Justine Shih Pearson
Originally trained in dance and theatre design, Justine Shih Pearson has developed an expanded, interdisciplinary practice as a creative producer, facilitator, independent artist, writer, arts researcher and advocate.
Working across the not-for-profit arts and higher education sectors for 20 years, she has collaborated on projects for live performance, digital media, film/tv, online publishing, public spaces, hospitals and museums in cities in Australia, Europe, the UK, North America and SE Asia.
Justine holds a PhD (University of Sydney) and an MA (New York University) in performance studies, has lectured at the University of Sydney, UNSW and Macquarie University in the arts and design, and has held several leadership and executive positions in the arts sector in Australia.
Justine writes regularly on performance and everyday life, the embodiment of national and cultural belonging, spatial practices and urbanism, public space and social reliance.
Her writing has been published in Realtime, The Conversation, About Performance, Australasian Drama Studies, Critical Dialogues, Extensions, and Brolga. She co-edited special issues of About Performance on movement (2012), risk (2014), and performance studies (2017), and a special issue of Performance Paradigm on southern feminisms (2020). As an editor, she has worked with more than 50 writers on subjects as diverse as living with crocodiles, disability as spectacle at the Paralympics, odissi connections to architecture, Holocaust memorialisation and placemaking in Vienna, mana wahine in Disney’s Moana, and the creative potential of migratory shorebirds. Justine’s monograph Choreographing the Airport: Field Notes From the Transit Spaces of Global Mobility (Palgrave 2018), charts how choreographic thinking can be used to study transnational systems of mobility like the airport.
In the mid-2000s, she began making site-based audiowalks as a way to expand the sensory and somatic strategies of dance towards explorations of place and the everyday movements of the streets. This work seeks to redress the disembodying potential of technology today by calling attention to intimate, bodily, affectful experience. In 2006 she made A place called Lost for a warren of corridors at 721 Broadway, and most recently was commissioned to make Changing Pathways, an audiowalk of the Westmead Hospital precinct in Western Sydney. She is currently beginning work on an audiowalk of Haymarket, a historic Chinatown in Sydney.
Working across the not-for-profit arts and higher education sectors for 20 years, she has collaborated on projects for live performance, digital media, film/tv, online publishing, public spaces, hospitals and museums in cities in Australia, Europe, the UK, North America and SE Asia.
Justine holds a PhD (University of Sydney) and an MA (New York University) in performance studies, has lectured at the University of Sydney, UNSW and Macquarie University in the arts and design, and has held several leadership and executive positions in the arts sector in Australia.
Justine writes regularly on performance and everyday life, the embodiment of national and cultural belonging, spatial practices and urbanism, public space and social reliance.
Her writing has been published in Realtime, The Conversation, About Performance, Australasian Drama Studies, Critical Dialogues, Extensions, and Brolga. She co-edited special issues of About Performance on movement (2012), risk (2014), and performance studies (2017), and a special issue of Performance Paradigm on southern feminisms (2020). As an editor, she has worked with more than 50 writers on subjects as diverse as living with crocodiles, disability as spectacle at the Paralympics, odissi connections to architecture, Holocaust memorialisation and placemaking in Vienna, mana wahine in Disney’s Moana, and the creative potential of migratory shorebirds. Justine’s monograph Choreographing the Airport: Field Notes From the Transit Spaces of Global Mobility (Palgrave 2018), charts how choreographic thinking can be used to study transnational systems of mobility like the airport.
In the mid-2000s, she began making site-based audiowalks as a way to expand the sensory and somatic strategies of dance towards explorations of place and the everyday movements of the streets. This work seeks to redress the disembodying potential of technology today by calling attention to intimate, bodily, affectful experience. In 2006 she made A place called Lost for a warren of corridors at 721 Broadway, and most recently was commissioned to make Changing Pathways, an audiowalk of the Westmead Hospital precinct in Western Sydney. She is currently beginning work on an audiowalk of Haymarket, a historic Chinatown in Sydney.
less
InterestsView All (21)
Uploads
Books & Edited Collections by Justine Shih Pearson
Taking an ethnographically-inflected approach, this study brings together knowledge of the moving body from dance and performance and the study of systems of mobility within cultural and mobilities studies, in order to call attention to the kinaesthetic experience of global space. What is the choreography of the global airport? How does it perform on us. How do we perform within it?
