The aesthetics of intercultural method: from process to procession in new Indonesian and Indo-Australian dance

This article examines how three dances featuring Indonesian artists and commissioned for Melbourne's 2020 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts staged their method of creation in ways that make explicit core features of cultural production in inter-Asia contexts. In The Seen and Unseen, by Kamila Andini and Ida Ayu Wayan Satyani, a self-contained world is best understood as participating in a much longer process of creation. Lucy Guerin Inc and Ensemble Tikoro's Metal is distinctive for staging the processual, integrating the common intercultural trope of narrating the encounter between its collaborators inventively into its structure. Garin Nugroho's The Planet—A Lament is best understood processionally: an event that began before its participants enter the stage, and carries on after the curtain comes down. As such, the “method” of these dances sets local embodied knowledges to work on international stages, expresses the negotiation of domestic and international hierarchies, and gives new forms to trans-regional relations.