by For Broome-based dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram, indigenous dance plays a vital role in healing a divided Australia.
After the referendum failed to give parliament a voice, she says First Nations arts must continue to bring “the hidden history, the untold stories, the truth” of Australia’s history to light, “acknowledging that there is more than one side to the story”, and to win “the hearts and minds of the public”.
As co-artistic director of the intercultural dance company Marrugeku, Pigram looks to her grandfather for ideas on how Indigenous Australians can connect on a human level. Yawuru lawyer Patrick Dodson is known as the father of reconciliation; he resigned from the Senate late last year after cancer treatment left him in persistent ill health.
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“I’ll never forget someone like my pop dedicating his whole life to the inch-by-inch changes he’s seen throughout his life, watching him get sick and recover and still hope ,” she says. “[I’ve] motivation to try to take that stick a little further.”
While Aboriginal painting is arguably Australia’s most admired and popular artistic product, indigenous dance also carries vital land songs and lore. For over 65,000 years, generations have told stories through dance, but now, as cultural custodians seek to share their traditions more, a factual question arises: how to keep First Nations performance thriving and relevant to the contemporary audience?
A month before the referendum, Marrugeku completed an international tour of his show Jurrungu Ngan-ga, translated from Yawuru as “small talk”. The show, which melded traditional First Nations dance, voguing, hip-hop and even shades of classical, touched not only on Australia’s high Indigenous incarceration rates but how much Aboriginal countries, asylum seekers and Australians Transgender represented on stage on stage. spectators.
For Marrugeku, and other companies, the challenge is to find the resources to achieve its lofty ambitions.
‘Everything is under the shadow of “no” now’
In March, First Nations leaders of federally funded Australian dance companies will meet for the first time in Adelaide for the two-day Blak Futures conference. It is being billed as a “revolutionary moment for Australian dance” that aims to “think, dream and plant the seeds of the future”. The conference has no formal agenda, but cross-cultural collaboration is likely to be a priority, as is discussion of federal and state arts funding, which companies say is not as good.
Pigram says Marrugeku has always understood his deep responsibility to explore Australia’s shared history, but after the referendum the need for healing focused sharply on the Yolŋu concept of Makarrata: coming together after struggle. “You can add to stereotypes,” she says, “or you can start to open people’s hearts and minds.” Part of that process involves a conflict with historical truths: Marrugeku’s latest production, for example, Mutiara, is about the Broome pearl industry and the practice of forced labor in the black pits; The show has been hailed as “an incredibly sensitive and other piece of memory”.
The ancient traditions of Native dance met their political moment in the 1970s land rights and equality movements, particularly in Redfern in inner Sydney, where Indigenous Australians established the first Aboriginal-run legal and medical services in the country. The arts were part of the struggle, with the founding here of the provocative National Black Theater and the Aboriginal Skills Development Association Dance College, which took its first students in 1976, using dance training as resistance and careers. Today, NAISDA remains a vital training ground for the likes of Bangarra Dance Theatre, whose art has often been heralded as “healing” by former long-time artistic director Stephen Page – and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences alike come together for a dose. .
Wiradjuri choreographer Daniel Riley, who built his own career at Bangarra, is the first Indigenous artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre, who will premiere his new work Marrow at the Adelaide festival alongside the March conference. Among the performers will be Kaurna woman Karra Nam and five others from different backgrounds, including Filipino and Irish dancers. Accompanying the dancers on stage will be a “character” sculpted from smoke.
Riley, who organized Blak Futures, says Marrow is a “post-referendum” dance work. The show’s cultural advisor is Kaurna/Ngarrindjerri elder Uncle Moogy Sumner, who shared with the creators of Marrow the story of Dreaming of flea market, a moral tale about the little blue fairy’s wren who is in trouble. The wren becomes a metaphor for Australia itself.
