Dancing Diplomacy: performance and the politics of protocol in Australia

Abstract

This book chapter provides a comparative analysis of a number of performance events revealing how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians innovatively draw on the power of performance to negotiate relationships among themselves and with the State. I explore the idea that the value of dance as diplomacy lies in its potential to hide as much as it reveals, through the analysis of three particular performance events that took place in three different political arenas, the local, the regional and the national. I begin with a birthday celebration on Thursday Island, Torres Strait, and then move on to a particular dance performed at the Laura Aboriginal Dance and Cultural Festival in Cape York. My final example concerns the opening of the Australian Federal Parliament in February 2008, when for the first time in Australian history, the official opening began with a traditional 'welcome to country' by Indigenous elders.