Tradition, Innovation and Fusion: Local articulations of global scapes of girl dance

In this paper I theorize a dance workshop program that I designed and ran with a group of young Sudanese Australian refugee women as part of my postdoctoral research into the arts and young people at risk. In consultation with the girls involved, I designed dance workshops in relation to a selection of texts (music, dance practices, film clips and video recordings of rehearsals). These popular cultural texts served as teaching tools and also articulated what, mobilizing Appadurai (1996, 2000); I call scapes of 'non white feminine dance'. I offer an account of the process through which I devised and the girls performed a dance piece that was presented at a community education end of year celebration for the Sudanese community living in Melbourne. The girls' highly gendered movement styles can be considered as a dialogue between local and global aspects of these scapes of non-white feminine dance. Through such framing, I show how ethnic heritages and media texts became core tools through which the girls produced dancing identity.