Dance in Contested Land by Rachael Swain

Author:Rachael Swain
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030465513
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Rachael Swain1

(1)Sydney, NSW, Australia

Rachael Swain

Email: [email protected]

This chapter takes the form of a close reading of Dalisa Pigram’s solo Gudirr Gudirr to explore the legacy of government policies for Indigenous peoples in the Kimberley. Pigram addresses the collision of the past and the future in the north-west by reflecting on the present devastating epidemic of youth suicide in the region. She has described Gudirr Gudirr as taking a good hard look at herself and her people in the mirror. In this chapter, I will outline how Pigram, together with her collaborators, focused and consolidated Marrugeku’s resurgent practices and emerging cosmopolitical aesthetic which had been initiated in Broome between 2004 and 2006 to address the nature of decolonisation of the mind and the work of unlocking doors and facing cultural change. I will explain how this produced a unique expressivity emerging from the uncanny enabled by intercultural dance in contested land. Together these factors enabled an assertion of a culturally situated neo-expressionism which I suggest is both an expansion of ways expression functions in Indigenous dance and a reclamation and repositioning of earlier understandings of expressionism in dance.

Drawing on the findings of Gudirr Gudirr, I propose the need to widen understandings of the role of emotion and expressionism in dance by acknowledging the critical cultural, political and social environments in which dance is constructed and attended. In the previous chapter, I outlined new Indigenous-intercultural dramaturgies that have capacities to make visible Indigenous ontologies of place and time. Here and in the following chapter, I further this discussion to explain choreographic and cultural processes to ‘gesture’ these dramaturgies in ways that reveal new culturally situated choreoaesthetics, that is, dramaturgies which make such knowledges corporeal.

Gudirr Gudirr is a one-hour solo dance work conceived by Pigram in collaboration with Patrick Dodson and co-created by a large multidisciplinary team in development stages that took place in Brussels, Broome and Sydney between 2011 and 2013. The production is directed by Flemish choreographer Koen Augustijnen, then a member of les ballets C de la B, Belgium who also co-choreographed the work with Pigram. The raw and visceral intimacy characteristically seen in Augustijnen’s dance theatre is an expression of the aesthetic and influence of les ballets C de la B and the wider Flemish Wave.1 At the same time, this reflects his own distinctive approach to revealing personal and at times absurd or disturbing aspects of human identity through dance. Our invitation to Augustijnen followed Incognita (2003) an earlier dance and physical theatre work that was co-directed and co-choreographed by Augustijnen and myself. Pigram was a co-devising dancer in that project and it was where we first began experimenting with applying Flemish choreographic processes to Australian dance and physical theatre.

In Gudirr Gudirr Pigram is accompanied on stage by the video art of visual artist Vernon Ah Kee (Kuku Yalandji, Yidindji, Gugu Yimithirr, Koko Berrin, Waanji, Chinese and Malay). Ah Kee’s conceptual text pieces, videos, photographs and drawings form a critique of Australian culture from the perspective of Indigenous experience of contemporary life.

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