Supporting Vulnerable Performance Traditions : Keeping it Going in Contexts of Continuity and Change

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.