- Rachel Fensham
In this paper, I tried to provide a picture of those cultural and political events in the 1960s and 1970s that helped to shape the field of Australian dance. I used Bourdieu's concept of the field to discuss dance within a matrix that involves institutions, individuals, practices, as well as beliefs. Changes taking place within dance might therefore be thought of as the product of networks of social relations that exist in competition with each other and with other institutions that constrain and enable cultural shifts. What is important in Bourdieu's concept of the field is that neither individuals nor institutions themselves constitute the agency that modify and adapt values and practices to new conditions but rather it is their role in objective positions that allow for dominance, a range of alternatives, and a 'feel for the game', to produce changes within a field.
In particular, I selected five areas of public policy that have impacted on the field of Australian dance; these were:
a) indigenous political struggles beginning with the Aboriginal referendum in 1967 and continuing into the land-rights movement and the formation of NAISDA;
b) the Colombo plan to educate young South and South-East Asians in Australia that opened up Australia to its role in the region, thus attracting immigration from different dance artists and communities;
c) the Vietnam war and increasing interaction with the United States, and the New York dance world;
d) the establishment of widespread vocational programmes in higher education that were open to a wider social franchise
e) the introduction of international festivals and touring programmes for dance companies and thus an export-import culture.
These policy changes with their influence in institutions and specific contexts also shape the stories we tell about dance inside the nation. While I named some of the key dance agents to shape the field, my aim was to draw attention to these different narratives by providing concrete examples of who was involved in various developments. Some of the wider issues included:
sovereignty - the cultural ownership of legal, social and imaginative domains;
foreign policy - the effects of international relationships on the borders of Australian identity;
war - the impact of conflicts, particularly in the Asian region on domestic experience;
education - the opportunities for disciplines and social values to be legitimated, and disseminated in young people;
festivals - the exhibition of international and national cultural product in a public marketplace.
Further historical research would enable us to examine more precisely some of these relationships between dance institutions, individuals, practices and beliefs in context, and therefore to develop a more nuanced understanding of dancing in the field of Australia in the 1970s.
This article is an adapted excerpt from an oral presentation given in June 2009 as part of the Ausdance 2009 Dance History Symposium ' Changing Landscapes'.
