Dancing with the Devil (Spirit): How Audiovisual Collections Reveal and Enact Social and Political Agency in Dance and Song (A Case from the Kimberley)

Abstract

Legacy data pertaining to song and dance has complex and immeasurable value to Indigenous communities across several domains. Over the past decade, projects of repatriation and return have thus flourished both within Australia and globally, as has scholarship addressing the processes, methods and results of such initiatives (Barwick, L. J. Green, and P. Vaarzon-Morel, eds. 2020. Archival Returns. Sydney and Honolulu: Sydney University Press and University of Hawai'i Press; Gunderson, F., R. C. Lancefield, and B. Woods. 2019. The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation. New York: Oxford University Press). Uses of legacy recordings by Ngarinyin, Worrorra and Wunambal practitioners of the dance..