So super confession folks. After the last blog post I never actually saw any live theatre. I know, hard to believe. But there you have it. Nada, nup, nope, absolutely nothing except for a few naff Tik Tok vids that infiltrated my Facebook feed. Yes I am that old. Facebook old.
I was going to sit in front of the box and surf for some old vids, maybe musicals of the La La Land ilk but something inside of me screamed NOOOOOOOOOoooooo. Then I got really nostalgic and contemplated rewatching An American in Paris, you know the big 1950’s Gene Kelly flick with Leslie Caron, and comparing it to the likes of High School Musical. Aren’t you lucky I didn’t attempt this?!
As luck would have it I was yarning over the phone to Merindah Donnelly, the current co-CEO and executive producer of BlakDance while Joel Bray was in attendance because he was just finishing a choreographic residency with Australasian Dance Collective located within the same building, the Judith Wright Centre, in Meanjin (Brisbane). So I was able to cadge the video documentation for Joel’s most recent work Monolith, which premiered at this year’s Rising Festival, in Melbourne. If I remember correctly I did write a little something a few months back after catching a glimpse when Joel was in rehearsal, while the Yirramboi Festival was in full swing.
Monolith was a departure for Joel. For I have always associated Joel with his ability to transform performances into events, and theatrical spaces, the places where the traditional roles of audience and entertainer are melded into one. Take his solo experience Biladurang for instance, which was set in a hotel room whereby he became a confidant of personal secrets and intimacies. Or his solo Daddy, which transformed the Arts House venue into a conceptual topography with Joel charting his own contemporary coming of age song cycle, featuring a chronology of interiorities writ large in candy and house music.
As I said (wrote), Monolith felt like a departure for Bray in that it was not packaged as a spectacle, but rather as a more conventional contemporary dance piece. However, like his aforementioned works, this too felt like a rite of passage. Monolith felt like an articulation of himself as an Indigenous contemporary choreographer and cultural ambassador, who is charged with holding the overarching origin histories, to mediate their relevance in this age.
For myself this rite of passage came in the form of a work titled Past. As part of the NAISDA fortieth year celebration/end of year production I was to reimagine the first major NAISDA (or AIDT student ensemble as it was known then) production which contained an homage to the historic erection of an Aboriginal Tent Embassy. However, I chose to begin the work referencing an epoch way before that infamous happening of political resistance in 1972, in the time before The Dreaming, as described by anthropologist Ted Strehlow (not to be confused with his father Carl). Ted Strehlow described this chronology as a stage whereby all things existed as an amorphous entity of potential.
Yeah, imagine trying to realise that.
I recall having my dancers move in a clump as if they were being captured in time lapse. In some instances the dancers actually appeared as if they were possessed, or having a fit of some sort. Oh and this scene was lit by a number of fairly strong hand held torches. You can insert canned laughter here as it materialised in differing degrees of success. Current Artistic Director of NAISDA Dance College Kim Walker’s stock declaration upon seeing many of my choreographic efforts is, “That was very brave.” Undoubtedly my reckoning of Past elicited his usual remark.
For Stephen Page, the previous director of Bangarra Dance Theatre, his seminal moment came with the production Ochres which was presented in four parts. In the second part titled Yellow, of which I performed the last ten renditions of the original run, we were lying still on a set piece which was given many monikers, however the one used in rehearsal was always ‘the mound’. After dancer and Songman Djakapurra Munyarryun sang we slowly became animated, at first dancing in pairs before separating to dance as individuals. I always saw us as part of the topography come alive. At the culmination of Ochres, again summoned by Djakapurra, all of us dancers would return to the mound and resume stillness.
Returning to Joel’s Monolith, whilst watching the work unfold I couldn’t help but see a pattern emerge. I saw Joel’s acknowledgement of a chronology that is expressed as an inhabitance, or a series of inhabitances in topography- on country. This concept both exists in, and exceeds our western understanding of time as a forward moving trajectory. I could identify an affinity with Ochres within Joel’s Monolith way before I recognised my own connecting expression in Past.
Most importantly I recognised in Joel’s Monolith a change in the audiences viewing Indigenous works. That Joel could dare to have the audience sit in complicity with his opening image as his combinant sarsen came to life, which slowly unfolded over approximately twentythree minutes, meant there has been a definitive growth in the literacy of Indigenous works. This in turn has emboldened Indigenous choreographers to make increasingly intrepid creative choices, of which this was one.
How do I know this?
A few years back, a decade to be exact, I made a work called Long Grass which told of the blackfellas stuck in and around Darwin, driven to live as itinerants in their own country, hiding amongst the top end’s tall grasses. I distinctly remember a dear friend and mentor of mine advising me to get rid of the first twenty minutes as it dragged the show down and rendered him bored. I remember informing him that this was what I intended as life in the long grass is interminable until, on a dime it is turned to chaos. His reply, “Congratulations, you’ve succeeded.” This was not a compliment.
In Monolith I saw Joel’s realisation of mobilized resistance. As the work unfolded I caught the spark of unrest in the first solo, a beacon of strength in the second, the mobilizer in the third solo, the fighter in dancer Glory Tuohy-Daniell and the emissary in the final solo. The only didactic moment was the rebirth of this entity of resistance in this era as dancers sequentially moved through set designer Jake Preval’s tilted scaffold sculpture as if moving through a birthing canal. However, this image was not a detriment to the work, it was much needed to remind us that our First Nations culture is part of a living and thriving continuum.
Whereas in comparison to Monolith I was a tad disappointed with the reworking of Stephen Page and Bernadette Walong’s Ochres performed at Carriageworks as part of their 21st anniversary celebrations in 2015. It took what was a striking statement piece with a humble cast of eight and turned it into the Indigenous equivalent of a chorus line in many respects, most obviously the doubling and trebling of cast numbers to accommodate, or legitimise the need to make a grand statement.
I sincerely hope Monolith enjoys at least a few more seasons, including coming to Sydney, so the local readership gets to feast their eyes on what I believe is a meditation on the ages, of ages and inclusively for all ages.
Ah but within this last paragraph there lies another controversial blog I think.
Until next month.
Vicki Van Hout
FORM Dance Projects
Blogger in Residence
P.S. I apologise for not being able to discern each dancer individually and so deservedly except for Glory Tuohy-Daniell which included Zoe Brown-Holten, Samakshi Sidhu, Katherine Hegeman, Nadiyah Akbar, and Sammie Lester.