The outcome I will present is a short film titled Mary, Anthony and the Snake, a reimagined story about my parents on a paddock, set in the 1970s, not long after the formal abolition of the White Australia Policy. Created through virtual production, memory, and movement re- enactment, the film revisits a moment layered with cultural tension and personal mythology. Embodied from my perspective as the daughter of Chinese and Scottish English immigrants growing up in Australia, the work reflects on the lingering presence of systemic racism and identity.
This research contributes to the decentering of “colonial mythscapes” (Leane 2019) in Australia through a contemporary dance lens. The research used principles of what I described as Choreoethics to create scenes called Digital Dancescapes, which are digital environments containing different combinations of live and pre-recorded choreography and technology.
Collectively the dancescapes make up the performance, Portrait of a Paddock, which reveals the portrait of a Gunditjmara paddock near Coleraine, Western Victoria, shaped by colonial brutality since the 1830s. Through dancescaping, I share stories of this land, interwoven with my family's memories and my own.
Each dancescape was an outcome sitting at the cultural interface (Nakata 2002), of my transdisciplinary methodology that integrates somatic dance with Virtual Production, Motion Capture, 2D animation and AI image generation.
Altogether, they attend to questions of cultural safety within the terrain of the paddock. Using practice-based choreographic research (Brown 2019) and autoethnographic approaches (Bartleet 2021), the project creates liminal spaces (Chawla 2011) and reinterprets embodied dance knowledge.