Extending thinking about contemporary cosmopolitanism and cultural identity, and the performativity of places and identities, this book is essential reading for those interested in cultural debates around globalisation, the innovative application of performance theory towards everyday experience, and interdisciplinary methodologies.
---
“This is more than an original exploration of the choreographed spatiality of airports. It is for all those interested by the way one moves in and is moved by space in the era of transnational mobility. What’s more, the text itself is a well choreographed festival of intelligently deployed theory speaking to acutely observed ethnographic material traversed by sharp socio-political observations that make it a pleasure to read.” (Ghassan Hage, School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne, Australia)
“Choreographing the Airport is a deeply-grounded study of hubs of contemporary global circulation — of bodies, affects, and cultures. No longer imaginable as the sole province of a transnational elite class, airports now function as critical arteries for the movement of refugees, migrants, transnational families, and others. As Shih Pearson’s nuanced examination demonstrates, airports bear a complex relationship to their geographic locations as well as their cosmopolitan functions — a relationship made all the more complex when considered from the perspective of the kinesthetic/somatic experience of its temporary inhabitants. Employing a kinesthetic auto-ethnographic method and combining performance and dance/movement theory, and postcolonial critique, Shih Pearson goes beyond a purely architectural analysis and asks us to attend to how and where we occupy those spaces, either in concert with or occasionally indifferent to global capitalism’s imperatives, asking us to consider the urgently relevant question, “what is it to move in this space?’” (Karen Shimakawa, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, USA)
This issue documents, analyses, and theorises performance made by women in the Global South and more broadly, the Asia-Pacific.
Articles: Nicola Hyland, Aylwyn Walsh, Fiona Gregory, Park Younghee and Jeremy Neideck, Helena Grehan and Olivia Rousset, Hannah Joyce Banks, and Nisha Madhan and Julia Croft
https://www.performanceparadigm.net/index.php/journal/issue/view/24/showToc
Contents
Kate Rossmanith "Getting into the Box"
Linda Hassall "Breaking the Silence"
Karen Frostig "Performing Memory on the Streets of Vienna"
Ian Maxwell "Do What You Want. Matey"
Tina Carter "Dangerous Play"
Bruce Barton "Subtle Spectacle"
Stuart Grant "What If? Performance is Risk
Articles by Justine Shih Pearson
What kind of world are we leaving for our children? So goes our conversation everywhere these days, it seems, as our planet overheats and burns in winter as well as summer, coral and other species die in alarming numbers, glaciers melt and seas rise, sending more and more people on the move. What world might we leave at all?
Dust, Dancenorth’s new show currently playing in the Sydney Festival, is a reflection on the world our children will inherit – although not in any didactic way. The show, inspired by the birth of co-choreographers Kyle Page and Amber Haines’s son in 2017, is cohesive and yet leaves room for the poetic, exploring a world on the brink of turning back into dust...
Australians are still waiting for a serious political conversation in response to last year’s momentous Uluru Statement from the Heart. This has been topped off, most recently, by the appointment of Tony Abbott as special envoy on Indigenous Affairs....
It is a good beginning; a rippling, textured synthesis of movement, music and design, which audiences have come to expect from Bangarra’s particular brand of dance-theatre. But at the end of 70 minutes I’m left wanting more than this.
