Marrugeku is an Australian dance theatre company who have brought the show Burrbgaja Yalirra 2 to Auckland for the 2024 Tempo Dance Festival.
The show consists of three pieces of very different yet related dance. My interpretation of what I was seeing is this:
First up was No New Gods set during a lunar eclipse. Dancer Bhenji Ra came on to a darkened stage accompanied by ethereal music. Performing Phillipino stick fighting she fought an unseen dragon that had swallowed the moon. The piece was primal, dark, almost angry. At one point she sat on the floor and spoke of the coming of the white man and the consequent exploitation of people and land. Her subsequent dance to loud discordant music seemed to evoke madness, violence and destruction. A new era of dislocation.
In Bloodlines, two men enter a sugar plantation, their clothing is spartan, dirty, ragged. They are friends and their dancing is masculine and graceful. The piece performed by Ses Bero and Stanley Nalo depicts forced labour of their ancestors on the plantations and how they coped with it. Part way into the piece, a train passes, we don’t see it, but we hear it, and lights from carriages flicker past. Once it is gone, the men change. They seem full of anguish and despair. Their movements evoking violence and death, perhaps sickness. A tree collapses, their world is transformed. The men cut down the remaining vegetation and seem reconciled to the barren land around them.
The third piece was Nyuju in which a lone man is sitting against rocks. He stands and dresses in pants, shirt and a dusty cowboy hat. He laments the change wrought by the coming of the white man and an economy that requires hard work to afford the basics, and alcohol. It is a senseless round of work, rest, drink, repeat.
At one point he is on the ground as tiny spots of light flicker all over him and the ground. Projections of indigenous art seem to transform him. For a moment he is a bird, hopping around and looking at his domain. The man seems to be at one with nature, but there is loss and destruction here also. But change comes, he strips off the clothing, paints his body with traditional patters, and begins to dance. He is different now, grounded, maybe connecting back with his culture has brought him peace?
Each of these pieces were different in style yet each explored similar themes such as the horrors of dislocation and destruction yet also strength of spirit. For me, the overarching message is that perhaps a strong connection to one’s cultural heritage is the key to resilience in an imposed new world order.
TEMPO DANCE FESTIVAL
10-20 October 2024
