In this book, I trace an engagement between dance and the land it is danced on, activated through intercultural choreopolitical processes in sites of contest, survival and renewal for Indigenous Peoples in northern Australia. Two dance projects provide the lens for this investigation. The first is Gudirr Gudirr (2013) a solo performed by Yawuru and Bardi dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram which explores the legacy of past government policies for Indigenous Peoples in her home town of Broome in the north-west of Western Australia. The second is Cut the Sky (2015), a transdisciplinary interrogation of industrialisation and climate change in the wider Kimberley region of the north-west which draws on the experience and perspectives of Yawuru, Nyikina, Walmajarri and Bunuba artists and cultural custodians who have collaborated on the work.1 Both productions were developed in intercultural, trans-Indigenous and transdisciplinary processes between artists from these language groups and with visiting Australian Indigenous and settler artists as well as collaborators from other contested sites around the world.
The works described here reveal emergent choreoaesethetics and new Indigenous-intercultural dramaturgies which reassert ethical relationships with the land and other living beings, communities and histories. Through thick description of performance making processes, I highlight ways the works themselves āremember forwardā past/futures in the north-west revealing ways in which land endures as an active presence. Yawuru Elder Elsie Edgar states: āBuru yingan jayidaā (Yawuru: Country is still alive) (2011, 115). Engaging in this aliveness through experimental choreographic processes activates capacities for response-ability with implications for making, performing and attending dance on contested lands.
Indigenous dance is located and relational, not just to and with other humans but also with non-human species and other sentient and Ancestral beings. Dance which traces trajectories of tradition across Indigenous understanding of simultaneous presence of Ancestors and events both in place and across time brings responsibilities and implications to other locations, times and peoples. In sites where colonial invasion and acts of cultural genocide have decimated private ceremonial and public forms of cultural dance, music, song and language, these forms can remain dormant or sleeping as a latent presence waiting to be awakened when the time is right. In these cases, the breath of revival can be activated through individual experimentation and collaborative construction, negotiated within community. In this way, the dance projects conducted in remote locations in northern Australia described in these chapters reveal how micro-politics can have implications of macro-importance for discourse in critical dance studies. This proposal forms the basis for the notion of dance in contested land and the new intercultural dramaturgies such practices can enable. New collaborations between Indigenous and allied artists are understood to speak back to wider debates processed at multiple levels of society and government.
Gudirr Gudirr and Cut the Sky are produced by Marrugeku, an intercultural dance theatre Company co-directed by Pigram and myself.2 The Company began in 1995 on Kunwinjku land in Kunbarlanja, West Arnhem Land and since 2003 Marrugeku has been based in the lands of the Yawuru in Broome on the west coast of the Kimberley. This book focuses on productions developed in the Kimberley between 2012 and 2015, a period of significant consolidation and expansion of Marrugekuās choreographic and dramaturgical processes and aesthetics. However, in Chapter 2 I also discuss Crying Baby (2000) created in Kunbarlanja with Kunwinjku Elder Thompson Yulidjirri in order to outline the emergence of the interpenetration of conceptions of land with the social, the political and the aesthetic which have since consolidated to become hallmarks of Marrugekuās more recent works.
I have been privileged to learn from the āschool of Marrugekuā and the cultural custodians who have guided the work, many of whom are quoted in this book at length. I write here as a director and/or dramaturg of settler (Scottish, Irish and English) heritage and also as an immigrant to Australia. My pathway to this role in Marrugeku was informed by growing up as a PÄkehÄ in the rugged beauty of the lands of the Ngai Tahu, the South Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand.3 The sense that it was a responsibility as both PÄkehÄ and a citizen of New Zealand to learn from the Tangata Whenua (MÄori: people of the land) was installed in me through my upbringing in New Zealand. I was encouraged to learn MÄori language and exposed to the intersectionality of culture, society and land rights through to the work of MÄori visual artists, writers and activists of the 1980s.
The shock of moving to Australia as teenager in the late eighties, with the shifts in my position as PÄkehÄ in Aotearoa to Gubba on the lands of the Gadigal in Sydney, was formative for me as a young artist.4 Witnessing Indigenous activists from the far reaches of the continent gathered to protest against the nationalistic bicentennial ācelebrationsā of 1988 exposed the vast gaping denial of Indigenous histories that has been famously named the āgreat Australian silenceā (1969) by Anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner. This silence and the profound space of non-encounter that persists in Australia between First Peoples and those of us of settler descent continues to circulate in arts and scholarly practices and through programming by sector organisations today. When the invitation to participate in a collaborative dance and physical theatre project in West Arnhem Land arose I had a sense of the importance and possibilities of this work. However, the ways and means of this journey were yet to comeāa journey of learning new ways to listen, to see and to know. Equally, as I will describe below, this included learning when to turn away from what is not mine to know. My framing of the research, rehearsal and touring of the projects described in this book is fundamentally informed by this optic of learning, listening and turning away. I draw on examples from periods spent as a visiting Balanda in Arnhem Land and later as a Gadiya in the Kimberley.5 In acknowledging my own position as a settler artist and scholar participating within Marrugekuās new interculturalism and observing its trans-Indigenous exchange, the writing here owes a debt to all those who have collaborated in these projects that began in Kunbarlanja and have continued in Broome.