In this article I take the idea of a world “on the move” and fluid concepts of culture, and put them up against the resistantly fixed and stable ways in which nation is employed. This paper concerns itself with the somatic experience of ideology, turning its attention to the key term movement to focus on the kinaesthetics of national and transnational belonging. Performance and specifically choreography, I argue, proposes a fundamental concern with the material body in movement and in space; and therefore allows for new insights into the embodied practice of place, community, and belonging. In particular, I am interested in the kinaesethetically mobile ways in which we amass with others or understand ourselves to belong to a national or global community. These are acts of cultural belonging that can be somatically virtuosic, but are partial, incomplete, not quite achieved—and as such, require different terminology, what I am posing in this paper as unsteady belongings.
Looking in detail at choreographer Jane McKernan’s solo performance Opening and Closing Ceremony and a memorial flash mob that both failed to “flash” and to “mob,” the term unsteady belonging that I have put forward allows us to closely analyse the micro-moves that are at work in these performances of being with others, our performative transition across the boundary of singularity towards some version of a body politic. Interweaving reflections through theory from dance and performances studies (particularly the presence-movement nexus in dance and a poetics of failure in performance), with that from cultural and mobility studies, productively puts together distant fields of discourse—particularly mobility studies and dance studies, which both have a central interest in theories of movement. In the last third of the article, I take up the performance of Australian nationality specifically in relation to the “threat” and/or “welcoming” of others (namely, asylum seekers), turning to the work of Benedict Anderson and Ghassan Hage to expand the field of discussion towards questions of intercorporeal ethics of encounter with the other, as part of the performance of nationhood. In this renewed age of Team Australia, where the physical territory of nation is increasingly contested through migration legislation and “allegiance” to nation is up for renegotiation in the Citizenship Act, it is time to look again— and challenge again— the bounded way we imagine the world.
At the crossroads of this frantic mobility, virtual and material, sits the airport: a transit space on the global stage. An exemplary in-between or thirdspace in which the nowhere/anywhere modes of cosmopolitanism are performed, but also (paradoxically) where the boundaries of nationhood are most strictly asserted in the form of immigration control. Airport spaces such as Terminal 5 at JFK make much of their connections to the Jet Set glamour of mid-twentieth century aviation, representing a gateway to romantic, far-off destinations and also a gateway through which we may access modernity’s global reach.
Website by Justine Shih Pearson
Papers by Justine Shih Pearson
Taking an ethnographically-inflected approach, this study brings together knowledge of the moving body from dance and performance and the study of systems of mobility within cultural and mobilities studies, in order to call attention to the kinaesthetic experience of global space. What is the choreography of the global airport? How does it perform on us. How do we perform within it?
Extending thinking about contemporary cosmopolitanism and cultural identity, and the performativity of places and identities, this book is essential reading for those interested in cultural debates around globalisation, the innovative application of performance theory towards everyday experience, and interdisciplinary methodologies.
---
“This is more than an original exploration of the choreographed spatiality of airports. It is for all those interested by the way one moves in and is moved by space in the era of transnational mobility. What’s more, the text itself is a well choreographed festival of intelligently deployed theory speaking to acutely observed ethnographic material traversed by sharp socio-political observations that make it a pleasure to read.” (Ghassan Hage, School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne, Australia)
“Choreographing the Airport is a deeply-grounded study of hubs of contemporary global circulation — of bodies, affects, and cultures. No longer imaginable as the sole province of a transnational elite class, airports now function as critical arteries for the movement of refugees, migrants, transnational families, and others. As Shih Pearson’s nuanced examination demonstrates, airports bear a complex relationship to their geographic locations as well as their cosmopolitan functions — a relationship made all the more complex when considered from the perspective of the kinesthetic/somatic experience of its temporary inhabitants. Employing a kinesthetic auto-ethnographic method and combining performance and dance/movement theory, and postcolonial critique, Shih Pearson goes beyond a purely architectural analysis and asks us to attend to how and where we occupy those spaces, either in concert with or occasionally indifferent to global capitalism’s imperatives, asking us to consider the urgently relevant question, “what is it to move in this space?’” (Karen Shimakawa, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, USA)
This issue documents, analyses, and theorises performance made by women in the Global South and more broadly, the Asia-Pacific.
