Supporting Vulnerable Performance Traditions

Supporting Vulnerable Performance Traditions: Keeping it Going in Contexts of Continuity and Change explores endangered forms of performance from across the world, and the aspirations of practitioners, community members and researchers to keep these traditions going. Readers are provided with an ethnographically rich focus on specific performance contexts in diverse cultural worlds, including case studies that cover: Irish traditional song, ritual performances from southern India, Aboriginal ceremonial songs from northern and central Australia, Latin Catholic rites in multicultural Australia, and Asian-Portuguese syncretic dance in Sri Lanka. With contributors who are all scholars and/or practitioners of music, dance and other temporal arts, this book offers an inside view on the importance of these traditions for peoples' expressions of their distinct cultural identities and assertions of their uniqueness. Supporting Vulnerable Performance Traditions contains essential insights into musical cultures in the context of continuity and change, and will be of interest to researchers and postgraduates of ethnomusicology, anthropology, performance studies and Asian studies, as well as music historians and practitioners, and musicians and culture bearers across the world.

Georgia Curran is a research fellow at the Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, and the current Chair of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance Study Group on Music and Dance of Oceania. Alongside Mahesh White-Radhakrishnan, she also co-hosts the podcast series Music!Dance!Culture! (www.music-dance-culture.com). Mahesh White-Radhakrishnan is an Honorary Associate at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Collaborator at the Centre of Linguistics at the University of Lisbon and the National Folk Fellow 2022.

1 Contemporary issues of continuity and change for vulnerable performance traditions Interlude: Yarlpurru- rlangu yawulyu 'Women's songs about the two age brothers' 2 'So they can keep it and carry it on': Shifting modes of song transmission and learning of Warlpiri women's yawulyu Interlude: Laansas treseer padaas 3 Laansas parmi napooy: squaring the circle on the "difficult" Portuguese Burgher lancers Interlude: In Meditation (2004), for erhu and electronics 4 Liturgical Latin in Lewisham: Old Rite music as a means of transcultural religious identification Interlude: Theyyam Exhibition - Everyday Life: A Repertoire of Ritual and Performance 5 Performance as exhibition: Sonic and visual response to the Theyyam festival Interlude: Kodava Song: Before and Beyond the Synecdoche 6 'Who do you not see here'? (but what might you hear?): Synecdochic maintenance of culture in Kodava song Interlude: Rupert Manmurulu and Renfred Manmurulu discuss and perform Inyjalarrku mermaid songs 7 'Remix!': continuity through innovation in the manyardi song tradition of western Arnhem Land