Rachael Swain - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Rachael Swain is a director of intercultural and trans-disciplinary dance theatre and a performance researcher. She is founding member and co-artistic director of Marrugeku, together with Yawuru dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram. She has directed Marrugeku’s productions Mimi, Crying Baby, Burning Daylight, Cut the Sky and Jurrungu Ngan-ga. Together with Dalisa Pigram she has co-directed Buru and Ngarlimbah. She was dramaturg for Dalisa Pigram’s award winning solo Gudirr Gudirr and for Marrugeku’s Australian-New Caledonian co-production Le Dernier Appel and the triple bill Burrbgaja Yalirra. Rachael was previously Co-Artistic director of Stalker Theatre where she directed Blood Vessel, Incognita (with Koen Augustijnen), Sugar and Shanghai Lady Killer.
Rachael trained at the European Dance Development Centre in Arnhem, the Netherlands and The Amsterdam School for Advanced Theater and Dance Research (DAS ARTS). She has a PhD from Melbourne University titled Ways of Listening — new Indigenous-intercultural dramaturgies. She held an Australian Research Council DECRA research fellowship at Melbourne University 2013-2016. Her first monograph, Dance and Contested Land- new intercultural dramaturgies, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. She is currently an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at UNSW, Sydney.
Rachael is an experienced creative producer, curating research laboratories, managing national and international tours and producing Marrugeku’s productions with multiple commissioning partners.
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Papers by Rachael Swain
Springer eBooks, 2020
This award-winning series presents studies of choreographic projects embedded in the intermedial ... more This award-winning series presents studies of choreographic projects embedded in the intermedial and transcultural circulation of dance. Through advanced yet accessible scholarship, it introduces the artists, practices, platforms, and scholars who are rethinking what constitutes movement, and in the process, blurring boundaries between dance, theatre and performance. Engaged with the aesthetics and contexts of global production and presentation, this book series invites discussion of the multi-sensory, collaborative, and transformative potential of these new world choreographies.
Global performance studies, Jan 15, 2018
Theatre Journal, 2015
Broome, northwestern Australia (1996-present). Together with Yawuru dancer and choreographer Dali... more Broome, northwestern Australia (1996-present). Together with Yawuru dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram, she leads the innovative, intercultural dance theatre company, which creates contemporary multimedia productions in remote Indigenous communities. She is also a founder and director of Stalker Theatre in Sydney (1989-2015). Her large-scale dance, circus, and multimedia productions have toured extensively, both nationally and internationally. She curates and facilitates practice-led research laboratories exploring new cultural pathways in the creation of contemporary intercultural and Indigenous dance and theatre, identifying new cultural dramaturgies in contemporary performance. She currently holds an Australian Research Council Early Career Researcher fellowship at Melbourne University.
Humanities, Feb 17, 2022
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Springer eBooks, 2014
Drawing on an analysis of choreographic processes developed in situ in remote Western Australia, ... more Drawing on an analysis of choreographic processes developed in situ in remote Western Australia, it is concluded that alternative approaches to ‘listening’ are required to allow new forms of Indigenous storytelling to emerge. The chapter presents a practice-based account to how this ‘listening’ might function by outlining the development of an experimental dance theatre process in close association with Indigenous elders and their custodianship of ‘country.’ The legacy of the forced removals under the Western Australian assimilation policies of the last century and its impact on dance and story, as well as current definitions of ‘tradition’ and continuous connection to country under native title law, are examined in order to consider the creation of contemporary dance in a context of loss. The performer’s response of ‘dancing back’ to the intrusions faced by their community are presented in a series of case studies taken from rehearsal notes.
Humanities, 2022
Australia’s brutal carceral-border regime is a colonial system of intertwining systems of oppress... more Australia’s brutal carceral-border regime is a colonial system of intertwining systems of oppression that combine the prison-industrial complex and the border-industrial complex. It is a violent and multidimensional regime that includes an expanding prison industry and onshore and offshore immigration detention centres; locations of cruelty, and violent sites for staging contemporary politics and coloniality. This article shares insights into the making of a radical intersectional dance theatre work titled Jurrungu Ngan-ga by Marrugeku, Australia’s leading Indigenous and intercultural dance theatre company. The production, created between 2019–2021, brings together collaborations through and across Indigenous Australian, Kurdish, Iranian, Palestinian, Filipino, Filipinx, and Anglo settler performance, activism and knowledge production. The artistic, political and intellectual dimensions of the show reinforce each other to interrogate Australia’s brutal carceral regime and the concep...
New World Choreographies
This chapter extends the proposal for dramaturgies born of listening to Country described in Chap... more This chapter extends the proposal for dramaturgies born of listening to Country described in Chapter 2 by asking what it means to consider these possibilities in a time of global climate change. Taking its lead from the practice-based findings performed in Marrugeku's sixth production Cut the Sky (2015), this chapter situates the neo-expressionism that I identified in the previous chapter within the contemporary cultural politics of neoliberal extractive capitalism as it plays out in Indigenous land in the north of Western Australia. I do this to discuss a multifaceted application of response-ability enabled by urgent intersubjectivies with people, other species, places and things in the face of the crises of climate, capital and culture in the Kimberley. Pigram and I began thinking about a work addressing Kimberley Indigenous perspectives on climate change in 2012 after observing the Broome community become painfully divided during three intense years of debate concerning a proposed massive onshore hub for processing liquefied natural gas instigated by the Browse consortium. Made up of some of the largest resource companies in the world, the consortium investigated the suitability of Walmadanj (James Price Point)-an area of pristine coastline on neighbouring Jabirr Jabirr Country-as a processing hub for vast supplies of gas. 1 Just 52 kilometres from Broome, the planned hub included a significant increase of infrastructure in the
The key aspects of the working process which took place in the Marrugeku Company's in its ear... more The key aspects of the working process which took place in the Marrugeku Company's in its early work in Western Arnhem Land between 1995 and 2000 are discussed. Such intercultural projects take on deep social and cultural negotiation, which place emphasis on the lived experiences of all participants and are a great gift to offer the future.