Articles: Nicola Hyland, Aylwyn Walsh, Fiona Gregory, Park Younghee and Jeremy Neideck, Helena Grehan and Olivia Rousset, Hannah Joyce Banks, and Nisha Madhan and Julia Croft
https://www.performanceparadigm.net/index.php/journal/issue/view/24/showToc
Contents
Kate Rossmanith "Getting into the Box"
Linda Hassall "Breaking the Silence"
Karen Frostig "Performing Memory on the Streets of Vienna"
Ian Maxwell "Do What You Want. Matey"
Tina Carter "Dangerous Play"
Bruce Barton "Subtle Spectacle"
Stuart Grant "What If? Performance is Risk
What kind of world are we leaving for our children? So goes our conversation everywhere these days, it seems, as our planet overheats and burns in winter as well as summer, coral and other species die in alarming numbers, glaciers melt and seas rise, sending more and more people on the move. What world might we leave at all?
Dust, Dancenorth’s new show currently playing in the Sydney Festival, is a reflection on the world our children will inherit – although not in any didactic way. The show, inspired by the birth of co-choreographers Kyle Page and Amber Haines’s son in 2017, is cohesive and yet leaves room for the poetic, exploring a world on the brink of turning back into dust...
Australians are still waiting for a serious political conversation in response to last year’s momentous Uluru Statement from the Heart. This has been topped off, most recently, by the appointment of Tony Abbott as special envoy on Indigenous Affairs....
It is a good beginning; a rippling, textured synthesis of movement, music and design, which audiences have come to expect from Bangarra’s particular brand of dance-theatre. But at the end of 70 minutes I’m left wanting more than this.
In this article I take the idea of a world “on the move” and fluid concepts of culture, and put them up against the resistantly fixed and stable ways in which nation is employed. This paper concerns itself with the somatic experience of ideology, turning its attention to the key term movement to focus on the kinaesthetics of national and transnational belonging. Performance and specifically choreography, I argue, proposes a fundamental concern with the material body in movement and in space; and therefore allows for new insights into the embodied practice of place, community, and belonging. In particular, I am interested in the kinaesethetically mobile ways in which we amass with others or understand ourselves to belong to a national or global community. These are acts of cultural belonging that can be somatically virtuosic, but are partial, incomplete, not quite achieved—and as such, require different terminology, what I am posing in this paper as unsteady belongings.
Looking in detail at choreographer Jane McKernan’s solo performance Opening and Closing Ceremony and a memorial flash mob that both failed to “flash” and to “mob,” the term unsteady belonging that I have put forward allows us to closely analyse the micro-moves that are at work in these performances of being with others, our performative transition across the boundary of singularity towards some version of a body politic. Interweaving reflections through theory from dance and performances studies (particularly the presence-movement nexus in dance and a poetics of failure in performance), with that from cultural and mobility studies, productively puts together distant fields of discourse—particularly mobility studies and dance studies, which both have a central interest in theories of movement. In the last third of the article, I take up the performance of Australian nationality specifically in relation to the “threat” and/or “welcoming” of others (namely, asylum seekers), turning to the work of Benedict Anderson and Ghassan Hage to expand the field of discussion towards questions of intercorporeal ethics of encounter with the other, as part of the performance of nationhood. In this renewed age of Team Australia, where the physical territory of nation is increasingly contested through migration legislation and “allegiance” to nation is up for renegotiation in the Citizenship Act, it is time to look again— and challenge again— the bounded way we imagine the world.
At the crossroads of this frantic mobility, virtual and material, sits the airport: a transit space on the global stage. An exemplary in-between or thirdspace in which the nowhere/anywhere modes of cosmopolitanism are performed, but also (paradoxically) where the boundaries of nationhood are most strictly asserted in the form of immigration control. Airport spaces such as Terminal 5 at JFK make much of their connections to the Jet Set glamour of mid-twentieth century aviation, representing a gateway to romantic, far-off destinations and also a gateway through which we may access modernity’s global reach.