For Broome-based dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram, Indigenous dance plays a crucial role in healing a divided Australia.
After the failed referendum to get a vote in parliament, she says First Nations arts must continue to bring to the surface “the hidden histories, the untold stories, the truth telling” of Australia’s history , “recognizing that there is more than one side to a story. ‘, and win public ‘hearts and minds’.
As co-artistic director of intercultural dance theater company Marrugeku, Pigram looks to her grandfather for ideas on how Indigenous Australia can connect on a human level. Yawuru lawman Patrick Dodson is known as the father of reconciliation; he retired from the Senate late last year after cancer treatment left him in persistent ill health.
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“Seeing someone like my father dedicate his entire life to the incremental changes he has experienced in his life, seeing him get sick and recover and still have hope is something I will never forget,” she says. “[I’ve] I am inspired to try to take the baton one step further.”
While Aboriginal painting has become perhaps Australia’s most admired and sought-after artistic product, Indigenous dance also incorporates critical song lines from the land and ancient lore. For more than 65,000 years, generations have passed down stories through dance, but as the custodians of the culture increasingly seek to share their traditions, an existential question arises: how can we keep First Nations performances thriving and relevant to today’s audiences?
A month before the referendum, Marrugeku concluded an international tour with the show Jurrungu Ngan-ga, translated from Yawuru as ‘small talk’. The show, which fused traditional dance, voguing, hip-hop and even classic shades of First Nations, was not only about Australia’s high rate of Indigenous incarceration, but also about how much the Aboriginal nations, asylum seekers and transgender Australians who appear on stage were represented, had in common with the audience.
For Marrugeku, as for other companies, the challenge is to find the resources to realize its great ambitions.
‘Everything is now in the shadow of ‘no”
In March, First Nations leaders from 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 will likely be a priority, as will the discussion over federal and state funding for the arts, which companies say is falling short.
Pigram says Marrugeku has always understood his profound responsibility to explore the shared history of Australians, but after the referendum the need to heal has brought Makarrata’s Yolŋu concept into sharp focus: coming together after struggle. “You can feed stereotypes,” she says, “or you can start opening people’s hearts and minds.” Part of that process involves confronting historical truths: Marrugeku’s most recent production, for example Mutiara, is about Broome’s pearl industry and the forced labor practice of the blackbird; the show was praised as a “surprisingly delicate, otherworldly memory piece”.
The ancient traditions of Indigenous dance met their political moment in the land rights and equality movements of the 1970s, most notably at Redfern in inner Sydney, where Indigenous Australians established the country’s first Aboriginal-run legal and medical services. The arts were part of the struggle, with the formation here of the provocative National Black Theater and the National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association Dance College, which accepted its first students in 1976, using dance training as resistance and to shape careers. Today, NAISDA remains a crucial training ground for the likes of the acclaimed Bangarra Dance Theatre, whose former artistic director Stephen Page often referred to his art as ‘medicine’ – and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences alike queued up for a dose.
Wiradjuri choreographer Daniel Riley, who built his own career at Bangarra, is the first Indigenous artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre, which will premiere their new work Marrow at the Adelaide festival in addition to the conference in March. The performers include Kaurna woman Karra Nam and five others from different backgrounds, including Filipino and Irish dancers. The dancers are accompanied on stage by a ‘character’ sculpted from smoke.
Riley, who organized Blak Futures, says Marrow is a dance work that is ‘post-referendum’. The show’s cultural advisor is a Kaurna/Ngarrindjerri elder, Uncle Moogy Sumner, who co-created the Dreaming story with the creators of Marrow waatji pulyeri, a moral tale about a lying and deceptive blue fairy-wren. The wren becomes a metaphor for Australia itself.
“In this work I try to link Australia as a nation to the wren; to say, ‘How did we get to where we are now, after the referendum?’” says Riley. “No matter how you voted, or what is happening in the cultural and social zeitgeist, everything is now in the shadow of ‘no’. We have to turn that around and change a lot of hearts and minds, and that’s hard, but it’s something that art can do in a very progressive, empathetic, smart, creative way.
Narungga/Kaurna choreographer Jacob Boehme also premiered new work at the Adelaide festival, Guuranda, which covers the story of the creation of Spencer Gulf, the westernmost inlet on Australia’s southern coast. The work “contains lessons not only about the environment,” he says, “but also about how 300 generations of tutelage have created a land that has been raped, plundered and turned into mining and agricultural fodder over the past 200 years.” The work involves Kaurna artists, a Kaurna choir and non-Indigenous collaborators.
“Increasingly important are the opportunities for non-indigenous people to sit, listen and learn,” says Boehme, who notes that the government is still failing to meet Closing the Gap goals. “Intercultural collaboration” is critical, he says, especially after a referendum that was “a huge wake-up call for most First Nations people about where we actually stand as a nation.”
“I do not think so [referendum] ‘No’ necessarily means that Australian people do not care about or support First Nations cultures or First Nations people,” says Boehme. “Look at all the interest across the country focused on our theater, on our dance, on our literature, our food, our science, our astronomy.”
‘First Nations first, nice slogan – but we don’t see any action yet’
The fifth National Arts Participation survey found that the number of Australians attending a First Nations dance, theater event or performing arts festival fell from 18% to 15% between 2019 and 2022 – but that decline reflects the cancellation of arts events and lockdowns due to the Covid-19 crisis. 19 pandemic. Attendance at First Nations arts events in 2022 was still higher than in 2016, and almost three-quarters of Australians consistently believe that First Nations arts and culture are important – although only 47% believe those Indigenous cultures are well represented in the art supply, against 51%. % in 2019.
A year ago, the federal government released its Revive cultural policy, promising to establish an autonomous, dedicated First Nations body within Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council for the Arts) by 2024. Boehme notes that there is “a hell of a lot of time, energy and money spent on policy. “’First Nations first’, nice slogan,” he says, “but we don’t see any action yet.” Blak Futures wants to influence the development of Revive and the arts policy 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 Creative Australia’s recent investment round – but he would like to see the company elevated back to major performing arts company status, from which it will emerge in the was removed in recent years. early 2000s. Currently, three First Nations companies – Bangarra, Marrugeku and Ilbijerri Theater Company – are part of this top tier of Creative Australia, known as the National Performing Arts Partnership Framework, which provides greater certainty of ongoing funding.
But the financial benefits of this top status are not self-evident. For example, Pigram at Marrugeku says that becoming a “major performing arts company” in 2021 meant that “not really one red cent would be received anymore; we have just been added to the list of people who do this kind of thing.” The company is “very grateful” for the support it receives, she says, but “we are not a full-time company; our core funding can barely pay for the little things… and then we have to apply for the other money to achieve the bigger dreams.”
Bangarra will this year perform Horizon, including The Light Inside, co-created by Maōri choreographer Moss Te Ururangi Patterson, in the company’s first cross-cultural collaboration on the main stage. Artistic director Frances Rings says the major performing arts companies “haven’t seen an increase in a while and all that – the cost of freight, the cost of touring, travel, keeping the operations going, CPI indexing; that all affects how much we can do. We would love to do more, but there is only so much we can do to meet demand.”
Rings says black creatives have a huge responsibility. “I think Australia likes to be comfortable, and we have to find the discomfort in that,” she says. “We have to look in the mirror, we have to know the light and the shadow… our role is so important, to bring that voice, to tell that truth, and also that incredible hopeful seed of resilience from the leaders who came before us, from our ability to adapt and survive, as well as 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 runs from March 13 to 17 as part of the Adelaide festival. Bangarra’s Horizon premieres in Sydney on June 11.