Another year, another NAIDOC. First Nations arts expressions are so much more visible now compared to when I started making dances. Get out! I’m startin’ to sound like one of those ol’ Aunties who goes on about walking miles to school without proper shoes. First up, school was literally just around the corner from my place, well a ten minute walk at most. But seriously and more importantly NAIDOC week as we now know it, has been celebrated for fifty years and this year I have experienced some powerful works.
I think the event that shaped my NAIDOC experience this time around was an SBS documentary about Emily Kam Kngwarray. It wasn’t planned. I was just channel surfing and once her life lit up the screen I was compelled to keep watching. Kngwarray was born in Alhalker on Utopia homelands in 1910 and passed away in 1996. One source states that she didn’t start painting until she turned 79, however another source states that her visual arts journey (hate that word) began in batik printing when she was 67. I am always keen to reveal these chronological statistics because I love the fact that you haven’t necessarily missed the boat if you haven’t picked something up at a ridiculously young age.
In the documentary Kngwarray is heard singing and seen dancing. I can’t remember if it is her actually dancing, but there’s dancing involved. There’s definitely dancing because dance, song storytelling, painting and country are indivisible from each other when it comes to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. The overarching thing that holds it all together is The Dreaming. The Dreaming histories are intrinsically related to Country. Taking the form of anthropomorphic narratives, they are metaphors which hold the knowledge about how everything came into existence, about how to make a light footprint on the land, and how to be with one another in the world, the universe. The Dreaming stories are also inexhaustible sources of imaginative inspiration.
This documentary, titled I am Kam is still available to view on the SBS streaming service supplied in this blog. You’ll kick yourself if you don’t see how she became our country’s most celebrated abstract expressionist.
All right- back to dance.
Bangarra Dance Theatre’s latest offering is titled Illume and marks multiple achievements, having shifted rooms in the big house by the water (aka the Opera House), from the Drama Theatre to the Dame Joan Sutherland. This is both a blessing and a curse. For in the Drama Theatre I always felt as if I were a part of the action on stage whereas, within the cavernous confines of the Dame Joan, I feel as if I am anything but.
Why?
Because the action is way over there while I am seated here, amongst a sea of strangers. In this new venue I could almost hear (well imagine) artistic director and choreographer Francis Rings thoughts ticking over, ‘Everything is going to have to be scaled up to fill the stagespace’. Whereas I think the biggest challenge will be to create, keep and carry those moments of intimacy across, what may initially seem like, a great divide.
Illume truly shone like a beacon as Rings paired up with fellow NAISDA graduate Darrell Sibosado, to set the stage alight. Sibosado is a Bard man from Lombadina situated on the Dampier Peninsula of the Kimberley coast, Western Australia and his work features iconography which at first appeared like Asian calligraphy, suspended in the air, speaking of the countrymen that came from across the seas to dive for pearls and pearl shells, to make beaded jewelry and buttons. I was half right in that Sibosado’s motifs are indeed connected to the traditional symbols etched on pearl shells, however in this context they were utilised to speak of the spiritual connection to the skyworld and the jeopardy industry has presented in the ability to commune with that celestial entity.
The set also included what I first thought were burial poles, but which were in effect “manawan trees (known commonly as woolybutts) with their blackened trunks, the result of cool weather burning practices.” The trees appeared in silhouette and, along with the pearl designs, in neon relief akin to the commercial signage normally accommodating a population far exceeding Sibosado’s small community of approximately 200. However, my description is not a negative indictment of the set, merely an indication of the proportions between Charles Davis set and the performers. At times the set rendered the dancers diminutive, almost insignificant. Although I think this may be the point. No matter what transpires, Country will always be here while humanity’s existence may not. Country is not some trifling thing that we manipulate at whim, it is an animate part of the fabric of the universe and it is speaking to us. We just have to listen.
This preoccupation with the interrelationship with country was what prompted me, as artistic director, to bestow the title the trees have voices, the feet have ears to last year’s NAISDA annual end of year production, and for artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre Daniel Riley to call his latest work Marrow. For marrow is, metaphorically speaking and according to my AI Google search assistant, “representative of the essential, most important part of something.” Not that this was new to me, however a little validation from my smart source doesn’t go astray either.
However, whereas Bangarra’s set loomed large, ADT’s set design was purposefully spare and with the cloth legs, fashioned into a smaller black box within the black box of bay 20 at Carriageworks, it felt cloistered. Whereas the movement language and soundscape of Bangarra’s Illume placed us within a timeless temporal portal, James Howard’s loud and oft times intentionally distorted soundscape framing the ADT dance placed us firmly in the current environmental and political maelstrom. At one end of the spectrum with Bangarra we had a temporal representation of longevity, whereby the present is merely momentary within a certain constancy, while at the other end of the spectrum we had ADT’s almost desperate plea, which was realised through an unrelenting physicality hurtling towards an uncertain end.
In both Bangarra’s Illume and ADT’s Marrow we were given a dramaturgical reprieve. In Illume it was through the machinations of men’s business, of sitting quietly in a circle and deliberating, meditating as smoke plumes gently rise to the heavens and ash slowly falls from them, where time seemed to have stopped. In Marrow the reprieve was felt through an extended female solo performance by Karra Nam. However Nam’s solo did not symbolise assurance, instead she broke the fourth wall between us the audience and the action on stage, her steady gaze both beseeching and accusatory, holding us accountable. Nam took possession of what could be interpreted as Country, or Indigenous knowledge, symbolised through the interactivity of a large piece of black fabric, before she literally opened up the stagespace by tearing down the set to reveal intense red floor lighting of which the dancers were drawn to and momentarily left lying, immobilised.
In contrast to both Bangarra and ADT the third piece I would like to reflect upon is a solo work titled Palyku Ngurra Dance by recent NAISDA graduate Maddison Fraser. This was presented by Catapult Dance based in Newcastle and performed at PACT in Erskineville. I had seen this solo in development whilst teaching Fraser at NAISDA and I am so glad I was eventually given the opportunity to see it. This was a modest offering in comparison to the high production values of the two aforementioned companies. However Fraser’s description of using hair as a conduit for the intertwined threads of her matrilineal lineage, which was epitomised through her deft interaction with her long tresses, made a strong impact. From a sequence of infinite swirls as her tendrils fanned out then collected themselves only to change direction like a creature moving across the seabed, or the dextrous wrist of the calligrapher whose brush cuts curlicues across the page, did her free flowing locks seem to catch secrets from the air around her. To the tugging and dragging of her locks across the floor to reveal apparatus of industry in miniature, forever changing her hometown topography, Frazer’s body was the perfect conduit to tell what has become our ubiquitous cautionary tale.
So there you have it. This year’s contemporary dance input over and around the NAIDOC celebrations represented a unified reflection of what is our preeminent macrocosmic concern.
Until next month.
Vicki Van Hout
FORM Dance Projects
Blogger in Residence
https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/movie/emily-i-am-kam/2434404931895
https://www.bangarra.com.au/media/dfjlpori/bdt-illume-digital-program.pdf