Theatre works get under the skin of Aborigines

By GILBERT WONG

The dancer with the glaring eyes stands on the roof of the Holden Torana.

His laugh is bitter, infused with whisky. "Want to hear a joke?" he shouts at the audience.

"What do you call a carful of Aborigines who drive off a cliff? An Abolanche."

The audience shivers with unease. He doesn't stop. "How do Aborigines take a family portrait? ... They climb in the Torana and run a red light camera."

The work is called Spear and, as hard as it might be to believe, this is the lighthearted bit of the performance by the Bangarra Dance Theatre.

The work begins with a distressed Aborigine man climbing on a chair and hanging himself, his feet swinging slowly in the spotlight, his twisted neck hidden in the shadows.

Commissioned for the Sydney and Brisbane arts festivals, the performance is called Skin.

The first part of the double bill, Shelter, is a work performed solely by women. Spear is the domain of men.

And as occasionally grim as the works can be, together they transcend the polemic that could easily be assumed from the mere words used above to achieve a sensual performance of mystery, beauty and hope.

The last comes in soulful doses from the newest Bangarra member, musician Archie Roach, whose simple singing with an acoustic guitar forms a wistful coda to Skin.

Bangarra's artistic director is Stephen Page, aged 35, an ex-Brisbane boy turned whizzkid choreographer. It was his work you saw in the indigenous sequences of the Sydney Olympics opening and closing ceremonies. As a dancer he was a member of Graeme Murphy's acclaimed Sydney Dance Company, and has worked in New York, but he returned nine years ago to join Bangarra.

The name, which means "make fire,"comes from the Warrudjari tribe from New South Wales. Based in Sydney, Page wanted the company to build on the local culture, though he makes regular visits to Arnhem Land in the north and the Torres Straits to learn from traditional performers and elders.

"We tell stories that are inspired by oral tradition, that come from the myths and the Dreaming," he says.

The Dreaming is as much about the present as the past, hence the issues of deaths in custody, alcoholism and petrol sniffing dealt with in Skin.

He works hard to maintain integrity when he mixes the ancient with the contemporary.

"They [the elders] know it's important to educate our children and maintain black control on how the culture and artforms are evolving."

Wesley Enoch is another Aborigine artist making it in a largely white middle-class art form. The theatre director is the first "black" artist employed by the Sydney Theatre Company, where he is resident director. For the Queensland Theatre Company he directed Fountains Beyond at the Brisbane Arts Festival, a revival of a play written by George Landen Dann in 1942. Dann, a white Australian, was a social crusader and he put Aborigine actors on stage in a story that touches on murder, black politics and land rights.

Born in Brisbane 36 years ago, Enoch was artistic director from 1994 to 1997 of Brisbane Aborigine theatre group Kooemba Jdarra, meaning "new ground," - even though it faced old problems.

"We wanted to try to promote a sense of celebration of our own community.

"In Queensland there has been a long history of denial, and while things have changed lately, when I left in 1997 we were turning over a half million a year, but still only received $25,000 annually from the state government."

His choice of Fountains Beyond was made from a desire to shatter what he calls a false nostalgia in Australia.

"I'm fascinated by the contemporary and historical issues. It put Aborigines on stage, it dealt with land rights. It's partly a way of saying to the people now in power that the issues aren't new. They have been ignored a long time.

"There's this nostalgia for a time when Australia was being built, but it never existed for some of us. We need to look at a true history, not some glorified past when everything was fine."

It would be easy to assume from their words that Page and Enoch are angry. They might be at times, but they are also seasoned artists with a wary eye for self-importance and a healthy sense of self-mockery. They are among the least prickly artists I have interviewed, relaxed, thoughtful, considering questions honestly.

Enoch: "My personal thing is to jump into the Sydney or Queensland theatre companies and take over those resources and use them." He grins.

Infiltration successful. The Sydney company turns over $15 million a year, has 20,000 subscribers and mounts 25 shows a season, the bulk of them Australian works.

For the company, Enoch has co-created and directed plays about the stolen generation of Aboriginal children, the history of Aboriginal theatre and staged a "black" Medea.

Page: "People say you can't get political. I can. I live it. You can't escape the politics in whatever you do, and this company aims to change people's minds and break down ignorance. I wouldn't do what I'm doing if it was just art for art's sake, there's no way I could do that. The reason I do this is to maintain the value of our culture."

Enoch: "With the theatre I want to do there is, in a generalised sense, the aim of engaging the audience and connecting to them with the actors to flip them over and engage them with a lot of material that isn't mediated through television or the newspapers. Let's face it, there aren't a lot of Aboriginal current affairs shows, so we have to represent ourselves."

He shrugs. There seems no other choice.