“I am trying to join Australia as a nation of wrens in this work; to say, ‘How did we get to where we are, after the referendum?’” says Riley. “However you voted, or whatever is going on in the cultural and social zeitgeist, everything is now under the shadow of ‘no’. We need to change that and change a lot of hearts and minds, and that’s a difficult thing, but it’s something that art can do in a way that’s really progressive, empathetic, intelligent, creative.”
Narungga/Kaurna choreographer Jacob Boehme also premiered a new work at the Adelaide festival, Guuranda, which includes the story of the creation of Spencer Gulf, the westernmost inlet on Australia’s south coast. The work “contains lessons not only about the environment”, he says, “but about how 300 generations of conservationists have looked after a Land that has been raped, plundered and turned into mining and farming fodder for the last 200 years” . The work involves Kaurna artists, a Kaurna choir and non-Indigenous collaborators.
“More and more, opportunities for non-Indigenous people to sit, listen and learn are really important,” says Boehme, who notes the government’s continued failures to meet Closing the Gap goals. “Intercultural collaboration” is critical, he says, especially after a referendum that was “a huge wake-up call to the majority of First Nations about where we are as a nation”.
“I don’t think so [referendum] A ‘no’ vote must represent Australians not caring for or supporting First Nations cultures or First Nations people,” says Boehme. “Look at all the interest across the country in our theatre, our dance, our literature, our food, our science, our astronomy.”
‘First Nations first, lovely slogan – but we’ve yet to see any action’
The fifth National Arts Engagement survey found the number of Australians attending a First Nations dance, theater or performing arts festival fell from 18% to 15% between 2019 and 2022 – but that drop shows that arts events were canceled and locked down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Attendance at First Nations arts events in 2022 was even higher than in 2016, and almost three-quarters of Australians consistently believe that First Nations arts and culture are important – although only 47% that those Indigenous cultures are well represented in arts offerings, down from 51% in 2019.
A year ago, the federal government released its Revive cultural policy, pledging to establish a self-governing First Nations body within Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Arts Council) in 2024. Boehme notes that “a lot of time, energy and money” being spent on policy. “‘First Nations first’, a beautiful slogan,” he says, “but we haven’t seen any action yet.” Blak Futures intends to influence the development of Revive as well as arts policies being formulated in various states, such as South Australia.
Daniel Riley says Australian Dance Theater was “grateful and proud” to receive four years of federal funding in the recent Creative Australia investment round – but wants the company to be elevated back to major performing arts company status, from which she was removed in the city. early 2000s. Currently, three First Nations companies – Bangarra, Marrugeku and Ilbijerri Theater Company – are part of this high-level of Creativity Australia, known as the national performing arts partnership framework, which offers greater assurance of continued funding .
But there are no financial benefits from this high-level status. Pigram at Marrugeku, for example, says that becoming a “major performing arts company” in 2021 meant “not getting a single red cent more; we’re just on the list of people who do this stuff”. The company is “very grateful” for the support it receives, she says, but “we’re not like a full-time company; Our basic funding can barely pay for the little things … and then we have to apply for the other money to make the big dreams come true”.
Meanwhile this year Bangarra will stage Horizon, including The Light Inside, co-created by Maōri choreographer Moss Te Ururangi Patterson, in the company’s first cross-cultural collaboration. Artistic director Frances Rings says that the major performing arts companies “have not raised for a while and everything – cost of freight, cost of touring, travel, keeping operations going, CPI indexing; that affects what we can do. We would love to do more, but there is only so much we can do to meet the demand.”
Rings says that Black creative people have a huge responsibility. “I think Australia likes to be comfortable, and we have to find the discomfort there,” she says. “We have to look in the mirror, we have to know the light and the shadow … the role we have is so very important, to be that voice, to tell the truth, and that incredible seed of hope of the resilience of the leaders who came before us to give. our ability to adapt and survive, and also to create inspiring works.”
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The Blak Futures conference will take place in Adelaide on March 17. Marrow by Australian Dance Theater takes place from 13-17 March as part of the Adelaide festival. Bangarra’s Horizon premieres in Sydney on June 11.
