September 29, 2006

Australian-Melbourne-Irish-Global media?

Posted by dogpossum on September 29, 2006 1:22 PM in the category academia and conferences and lindy hop and other dances and melbourne and teaching

As some of you know, I'm booked in to give a paper at the annual CSAA conference in Canberra in December. I wrote about my abstract here and moaned about not scoring a bursary here.

Well, things have actually turned around a bit since then. I have actually scored a smallish grant from the nice people at the CSAA, which will cover my conference registration and part of my airfare. Yay.

So, come December, I'm flying up to the Can to talk theoretical turkey with acadackas, hang out with my old school friend Kate (no, not 'old skewl', nor is she particularly 'old' - she is a friend I have had for a long time) and possibly see some local dancers.

This was all very nice to hear - I'm quite proud of having scored a competitive grant from an organisation which will look good on my CV. I'm also happy to be funded for my trip to the Can - I need to get a job some time soon, and these things are good networking activities... though I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging about with old UQ buddies. And as you can see from this entry, I seemed to spend more time thinking about jazz than any professional business at the last CSAA conference.

So anyways, I'm off to do a paper.
Here is the abstract again:

Swing Talk and Swing Dance: online and embodied networks in the ‘Australian’ swing dance community.
Since its revival in the 1980s, lindy hop and other swing dances have become increasingly popular with middle class youth throughout the developed world.
There are vibrant local swing dance communities in Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart, Perth, Canberra and Brisbane for whom dancing - an embodied cultural practice – is the most important form of social interaction. Swing dancers will travel vast distances and spend large amounts of money solely to attend dance events in other cities. The success and appeal of these events lies in their promotion as unique and showcasing their local dance ‘scene’.
In travel itineraries which criss-cross the country, swing dancers develop networks between local communities that are not only cemented by their embodied interpersonal interaction, but also by their uses of digital media. In this paper, I examine the ways in which the online Swing Talk discussion board is utilised by Australian swing dancers to develop personal relationships with dancers in other cities, which in turn serve to develop relationships between local communities. This insistence of local community identity in swing dance culture in Australia defies a definition of a ‘national’ swing dance community. I describe the ways in which ‘Australian’ swing dance is an ‘unAustralia’ - not a homogenous ‘whole’ but a network of embodied and mediated relationships between diverse local communities and individuals.

Right now I'm having trouble remembering what I wanted to write about. I suspect there wasn't actually a lot of planning in there. But I have started to have some ideas. Of course stimulated by my impending trip to SLX (I'll be off to the tram stop in a few hours - nursing this horrid cold that's sprung up), but also prompted by planning for MLX6 planning.

Have a listen to this:

powered by ODEO

(which you can find here on the MLX6 music page).

Now, if that's not an advertisement for glocal community, I don't know what is. I mean, before we even get to the dance/exchange stuff, we're listening to an Irish guy pimping Australian jazz for a Melbourne exchange to an international audience. Neat stuff, huh?
This is the stuff about lindy hoppers that I really love: the way they go nuts and do all sorts of creative things - off as well as on the dance floor. And much of this creative work is centered on big dance events like exchanges and camps. There are lots of film clips, mini-films, websites, DVDs, etc etc - and a couple of special official CDs produced - but I'm beginning to get interested in the way swing dancers use radio and audio technology. Specifically, digital audio technology. I mean, there is all that stuff about DJing, but swing dancers do other really interesting things as well: Yehoodi radio is streaming music chosen by swing dancing DJs from all over the world, the Yehoodi Talk Show is really just a chance for a couple of engaging dance/music nerds to have a chat online and Hey Mr Jess is even nerdier - a particularly lovely DJ chatting about swing music and DJing with another dance/music nerd.

Hello podcasts.

This promotional podcast by one of our MLX6 crew is interesting for the way it combines samples from local musicians' albums (these are all bands we're hosting for MLX6, from Melbourne and Sydney) - they're all still living, all contemporary artists - with pimpage for our event.
I do need to sit down and do a bit of analysis of the content, but this is some interesting stuff. Radio has proved a particularly effective medium for connecting dancers in different countries - a natural complement to discussion boards. And this is one of (if not the) first Australian contribution to the international lindy hop radio world (excluding contributions by local DJs to the Yehoodi radio show) - this is the first locally produced Australian swing dance radio 'bit'. And it's narrated by an Irishman!
Wonderful!

I do need to sit down and think about how this works: the way 'Melbourne' is presented, the way 'Australia' is presented, and how different audiences within and without Australia (and Melbourne) might receive/interpret/read this text, but it's a starting point - a bit of motivation - for my paper. At the very least, I can add that to my usual list of clips and photos for the presentation - always fun to do.

Yay!

--edit: you know, part of my brain is also a bit interested in the way I've used that odeo plugin, there: most times you see those sorts of things they're 'invisible', in the way my sidebar over there is largely 'invisible' from the main body of the page over here. But I've actually framed that odeo thingy as something to use and listen to, rather than just stuffing it into my sidebar or at the bottom of this post. It's an interesting contrast to the livefm thingy over there in the sidebar (which is still stuffed and giving me the shits). I am, of course, delighted and fascinated by all this convergence action - my blog as combining audio and visual as well as written? Let's see a newspaper try that then! Of course, this issue is one I've been plaguing my students with lately in tutes - as I heard in a Media Report story about cross-media ownership and digital technology, the cross-media ownership legislation kind of collapses when faced with the internet and the fancy things newspapers have been doing online: they combine av with traditional 'static' text... and bloggage, and audio, and... lots of other lovely stuff.

This is such a great time to be a media studies stooge! How could you not love the internet?!

Posted by dogpossum on September 29, 2006 1:22 PM in the category academia and conferences and lindy hop and other dances and melbourne and teaching