Narrative art: multimodal documentation of speech, song, sign, drawing and gesture in Arandic storytelling traditions from Central Australia

Jennifer Green, University of Melbourne

Project Details:

Individual Postgraduate Fellowship. Duration: 2011-2013. £124,945

Project Summary:

In Central Australia the expressive potentials of verbal and visual art forms are combined in multimodal narratives that incorporate speech, song, sign language, gesture and drawing. These stories are a highly valued yet endangered part of the traditions of Central Australian peoples. This project will take a multimodal and multidisciplinary approach to the documentation of stories from the Arandic language group – a group of closely related languages spoken by about 5,500 people. It will provide a significant record of these narrative practices and provide rich data sets for analyses that will enhance our understandings of how multimodal communicative systems work.