We are pleased to announce that there will be three keynote speakers:

  • Professor Margaret Kartomi who will open on Tuesday 7th of October
  • Sarah Andrieu who will open on Wednesday 8th of October
  • J. Lowell Lewis who will open on Thursday 9th of October

Professor Margaret Kartomi will be delivering an address entitled “Body Percussion in Acehnese Music and Movement”. Professor Kartomi is a Member of the Order of Australia and a Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities. Her fieldwork experience is vast and her work in ethnomusicology has been published prolifically. She has been doing research into the music and dance culture of Aceh since 1982-1983. We are all looking forward to hearing her address!

  

Sarah Anais Andrieu comes to us straight from her fieldsite in West Java. She is a third year PhD Student in Social Anthropology and Ethnology, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. Her research is acclaimed in Holland, Canada, France and Indonesia. She is currently performing fieldwork in a little Sundanese village in Indonesia, preparing her PhD thesis about the wayang golek Sunda (rod puppet theatre of West Java, Indonesia), which is involved in a multilevel patrimonialization process (since its Proclamation as Masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage of Humanity by the Unesco in 2003).
 
At the same time, Sarah is studying traditional music (karawitan) and dance (tari) at the High Conservatory for Indonesian Arts (STSI) in Bandung, as well as puppets with the puppeteers of Giri Harja village (South Bandung), thanks to the Darmasiswa exchange scholarship program of the government of Indonesian Republic. Before that, she wrote her D.E.A. dissertation about Unesco, intangible heritage and wayang Indonesia (2005). In 2004 she wrote a Master dissertation about Dutch practices of Indonesian music in Leiden (The Netherlands). She has been studying theatre for 13 years as a non-professional performer. 

 

J. Lowell Lewis will be talking about “Aspects of Movement and Music Performance”. He is an Honorary Research Associate in Anthropology and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, having recently retired from active teaching. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Washington (Seattle) in 1986. His dissertation research was on the Brazilian martial dance form capoeira, which resulted in the publication of Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian capoeira (Chicago 1992). He arrived in Australia in 1991, and subsequent publications have included work on Aboriginal dance, popular folk festivals, and aspects of Brazilian culture. Recently he has contributed chapters to Unstable Ground: Performance and the Politics of Place (Peter Lang 2006); and Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance (Berghahn 2008). He is now completing a manuscript entitled The Anthropology of Cultural Performance, which will be a contribution to performance and cultural theory.

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