Mapping Cultural Identity in Contemporary Australian Performance by Helen Grehan (review)

516 REVI EWS the volume, Rachel Fensham looks at the uses of technology in contemporary dance. Following Suzanne Kozel, she sees technology as offering dancers "another logic, one that enables them to imagine different bodies" (231), but she then goes on to question what exactly it is that technology brings to the relationship: "If body is no pure state of being but a mediated materiality, what is to be seen in the technologised representations of dance?" (232) Through an analysis of filmed dance works by Chrissie Parrot and Company in Space, she argues that the use of technology has created a situation in which dancersare freer in the sense that their "capacity to mediate - to network from one sphere of meaning-making to another -" (240) has increased. Fensham concludes that "dance mediated through technology can also operate as a critique of dance, and its epistemology narrowly defined by modem dance discourse as emergent from, or grounded in, the body" (241). This discussion of the ways in which technology can open up the terrain for bodily representations is a productive and inspiring note on which to close a varied and interesting collection of essays. The greatest strength of Body Showls is the breadth and clarity of its analysis . Further to Tail's observation in the introduction that the "theoretical analysis of live performance remains underdeveloped" (2), the essays represented here certainly do begin to redress this lack. The importance of the collection lies nol in its discussion of specific Australian works, but rather in the larger questions that these detailed theoretical and creative engagements stimulate for those of us involved in performance-making and scholarship. HELEN GREHAN. Mapping Cultural /deilliry ill Contemporary Australian Performance . Bruxelles: P.I.E. - Peter Lang, 2001. Pp. 167, illustrated.$27.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Pela Tait, La Trobe University I arn very pleased to review Helena Grehan 's Mapping Cultural Idemit)' in Contemporary Australian Performance for two reasons. First, the book is about four artistically innovative Australian works frorn the 19905, and it is thus a welcome addition to the available resources for the study of texts. Second, the book came out of a PhD thesis, and there has generally been a mismatch between the limited opportunities to publish books on Australian theatre and perfonnance, and student interest in researching these areas. Grehan's first chapter is an adroit investigation of conceptsof rnapping cultural identity to suggest a subjectivity that is fluid, shifting, and multivalent in relation to place and landscape. It draws on some widely read key theorists and concepts: Elin Diamond's definition of performance (22), Rosi Braidolli 's "nomadic subjectivity" (39), a Deleuzean "nomadic trajectory" (40) with rhizomatic linkage. and Stephen Muecke on Australian indigenous identity. Reviews 517 There is also a lucid summary of the standard approach to describing performance personae as able to deliver impressions of fragmented subjectivity, realign performer-spectator relationships, and generate postmodem texts of surfaces and images. Chapters two to five are close readings of four texts by solo performers about land and identity. The creative partnership of Sarah Cathcart and Andrea Lemon developed Tiger Country about four non-indigenous female characters to be performed by Cathcart. The characters engage in contrasting ways with the Australian landscape. Ningali Lawford's internationally awardwinning Ningali, developed with Angela Chaplin and Robyn Archer, is based on her experiences of growing up in a remote northwest indigenous community and going on a student exchange to an Alaskan high school. Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman's powerful The 7 Stages of Grieving is about indigenous experiences of loss and hardship in European-dominated Australian society. This piece was performed to acclaim by Mailman, who is now a household name for her television roles. Josephine Wilson's Geography of Haumed Places is a potent overlapping text that exposes how discovery - of a land, a woman, a species - brings with it the desire to possess. This work was a collaborative production and performed by Erin Hefferon . Grehan has chosen well. These are indeed important image-based performances of the 1990s, and the fact that only two are available in print versions validates Grehan's strategy of retelling the narrative and the sequence of action and...