The Sydney Festival certainly got off to a terpsichorean start last week with the Sydney Morning Herald coming out on Monday with no fewer than three different dance reviews. Two got 5 star raves from Chantal Nguyen, the paper’s regular dance reviewer. Sadly, the Jannawi Dance Clan’s proud effort to promote the Dharug language and culture (on hostile Gadigal land at the Opera House), only rated three stars from Nguyen – which I think slightly unfair.
The fact is that the choreographers of ‘Garrigarrang Badu’ (Saltwater/Freshwater), Peta Strachan (Jannawi’s founder), Beau Dean Riley, Albert David and the dancers, almost inevitably found it difficult to match the cultural experience of living on Country today between Hunters Hill and the Blue Mountains with the many touches of traditional remote culture that were included but are associated with Arnhemland’s amazing dance/ceremonial world. And, given the effort made to create and present 14 musical items using the Dharug language, what a shame that there were no surtitles to give those strange words meaning to non-Dharug speakers.
So we had grass skirts for the all-female ensemble, feathers were interwoven into elders’ outfits, and at various stages we progressed from that classic symbol of the matriarchy – the digging stick – via coolamons for babies and gathering and woven fish-nets to nawi – the special canoes designed for fishing on Sydney Harbour, always ‘manned’ by the women (while the men speared their fish). The didg also appeared in Matthew Doyle’s urbane music to encourage Arnhem thoughts.
Should all this have been accompanied by the earth-stamping dances of Arnhemland, sand kicked up in the firelight that illuminates nighttime dancing? For Joseph Lycett, the forger-turned-painter who was transported to Australia in 1814, certainly recorded ceremonies that could easily match Arnhemland’s best, especially in the Newcastle area. But would that make sense for the urban Dharug of today? For surely they were not attempting to tell a 19th Century story, but position themselves in the wonderful continuity of the everywhen. So I reckon Nguyen was unjust to claim “Audiences should not go in expecting a stratospheric level of choreographic complexity or dance technique”. The dance was illustrating the values of the Dharug female through history, using contemporary music and contemporary dance styles lightly.
Oddly, experienced dramaturg Nigel Jamieson left me a little confused by what I had assumed at the beginning was the handing on of experience and wisdom by four elders in feathered costumes different to their initiates. However, though these figures disappeared and a new confidence appeared in the dancing of the 11-strong corps, they kept reappearing in subsidiary roles. Greater clarity in the through-put of story-telling would have helped me.
But perhaps a greater disappointment was in store as many of the women behind the production gathered on stage after the show to “reclaim” the Dharug. This, I suspect, is all part of bigger game plan to challenge Eora as the Sydney ‘nation’. For many believe that Dharug was the language that greeted Governor Phillip et al. And there are many more extant Dharug people than the Gadigal, whom we hail so often at Welcomes to Country. All of which is a bit of a threat to a Sydney Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council that has many a board member from outside Sydney. Peta Strachan was strongly accompanied by elder Julie Webb and both Leanne and Jacinta Tobin in this session. But, all too often their more political insights were cut off by the chair, Gamilaroi women Cathy Craigie, who was steering a more national picture of Aboriginal women.
Go the Dharug – in dance and politics!
