Cultural Presentation
Visual Installation: Through young people's eyes: Images
from displaced youth in Timor Leste
Plan International Australia: www.plan.org.au
Some of the images shown at the conference will be representative of
the first part Plan’s Engaging Youth project. In collaboration with
UNSW, the project involved action research in providing an opportunity
for young people to reflect on their experiences during and after the
conflict in East Timor. It was to document positive ways in which youth
are responding to displacement and supporting their families and communities,
and to give young people a platform to express their hopes, concerns and
opinions about the future in Timor. The project incorporated workshops,
photography, film and booklet production, and youth events to share and
convey research findings.
In a separate plenary session, CEO of Plan Australia, Ian Wishart will
be speaking about the images and on the project.
Actors for Refugees: www.actorsforrefugees.org.au
Performers: Michael Gurr, Alice Garner, Annie Phelan, Michael Gurr,
& Robin Laurie
A rehearsed performance taken from a scripted piece for four actors
and two musicians. Drawn from interviews with refugees, it tells many
stories and uses figures and facts from the period when most asylum seekers
were incarcerated in both on and off shore detention centres. Collated
by well-known playwright Michael Gurr, the performance is a powerful example
of informed, tourable theatre work. It raises the question of the role
such work can play as an awareness-raising tool for not only the personal
stories themselves but for bringing public attention to this and similar
sorts of issues.
Screening: A Kind of Childhood
A film by Catherine and Tareque Masud
Produced by Trudie Styler and Susan Bissell
Susan Bissell was a PhD graduate of Lenore Manderson who went onto to
furthering her career using film as a way of representing her work ethnographically.
This film challenges our notions of child labour by peeking into a world
where the concept of childhood as we know it has no meaning, where children
support their parents, and where work is just another part of growing
up.
Set in Dhaka, Bangladesh and following several children over period of
six years, A kind of childhood attempts to focus on the realities of child
labour, with real children, their struggles and dreams.
Idris is one of thousands of children who earn their living on the busy
stress of Dhaka. Although he has to work from an early age to support
his ailing father, he tries to hold onto his dream of education, even
while working long hours as an assistant on a public transport vehicle.
When circumstances force him to drop out of school, his desire for an
education is replaced by new dreams of urban success. Eventually, the
harsh realities of city life begin to close in on Idris, forcing him to
reconsider his goals as he enters adulthood.
A kind of childhood follows the path of Idris’ life over a period
of six years, documenting the complexities of balance and survival in
a unique and personal story of ‘childhood’ experience.
River River
Merlinda Bobis
Merlinda Bobis is not just a skilled writer of social commentary, she
is multi-talented; a performance artist, she reads, sings, dances her
tales; in poetry, prose and drama she writes for you to read and sing
along; she writes for others too, so you can hear their way of understanding
the diversity and the common place of our many realities.
River, River is a sound drama that combines realism, dream and metaphor
and marries poetic text, sound and music - traditional Filipino chanting
and Western opera.
Estrella uses her long hair to trawl corpses from the river in Iraya,
a militarised village in the Philippines. In a time of war the river has
become a dumping ground for the victims of summary executions. Each time
a body is thrown into the water, it changes flavour: from river sweetness
into brine, into lemon grass. Estrella remembers a night lit by fireflies,
a night she is to retrieve another body. But this time she might know
the victim. It could be her Australian lover who has disappeared.
River, River was produced with the assistance of the ABC Regional Production
Fund.
Visual Installation
Wendy Woodson
Wendy Woodson is a Professor of Theater and Dance at Amherst College
and artistic director and founder of Present Company Inc. She has created
over 80 movement, theater, and video works that have been presented throughout
the U.S. and in Europe at such venues as the Washington Project for the
Arts, P.S. 122, Jacob's Pillow, Emerson Majestic Theater, the John F.
Kennedy Center, Wolf Trap, New Playwrights Theater, the DeCordova Museum,
at numerous colleges, universities, and national and international video/film
festivals. She has received numerous awards and grants for her performance
and video work including Choreography, Theater and Interdisciplinary Fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts, the D.C. Commission on the Arts
and Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Boston Film
and Video Foundation. Most recently she was the recipient of a playwrights/new
theater fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a residency
at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. She is currently
working in Australia as a senior Fulbright Scholar.
Maori Dance: Banaba Phosphate
Katerina Teaiwa
Katerina's research lies primarily in the histories of phosphate mining
on Banaba/ Ocean Island in Kiribati and the ways in which they connect
to the development of agriculture in Australia and New Zealand. She also
writes on and has taught courses engaging popular culture and consumption,
globalization, women’s studies, Pacific dance studies, Pacific diasporas,
visual ethnography, and theory and method for Pacific Studies. She coordinates
the Cultures Moves! Pacific dance studies resources website with Letitia
Hickson at http://www.hawaii.edu/cpis/dance
and is a member of the Islands of Globalization project team that connects
the Pacific and Caribbean through popular, policy and pedagogy projects
(see http://www.movingislands.net).
She is currently working on Ocean Island: land from the sea, land from
the sky, a collaborative DVD project.
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