Performing Place: Staging Identity with the Kuranda Amphitheatre

This paper is part of a wider study exploring the politics of place and identity in Kuranda, the small North Queensland town in which my extended family has been settled for the past 25 years. I focus on activities associated with the Kuranda amphitheatre as an attempt by people in Kuranda to define their place and their community in the context of a shire in which they felt ‘out of place’. The amphitheatre is for Kuranda people more than just a venue for the performing arts. It is a place where ideas of ‘community’ get played out and contested, where place is performed, and where experiences of ‘the difference within’ are produced. I argue that, whether they be on the stage or off it, performances are not the mere reflection, nor even a representation, of given structurally and/or cognitively encoded identities. Rather, they are generative phenomena, experientially constitutive of such identities.