(Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this document/blog may contain images and names of people who have since passed away)
This blog has been a journey through the tracks and maps left by generations of indigenous artists giving a sense of the rich history, stories, cultural backgrounds, perspectives and practices of dramatic traditions which date back thousands of years before white occupation. It is an attempt to provide a link between the representations of indigenous people, history, stories and dramatic elements in more traditional ceremonies through to the collective revues of Bill Onus and his comrades to the vibrant Indigenous Theatre which evolved in the 1970's and 1980’s to the stories and performances which occupied a prominent place on Australian stages and remain pivotal to the Australian theatre scene today in the 21st Century. Australian indigenous performing arts have always been a complex integration of different narratives dramaturgy and cross-arts dialogue. The richness of Australian Indigenous Drama is that it is a living dialogue between traditions, ceremonies, forms and individual and shared histories. As Casey and Craigie state in their 2011 article entitled A Brief History of Indigenous Australian Contemporary Theatre, “Traditional Indigenous performance works alternate rhythmically between speech and silence, between the past and the present and between performance and story…” (Casey & Craigie 2011, p2).
Indigenous
drama is not something that can be viewed as separate from the interrelated
aspects of the lives, culture, stories and history of Australian Indigenous
peoples. Stories and drama explain, document and define people’s lives and
nowhere is this more evident than in the long, and continuously rich and
confronting narratives presented to us in Australian Indigenous Drama.
The
shift from a National Aboriginal Playwright’s Conference to a National
Indigenous Theatre Forum (NITF) as a major meeting place and forum for
discussion about Indigenous Australian theatre and drama issues is a
significant one, in that it shows the movement away from viewing a ‘published’
work and a playwright as being at the
centre of indigenous dramaturgy towards a view where the performance and
processes of performance making are seen as central to the Australian
Indigenous drama and theatre making process. Some of the issues raised at the
recent National Indigenous Theatre Forums (NITF) and in the Platform Papers
published on Australian Indigenous drama and theatre have centred on the
importance of ownership when dealing with indigenous stories, drama and
theatre. The issues of community permissions and when and how they should be
sought and sensitivity, protocols and
permission that need to be requested, raise larger issues of the ownership and
caretakership of stories and their enactment. These are not easy issue to
navigate through even for seasoned indigenous theatre artists like Rhoda
Roberts (for the Indigenous sequences of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games Opening
Ceremony and Jane Harrison (for the play Stolen)
and this raises the question of who ultimately ‘controls’ or ‘cares for’
indigenous stories once they are put into performance pieces. As Indigenous
Australian artists move toward different models of dramaturgical processes
where the playtext may or may not be at the centre of the process or where
devised work by indigenous performers is appearing without a ‘writer’ listed,
the questions are raised again of “Who owns the story?” and “Who is in control
of the storytelling?”.
The
larger questions of who is able to develop, act out and ‘write’ Indigenous
drama are still vital questions. The question of casting indigenous people who
are from the family, clan or tribe who own the history behind the story was
frist raised in modern times by Bill Onus and brought again to prominence by
Jack Davis casting spme of his plays with members of clans and families who had
experienced and ‘owned’ the stories told. In more recent times the use of
Indigenous family members to act out the stories of members of their family in
the award winning film Ten Canoes and
the use of members of the Namatjira family to paint sets live during
performances of the play Namatjira, highlight
the necessity for more more Indigenous models of dramaturgy to be applied to
notions of ownership of the creation and performance of Australian Indigenous
drama and theatre. This can then be extended into the crucial questions raised
by Indigenous artists interviewed and quoted in the important work of Glow and
Johanson in their 2009 book ‘Your Genre
is Black’: Indigenous Performing Arts
and Policy (Glow & Johanson 2009) where the question is raised about
how Indigenous performing artists can be allowed to break away from having all
of their work framed within the ‘Black Theatre genre’ if they so chose.
The
question of who is performing, writing and controlling the framing and flow of
indigenous stories in drama, is an important one particularily as Indigenous
Australian drama makes its way from a novelty and curiousity to one of the most
important forces in modern Australian mainstream theatre. Casey and Craigie see
modern indigenous Australian drama as both a representation of individual and
group indigenous voices and an agent for cultural representation and
understanding of all Australians and their cultures.
“In
the second decade of the twenty-first century, Indigenous theatre continues to
embrace its rich traditions but to also engage fellow Australians in another
side of the story. Cumulatively, the plays and performance texts produced over
the last fifty years have changed the understanding of Indigenous Australians and
their cultures. The breadth of individual voices represented and expressed
within Indigenous Australian playwriting defies any kind of generalisation.
They come
from all over Australia, from Koori,
Murri, Nunga and Noongar writers, from men and women, from urban and rural
communities and individuals. Together, they represent the unexpected and
intangible elements and variety of contemporary Indigenous Australian cultures.” (Casey & Craigie 2011, p.6)
At
present in 2014, there are four permanent Indigenous theatre companies in
Australia, two permanent Indigenous Dance Theatre Companies, an Indigenous unit
which is part of Opera Australia and one Indigenous theatre director in charge
of a major or State theatre company (Wesley Enoch is in charge of the Queensland
Theatre Company). In these precarious times in Australia of shrinking arts
funding where the work of four or five playwrights, three or four
choreographors and one musician may get funded each year, a greater range of
performance making processes and performance opportunities need to be embraced
and properly developed and funded if Australian Indigenous drama is to grow and
survive into the 21st century.
“History teaches us that the way to genocide
is to take a culture, mould it into a defunct company – bankrupt, at the mercy
of its liquidators – and destroy its credibility so it can no longer reflect
itself… up there on stage we are judged … on our individual talent, not our
colour.”
(Merritt,
R.J. in the Preface of The Cakeman
1983:xi)
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