, these embodiments
represent ‘inner differentiation’ and cultural complexity.
 370 R. Fensham & O. Kelada

Perhaps the most successful youth movement of the last 20 years is the dancing of
hip-hop, given the commodity circulation of music, images, competitions, and
celebrities across cultures and nations. Its localised variations include the Japanese
manga form, German athletic moves and Algerian street beats that provide ample
evidence that hip-hop serves as a vehicle for negotiation of identity and representa-
tion in relation to national or regional political circumstances (Osumare 2002). Other
transcultural forms, along with salsa, hula and haka, which have become global
phenomena, include tango, belly-dancing, swing-dancing, capoeira and other styles
that circulate as commodities in and through diverse urban settings. The popular
circulation of these globalised dances radically shifts a previous conception of ‘ethnic
dance’ as the expression of a people’s identity or heritage (Pietrobruno 2006: 77). A
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young man from Calcutta who is the reigning Indian salsa champion, an Hawaiian
hip-hop dancer and an Aboriginal Zorba represent instead transcultural bodies,
whose re-coding of dance forms, stylisations and gestures appear to exemplify the
success of a globalising popular culture. It is difficult therefore not to see these
transcultural bodies as new sites for the investigation of the dynamics of transnational
cultural flows, the shifting terrain of identity and the fluidity of cultural values.
Dancing the transcultural, as these scholars attest, impacts on modes of being in
the world and gives form to experiences that are polyphonous. The work of Ram,
Balme and Pietrobruno demonstrates that the dynamic incorporation and transmis-
sion of dance forms in modern cultures articulate varieties of knowledge (whether
colonial, sexual, racial, postcolonial or cosmopolitan). Further analysis using a
transcultural approach reveals the complexity and inner differentiation of dancing in
contrast to the abstract and homogenous representations of dance forms dissemi-
nated by colonial or global power structures.
*****
The papers in this special issue on ‘‘Intercultural Choreographies’’ configure
transculturalism and dancing across locations within the geo-political South, that
is, dance practices located in a sense of place or nations outside the dominant
hegemonic power structures of the North. We begin in the metropolitan centre and
move to the smallest island of the newest nation in the world. The geography of
research extends from Tamil trance dances in the temples of South London to an
Odissi Indian classical dancer and Australian-Malaysian choreographers; and from an
intercultural project in Vietnam to the village dances of East Timor. A feature of this
positioning is that the case studies hybridise cultural practices conceived as ‘modern’
or ‘traditional’. They also navigate the complexity of highly politicised contexts in
intercultural environments. These shifts in place and location are accompanied by
transcultural analysis of multiple modes of exchange and communication.
In extension of Bottomley’s focus on immigrant communities, dance scholar Ann
David’s study makes important connections between spatial practices and religion as
ways of understanding diasporic communities in cosmopolitan cities; this paper
covers the circulation of rituals, capital and strong political beliefs in Sri Lankan-Tamil
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 371

groups in the new geographical context of South London. David argues that the
practice and dissemination of community dance forms and trance dancing (the
gestures, the negotiations between teacher body and student body, the materiality of
body, the exchange of embodied knowledge) demonstrates embodied migration.
The second paper, following Ram’s interest in questions of authenticity associated
with learning Indian dance, engages with the ethics of interviewing and fieldwork in
an intercultural context between an Australian dance scholar, Sally Gardner and
Sangeeta, a second-generation Indian student who studies Odissi classical dance by
travelling to India to stay with her guru. The paper shifts focus from the speaking
ethnographic subject to the listening researcher and raises questions about estrange-
ment from living traditions as a result of migration, and the necessity of co-presence
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in dancing. It draws upon feminist phenomenology to explore the challenging

strategy of listening as a mode of fieldwork constructed in dialogue with the dancer/
dance form examined.
Cultural and performance theory scholars, Rachel Fensham and Odette Kelada,
examine the techniques and strategies of choreographers Tony Yap and Chandrab-
hanu who migrated from Malaysia to Australia 30 years ago. These artists draw upon
animist and other transformational practices to re-enter familial pasts and cultural
traditions as an active present of modernity. As with Reynolds’ notion of rhythmic
energies, it examines how the cellular effects of their choreography transforms the
limits of political and social models of identity in Australia. Utilising the concept of
the situated imagination Fensham and Kelada argue for embodied fantasy as an
affective modality to communicate homing, transmigration and alienation.
Choreographer Cheryl Stock provides a detailed account of intercultural commu-
nication in a dance collaboration, the Phoenix Project, between the Vietnam Opera
Ballet Theatre and a group of Australian dance and visual artists. In acknowledgment
of different subject positions, within the expertise of dancers and choreographers, the
paper raises questions about language skills, markers of social status, the expression
of emotion and the use of non-verbal signs as powerful coordinates in any large-scale
intercultural exchange. The paper is a lively narrative of a cross-cultural working
process, with shifting power relationships, and highlights the contested nature of
control and the co-construction of meaning in art.
Political scientist Jacqueline Siapno presents an important critique of recent trends
in the study of trauma on victims of violence in post-conflict and war zones. Located
in Timor Leste where many NGOs and international agencies are involved in
reconstruction projects, Siapno highlights the failing and exclusions of these efforts
by first world countries. As Balme suggests for the hula and the haka, the paper
focuses on local dance practices as affirmative strategies for individual and communal
belonging and survival. It examines the intersection/s between traditional Timorese
dances and martial arts training such as Aikido and how embodiment and
participatory practice may be a core methodology for healing in conflict zones.
Each paper of this special issue is presented in the form of grounded theorising that
has emerged from the labours of fieldwork, in interviews, participant observation, social
 372 R. Fensham & O. Kelada

interaction or physical efforts. A politics of writing in dance and intercultural studies

requires recognition of the economic and social power that accrues to the scholar who
studies the non-Western dance. It is important therefore to consider the dancer’s own
perspective, and what that experience might represent both from within the dance, or
within the society in which the dancing takes place. It can also be addressed by
providing opportunities for different representations of dance to circulate, such as
offered here, in the discussion of dance forms and practices across the global South.
The transcultural as we have defined it in this paper provides for just such a
localised, yet dynamically complicated, interpretation of the activity of embodiment
and its relationship to social or political mobility. Since power relations and cultural
embodiments are never fixed or even, the transcultural appears to be a productive
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term for dance and cultural research in the globalised and destabilised admixture of
identities and experiences that shape the twenty-first century. Culture therefore, is
not defined here by its origins or its discreteness, but by its potentiality for
embodiment into the future, as a kind of becoming of identity and thus of necessity
to do with the mobility of subjects within new locations and new situations.
We contend therefore that dance is ‘trans’; mobilised by an active prefix that
foregrounds motion, fluidity and continual crossing between, among and through
constructed, imagined and naturalised boundaries. It incorporates transmission,
translation, transgression and as papers in this issue examine, transmigration.
Identities are creatively unsettled while at other times reproduced; feelings of self can
be found in alien spaces; the past may be lost and potentially recuperated; and
emotions of belonging and otherness can find expression in ways not easily reduced,
contained or restricted to verbal communication. This multi-layered semiotics makes
dance inherently political as well as aesthetic ! and as with the idea of the
transcultural, these terms and interactions become entangled.

Note
[1] An extended critique of Sachs and Lomax’s influence on understandings of dance is offered
in Susan Leigh Foster, Worlding Dance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 3!7.

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