Talking about "home"

Dr Alessandra Lopez y Royo of Roehampton University presents a discussion at IKJ (23 February) and Yogyakarta (7 March) on Dance and Cultural Diversity in the UK.

... The discussion of ethnicity and cultural identity has grown in terms of the number of interventions over the past two decades, embracing several political shifts and positionalities. It is worth reiterating here that definitions of “ethnicity,” “race” and “culture” do not reflect absolutes, are not universal and unchanging conceptual realities, “on the contrary, they represent specific, historically contingent ways of looking at the world, which intersect with broader social and political relations” ( Jones, 40). Typically, historical, sociological and anthropological discourses have defined and redefined “culture” accordingly and continue to do so. Dance and the performative are inscribed in this political discourse, playing a role in articulating perceptions, including self-perceptions, of cultural identity. Changing definitions of “home” affect the content and even the form of dance and influence the organisation of dance and its points of reference, with changes determined by new challenges in a new and constantly self redefining social context and new audience’s expectations. Those changes are engendered through a process of negotiation.

The debate on classicism and contemporaneity is central to British dance discourses but significations of these terms are contextually derived so that the terms resonate in different ways when used by policy makers and funders and by the artists engaging reflexively with their practice. As a result, in the British context, the issue of contemporaneity in non-European dance praxes becomes indistinguishable from that of attitudes to modernity and postmodernity in dance and the search for a dance language which can articulate the specificity of being a migrant in today’s Britain.

Being a migrant is a condition characterized by changing definitions of home and origin. There are several “places of origin,” many “homes” and “homes-in-between” resulting in multiple and fluid identities and ethnicities, intersecting with racial, gender and class realities. The concept of diaspora, which is increasingly being used to describe the migration of large groups and communities, such as the South Asian and the Chinese, is in itself problematic; it is important to be aware that diasporic is not simply another word for “being away from home” but, as Brah suggests, “the concept of diaspora signals processes of multi-locationality across geographical, cultural and psychic boundaries” (Brah 194) and can be better understood in terms of “diaspora space,” which goes beyond the idea of “borders,” presupposed by the idea of diaspora (Brah 208).

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