Springer eBooks, 2020
This award-winning series presents studies of choreographic projects embedded in the intermedial ... more This award-winning series presents studies of choreographic projects embedded in the intermedial and transcultural circulation of dance. Through advanced yet accessible scholarship, it introduces the artists, practices, platforms, and scholars who are rethinking what constitutes movement, and in the process, blurring boundaries between dance, theatre and performance. Engaged with the aesthetics and contexts of global production and presentation, this book series invites discussion of the multi-sensory, collaborative, and transformative potential of these new world choreographies.
Global performance studies, Jan 15, 2018
Theatre Journal, 2015
Broome, northwestern Australia (1996-present). Together with Yawuru dancer and choreographer Dali... more Broome, northwestern Australia (1996-present). Together with Yawuru dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram, she leads the innovative, intercultural dance theatre company, which creates contemporary multimedia productions in remote Indigenous communities. She is also a founder and director of Stalker Theatre in Sydney (1989-2015). Her large-scale dance, circus, and multimedia productions have toured extensively, both nationally and internationally. She curates and facilitates practice-led research laboratories exploring new cultural pathways in the creation of contemporary intercultural and Indigenous dance and theatre, identifying new cultural dramaturgies in contemporary performance. She currently holds an Australian Research Council Early Career Researcher fellowship at Melbourne University.
Humanities, Feb 17, 2022
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Springer eBooks, 2014
Drawing on an analysis of choreographic processes developed in situ in remote Western Australia, ... more Drawing on an analysis of choreographic processes developed in situ in remote Western Australia, it is concluded that alternative approaches to ‘listening’ are required to allow new forms of Indigenous storytelling to emerge. The chapter presents a practice-based account to how this ‘listening’ might function by outlining the development of an experimental dance theatre process in close association with Indigenous elders and their custodianship of ‘country.’ The legacy of the forced removals under the Western Australian assimilation policies of the last century and its impact on dance and story, as well as current definitions of ‘tradition’ and continuous connection to country under native title law, are examined in order to consider the creation of contemporary dance in a context of loss. The performer’s response of ‘dancing back’ to the intrusions faced by their community are presented in a series of case studies taken from rehearsal notes.
Humanities, 2022
Australia’s brutal carceral-border regime is a colonial system of intertwining systems of oppress... more Australia’s brutal carceral-border regime is a colonial system of intertwining systems of oppression that combine the prison-industrial complex and the border-industrial complex. It is a violent and multidimensional regime that includes an expanding prison industry and onshore and offshore immigration detention centres; locations of cruelty, and violent sites for staging contemporary politics and coloniality. This article shares insights into the making of a radical intersectional dance theatre work titled Jurrungu Ngan-ga by Marrugeku, Australia’s leading Indigenous and intercultural dance theatre company. The production, created between 2019–2021, brings together collaborations through and across Indigenous Australian, Kurdish, Iranian, Palestinian, Filipino, Filipinx, and Anglo settler performance, activism and knowledge production. The artistic, political and intellectual dimensions of the show reinforce each other to interrogate Australia’s brutal carceral regime and the concep...
New World Choreographies
This chapter extends the proposal for dramaturgies born of listening to Country described in Chap... more This chapter extends the proposal for dramaturgies born of listening to Country described in Chapter 2 by asking what it means to consider these possibilities in a time of global climate change. Taking its lead from the practice-based findings performed in Marrugeku's sixth production Cut the Sky (2015), this chapter situates the neo-expressionism that I identified in the previous chapter within the contemporary cultural politics of neoliberal extractive capitalism as it plays out in Indigenous land in the north of Western Australia. I do this to discuss a multifaceted application of response-ability enabled by urgent intersubjectivies with people, other species, places and things in the face of the crises of climate, capital and culture in the Kimberley. Pigram and I began thinking about a work addressing Kimberley Indigenous perspectives on climate change in 2012 after observing the Broome community become painfully divided during three intense years of debate concerning a proposed massive onshore hub for processing liquefied natural gas instigated by the Browse consortium. Made up of some of the largest resource companies in the world, the consortium investigated the suitability of Walmadanj (James Price Point)-an area of pristine coastline on neighbouring Jabirr Jabirr Country-as a processing hub for vast supplies of gas. 1 Just 52 kilometres from Broome, the planned hub included a significant increase of infrastructure in the
The key aspects of the working process which took place in the Marrugeku Company's in its ear... more The key aspects of the working process which took place in the Marrugeku Company's in its early work in Western Arnhem Land between 1995 and 2000 are discussed. Such intercultural projects take on deep social and cultural negotiation, which place emphasis on the lived experiences of all participants and are a great gift to offer the future.