A Bran Nue Dae? Decolonising the Musical Theatre Curriculum

Abstract

Abstract Decolonising the musical theatre curriculum in higher education is much more radical and comprehensive than simply exposing students to a greater volume of commercially celebrated work featuring Black, Indigenous, and Asian artists. The process of decolonisation begins by understanding how we could make universities accountable to the circumstances of the real artists who create the work. The challenge for departments and professors in musical theatre is that they are preparing students for an industry that does not see decolonisation as an aim. For the globalised musical, the nexus of Broadway and the West End is the cornerstone of an unyielding power structure that relies upon multiple canons of work enabled by a network of capitalist-colonialist nation-states whose social, economic, and cultural structures depend upon the centrality of these canons. This chapter will consider how a very grounded story about a very particular set of lived circumstances, Jimmy Chi and Kuckles’s Bran Nue Dae, is instructive as to how we begin to decolonise our understanding of commercial musical theatre globally and within the university sector. Entailed in this are matters of who curates and theorises this material, who performs it as part of an educational curriculum, how we decolonise the training of skills in both analysing and performing the genre, and the productions we stage.