1.1 Land: Country, History and Ancestral Presence
As a starting point in an intercultural investigation of dance and its relationship to land, we must accept that the very concept of ālandā is both cultural and political. In Australian Aboriginal English, the term Country is used to denote an area of land formations and stories over which a group or individual may have custodianship.6 Yawuru leader, Professor Mick Dodson, explains that in referring to Country, Aboriginal Australians:
might mean homeland, or tribal or clan area and we might mean more than just a place on the map. For us, Country is a word for all the values, places, resources, stories and cultural obligations associated with that area and its features. It describes the entirety of our ancestral domains. (2009)
By contrast the noun land as defined in the Australian Oxford dictionary foregrounds its value as property and nation state:
1) the solid part of the earthās surface. 2) (a) an expanse of country; ground; soil. (b) such land in relation to its use, quality, etc., or as a basis for agriculture. (c) any part of the earthās surface and everything annexed to it, as trees, crops, buildings etc. (d) any proprietary interest in land. 3) a country, nation or state. 4) (a) real property. (b) estates. (Moore 2004, 711ā12)
Here land is identified as dry and solid, as agricultural commodity and as real estate. These definitions present fundamentally conflicting values underlying the conceptions of land as property and commodity versus land as an area under custodianship containing waterways and atmospheres and multiple living presences and events across time. This offers an inherently fraught and unsettled site in which dance in Australia must navigate its attachments to, and imaginative expression of, land.
In the language of the Yawuru people, the word buru translates to the intersecting relationships between place, ground, seasons and time. Yawuru Ngan-ga, the Yawuru language app, translates buru as: āTime. Placeā (Yawuru 2013). Yawuru buru, the homelands of the Yawuru, therefore, contains all that has the occurred there, including its colonial history of violent dispossession and, for those who follow Yawuru customary law, the co-presence across time of sentient beings.
The day-to-day activities, choreographic processes and rehearsal discussions which have taken place in the projects described in this book have engaged in Yawuru, Bunuba, Nyikina and Kunwinjku conceptions of land. These understandings have therefore contributed to the values, logics, protocols, ontologies and resulting dramaturgies which have emerged from these processes. I quote from cultural custodians who have participated in the work to acknowledge some open public understandings of the impacts and effects of what is known in Yawuru as Bugarrigarra and in Kunwinjku as Djang which have both been described in English as the Dreaming.7 I do so carefully, with the respectful appreciation that, as Stanner has explained: āWe [non-Indigenous Australians] shall not understand The Dreaming fully except as a complex of meaningsā (1987, 225).
In their Cultural Management Plan the Yawuru state:
Bugarrigarra is often glossed in English as Dreamtime, and bugarri does mean ādreamā. However, the terms bugarri and Bugarrigarra signify a non-ordinary reality, not mere insubstantial phenomena. Bugarrigarra is a world creating epoch and the supernatural beings active in that time. These beings are responsible not only for the formation of the world and its contents but also for the introduction of social laws and principles governing human existence. Bugarrigarra is also credited with the introduction of human languages, the seasons and their cycles, the nature of our topography and the biodiversity. (2011, 30)
The Yawuru describe the non-ordinary, enigmatic presence governing connection between human and Ancestral worlds in ways that have relevance to this book: āFrom Bugarrigarra our Country is imbued with a life-force from which all living things arrive. Within the Country our rayi (spirits) and our Ancestors live. It is from the Country that our people, our language, our stories and our Law ariseā (Yawuru 2011, 30).
From my restricted knowledge I have come to understand Bugarrigarra as offering both a mapping of Country and a mapping of social interactions, operating in both the past and a continuous present. These are bound in an ethics of responsibility, functioning in connectivity with seasons, place, non-human species and in sentient specific lifeworlds.8 Kombumerri and Wakka Wakka philosopher Mary Grahamās seminal proposal for two central observations in Indigenous philosophy about nature, spirit and human beings that have not changed over millennia has relevance here. She outlines these axioms as: āthe land is the lawā, and āyou are not alone in the worldā (2008). The implications of this ontology that understands that land, atmospheres, minerals, waters, the living and the dead, non-human species and Ancestral forces all have presence and agency and are responsive and responding to human lifeworlds will be explored in the following chapters.
The possibility of these understandings flows through Marrugekuās works and finds form in our practice. This is enabled through the scrutiny and guidance of cultural custodians of stories, songs and dance, whose authorship extends into the works through the dancers and in the complex net of kinship ties and cultural responsibilities enacted in the performance-making process. Grahamās proposal can be understood as a broad framing of the conception of land explored for dance and dramaturgy in this book. However, the processes that I describe are grounded in projects undertaken in particular locations and with specific nation-based knowledges shared by custodians with collaborating artists.
Senior Yawuru cultural leader and Senator for Western Australia Patrick Dodson has provided cultural guidance to Marrugekuās projects since the Company relocated to Broome in 2003. His philosophical, cultural and political contributions remain central to Marrugekuās new intercultural dramaturgies emerging from dance as a political act on contested land. Along with ...