For Broome-based dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram, Indigenous dance has a vital role to play in healing a divided Australia.
After the failed referendum for a voice to 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, “acknowledging there’s more than one side to a story”, and win public “hearts and minds”.
As co-artistic director of intercultural dance theatre company Marrugeku, Pigram looks to her grandfather for ideas on how Indigenous Australia can connect at a human level. The Yawuru law man Patrick Dodson is known as the father of reconciliation; he retired from the Senate late last year after cancer treatment left him with persistent ill-health.
“Watching someone like my pop dedicate his whole life to the inch-by-inch changes he’s witnessed in his lifetime, watching him get sick and recover and still have hope, is something I’ll never forget,” she says. “[I’ve] been inspired to try and take that baton a little bit further.”
While Aboriginal painting has arguably become Australia’s most admired and sought artistic product, Indigenous dance, too, carries critical songlines of land and ancient lore. Over 65,000 years, generations have passed stories down through dance, but now, as the custodians of culture seek to increasingly share their traditions, an existential question arises: how to keep First Nations performance thriving and relevant to contemporary audiences?
One month before the referendum, Marrugeku concluded an international tour of its show Jurrungu Ngan-ga, translated from Yawuru as “straight talk”. The show, which melded First Nations traditional dance, voguing, hip-hop and even shades of classical, was not only about Australia’s high Indigenous incarceration rates but how much those Aboriginal nations, asylum seekers and transgender Australians represented on stage had in common with the audience.
For Marrugeku, as for other companies, the challenge is finding the resources to reach its vaulting ambitions.
‘Everything is in the shadow of “no” now’
In March, First Nations leaders of federal-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” which 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 discussion about federal and state arts funding, which companies say falls short.
Pigram says Marrugeku has always understood its profound responsibility to explore Australians’ shared history, but post-referendum the need to heal has sharply focused the Yolŋu concept of Makarrata: to come together after a struggle. “You can feed into stereotypes,” she says, “or you can start to open people’s hearts and minds.” Part of that process involves confrontation with historical truths: Marrugeku’s most recent production, for instance, Mutiara, is about Broome’s pearling industry and the forced labour practice of blackbirding; the show was praised as a “surprisingly delicate, otherworldly memory piece”.
The ancient traditions of Indigenous dance met their political moment in the 1970s land rights and equality movements, notably in Redfern in inner-Sydney, where Indigenous Australians set up the first Aboriginal-run legal and medical services in the country. Arts was part of the struggle, with the formation here of the provocative National Black Theatre and the National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association Dance College, which took its first students in 1976, deploying dance training as resistance and shaping careers. Today, NAISDA is still one crucial training ground for the likes of the lauded Bangarra Dance Theatre, whose long-running former artistic director Stephen Page often declared his art “medicine” – and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences alike lined up together for a dose.
Wiradjuri choreographer Daniel Riley, who built his own career at Bangarra, is the first Indigenous artistic director of the Australian Dance Theatre, which will premiere their new work Marrow at the Adelaide festival alongside the March conference. The performers include Kaurna woman Karra Nam and five more from diverse backgrounds, including Filipino and Irish dancers. The dancers will be joined on stage by a “character” sculpted from smoke.
Riley, who organised Blak Futures in collaboration with BlakDance, says Marrow is a “post-referendum” dance work. The show’s cultural consultant is a Kaurna/Ngarrindjerri elder, Uncle Moogy Sumner, who has been sharing with Marrow’s creators the Dreaming story of waatji pulyeri, a moral tale about a lying, cheating little blue fairy wren. The wren becomes a metaphor for Australia itself.
“I’m attempting to attach Australia as a nation to the wren in this work; to say, ‘How did we get to where we are, post-referendum?’” says Riley. “However it is that you voted, or whatever’s going on in the cultural and social zeitgeist, everything is in the shadow of ‘no’ now. We’ve got to turn that around and change a lot of hearts and minds, and that’s a difficult thing, but it’s something art can do in a really progressive, empathetic, smart, creative way.”
Narungga/Kaurna choreographer Jacob Boehme, the artistic director of Idja Dance theatre, also premiered new work at Adelaide festival, Guuranda, which includes the story of the creation of the Spencer Gulf, the westernmost inlet on Australia’s southern coast. The work “contains lessons not just about the environment”, he says, “but how 300 generations of custodianship have cared for Country that in the last 200 years has been raped, pillaged and turned into mining and farming fodder”. The work involves Narunnga artists, a Narunnga choir and non-Indigenous collaborators.
“More and more, opportunities for non-Indigenous people to sit, listen and learn are most important,” says Boehme, who notes continued governmental failures to meet Closing the Gap targets. “Intercultural collaboration” is vital, he says, especially after a referendum which was “a huge wakeup call for most First Nations people as to where we actually are as a nation”.
“I don’t think that [referendum] ‘no’ vote necessarily translates to Australian people not caring or supporting First Nations cultures or First Nations people,” Boehme says. “Look at all the interest across the nation that is focused on our theatre, in our dance, in our literature, our food, our science, our astronomy.”
‘First Nations first, lovely slogan – but we’re yet to see any action’
The fifth National Arts Participation survey found the number of Australians attending a First Nations dance, theatre event or performing arts festival fell from 18% to 15% between 2019 and 2022 – but that drop reflects cancellations of arts events and lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Attendances at First Nations arts events in 2022 were still higher than in 2016, and almost three-quarters of Australians consistently believe First Nations arts and culture are important – although only 47% believe those Indigenous cultures are well represented in arts offerings, down from 51% in 2019.
A year ago, the federal government released its cultural policy Revive, promising to establish an autonomous dedicated First Nations body within Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council for the Arts) in 2024. Boehme notes a “hell of a lot of time, energy and money” being spent on policy. “‘First Nations first’, lovely slogan,” he says, “but we’re yet to see any action.” 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 Theatre was “grateful and proud” to receive four-year 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 was removed in the early 2000s. Currently, three First Nations companies – Bangarra, Marrugeku and Ilbijerri Theatre Company – are part of this Creative Australia top-tier, known as the national performing arts partnership framework, which offers greater assurance of ongoing funding.
But financial benefits from this top-tier status are not a given. Pigram at Marrugeku, for instance, says becoming a “major performing arts company” in 2021 meant “not actually getting one red cent more; we just joined the list of people who do this stuff”. The company is “very grateful” for the support it gets, she says, but “we’re not like a full-time company; our core funding can barely pay for the small stuff … and then we have to apply for the other money to realise the bigger dreams”.
Bangarra meanwhile will this year stage Horizon, including The Light Inside, co-created by Maōri choreographer Moss Te Ururangi Patterson in the company’s first mainstage cross-cultural collaboration. Artistic director Frances Rings says the major performing arts companies “haven’t had an uplift for a while and everything – the cost of freight, the cost of touring, travel, keeping operations going, CPI indexation; that all affects how much we can do. We’d love to do more, but there’s only so much that we’re able to do to meet the 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 vital, to bring that voice, that truth telling, and also that incredible hopeful seed of resilience of the leaders that came before us, of our ability to adapt and survive, and also to create inspiring works.”
