Dancing with the Devil (Spirit): How Audiovisual Collections Reveal and Enact Social and Political Agency in Dance and Song (A Case from the Kimberley)

Abstract

Legacy data pertaining to song and dance has complex and immeasurable value to Indigenous communities across several domains. Over the past decade, projects of repatriation and return have thus flourished both within Australia and globally, as has scholarship addressing the processes, methods and results of such initiatives (Barwick, L. J. Green, and P. Vaarzon-Morel, eds. 2020. Archival Returns. Sydney and Honolulu: Sydney University Press and University of Hawai’i Press; Gunderson, F., R. C. Lancefield, and B. Woods. 2019. The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation. New York: Oxford University Press). Uses of legacy recordings by Ngarinyin, Worrorra and Wunambal practitioners of the dance-song genre known as Junba from the Kimberley region of north-west Australia for the purposes of revitalising the tradition with repertoire and increasing participation have been previously discussed (e.g., Treloyn, S., M. D. Martin, and R. G. Charles. 2019. “Moving Songs: Repatriating Audiovisual Recordings of Aboriginal Australian Dance and Song (Kimberley Region, Northwestern Australia).” In The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation, edited by F. Gunderson, R. C. Lancefield, and B. Woods, 591–606. New York: Oxford University Press). This paper, co-authored by two cultural custodians of practices and repertories of the dance-song genre known as Junba and an outsider ethnomusicologist, considers social and political agency through performance in relation to legacy recordings. The paper finds that legacy recordings of song and dance practice can throw light on political and social agendas of past performances, while creative reuse of frameworks and materials derived from legacy recordings of song and dance can support contemporary practitioners to express their own social and political agency today. The paper also suggests that attention to the social and political agency of cultural custodians is an important part of the work of archives, particularly where barriers to accessing legacy recordings remain.