Aboriginality on the London stage

Nicôle Lecky in This Heaven

In the past week, I have seen two very distinct representations of Aboriginal Australia on the London stage.  The first was a play by an indigenous Australian writer, Nakkiah Lui's This Heaven, which has just finished its run at the Finborough.  I was asked to take part in a post-show panel discussion, which, given the play's concern with the issue of deaths in custody, inevitably turned to Beautiful One Day, and also to Bullie's House (the latter ends with a death in custody, although here the implication is that the Aboriginal man dies because of his separation from land and community, rather than as a direct result of police brutality).  Like both of those plays (to a greater or lesser degree), This Heaven is the result of the Belvoir Theatre's sustained engagement with indigenous culture - and so it is perhaps all the more disturbing to hear in it the voice of discontented Aboriginal youth, in the character of the trainee lawyer Sissy, expressing fury that even her success as an indigenous person is measured in terms of a white world view.  But isn't this exactly the problem of the whole "development" agenda?  We measure "improvements" in the post-colonial space and the lot of indigenous peoples solely in terms of how close they can come to our way of living.  We praise them for becoming more like us, and lament our own failings when they refuse to do so.  We assume that economic prosperity is the only measure of human endeavour, and we impose this on those whom our ancestors once conquered.  Theatre may be as guilty as every other field of endeavour, and Lui is right to provoke.

Gary Wood in Our Country's Good

I was still thinking about these concerns when, the next night, I saw the National Theatre's production of Our Country's Good.  In spite of its "modern classic" status, I'd actually never seen the play before - though I knew Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker, on which it is based.  Since Tom also wrote Bullie's House, I had expected another nuanced and provocative engagement with Aboriginal culture.  Indeed, The Playmaker is dedicated to "Arabanoo and his brethren, still dispossessed", in a direct acknowledgment of Aboriginal man who worked to build a relationship with Captain Arthur Philip, whose expedition to Australia forms the background to the story.  In Tom's novel, this relationship is central - but in the play, it has been abandoned.  There remains, however, the figure of "The Aborigine", whom the text shows as speaking four times in a direct audience address.  These moments have the potential to be powerful theatrical interventions in the colonial narrative: for example, the second scene of the play is titled "A lone Aboriginal Australian describes the arrival of the First Convict Fleet in Botany Bay on January 20, 1788", and the spoken text reads: "A giant canoe drifts onto the sea, clouds billowing from upright oars.  This is a dream which has lost its way.  Best to leave it alone."

This language is sparse, poetic and evocative.  It was also totally lost in the National production.  I'm not sure if it was even spoken, or, if it was, whether it was spoken in English.  Certainly there was no contact between the Aboriginal character and the audience.  Every production decision was calculated to make him distant and "Other" - exotic, and therefore of no concern to us.  Michael Billington's review talks of him "exerting some mysterious Puck-like power", as if the indigenous were literally another world.  The production brings him into the action whenever there is violence or cruelty between the white characters, as if he were the embodiment of their savagery.  This is about as far from the open spirit of Belvoir as it is possible to get - and it really saddens me to see it on Britain's national stage in the 21st century.

Deaths in Custody

Beautiful One Day.  Photo: Ponch Hawkes

Today, August 4th, marks the first anniversary of the death of a young indigenous Australian woman, Julieka Dhu, in police custody.  It's still not clear exactly how she died: what is known is that she was taken into custody for not paying her parking fines.  There's a sensitive and touching radio programme on the subject here.

There's a horrible air of familiarity about this story.  Just over a month ago, our Origins Festival came to an end with Ilbijerri's wonderful production Beautiful One Day, which was made in response to the notorious death in custody of indigenous man Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island in 2004.  As well as the play, the case has led to a book, a documentary film, an art installation by Vernon Ah Kee, and (of course) riots...  You would think something might have changed.  The case of Julieka Dhu seems to suggest otherwise.

2004 was also the year when Border Crossings first became involved with indigenous peoples and their theatre, when we presented Bullie's House.  At the end of that play, there's a strong sense that one of the indigenous characters, Jimmie, will die in custody - and I discussed that with the writer, Thomas Keneally, in an interview on our website.  Tom's sense at that time was that the experience of incarceration alone could be enough to end the life of an indigenous person, and that may well be partly true - but it has become ever clearer that systematic police brutality is also a huge part of the problem.  Such brutality is only possible when people think of those they are oppressing as less than human.  It's probably naive to suppose that cultural education can solve a prejudice that deep - but we have to start somewhere, for the next generation if not our own, and it's only through culture that the humanity of the other can finally be perceived.

Thinking about this has taken me right back to the experiences which led me to set up Border Crossings in the first place - directing in West Coast America after the LA riots had been set off by the police attack on the black taxi driver Rodney King.  And it had brought me very close to home: the 2011 riots in Wood Green, where we have our office, were sparked by the police shooting of the black man Mark Duggan.  I am not saying that these events are all equivalent to one another - but I am saying that they are part of a recognisable pattern across the world, where black communities feel that policing had become an instrument of oppression rather than protection.

Contracting the police force and asking them to operate on a slimmer budget is not going to help overcome this.  Only a sustained engagement on an educational and cultural level will overcome it, and that is something that is very unfashionable right now.

Oddly enough, the day Mark Duggan was shot in 2011 was August 4th.

Origins 2015

Voladores de Papantla

Origins came to an end last Thursday night, with the second performance of Beautiful One Day - the production that critic Matt Trueman said was "the most important show I've seen all year".  We must be doing something right. 

Actually, it's been by far the largest scale and best received festival to date - and we're genuinely delighted with the response.  It's going to take a bit of time to process all that was achieved: in fact, not all of it has been achieved yet, as the education and community work is ongoing, with a whole film project and oral history work coming later in the year.  It's pleasing to look at statistics which tell us more than 500 people came to Horniman's Pleasance on a wet Saturday to see the Voladores fly, and that 1,500 people turned up at the British Museum to see how very much alive the cultures shown in the museum's exhibition turn out to be.  It's great to know that the whole of Cavendish School came off timetable for a week to experience the festival, and that every child spent every day of that week exposed to indigenous cultures at first hand.  It's exciting that there are some clear marks of permanent impact - quite literally so in the case of Elliot Tupac's amazing mural at Acklam Market. 

The real impact, of course, will take longer to emerge. But, at this stage, I just want to say one thing.  We had proposed three key themes for the festival - Elders and Youth, Politics and Protest, Food and Environment.  These were present in spades, of course - but during the festival itself a fourth theme started to emerge very organically from the work being presented, and from the encounters between artists and between artists and audiences that were generated.  And that theme was one of fundamental change.  It probably seems odd to say this in the aftermath of an election that put the right very firmly in power in our country - but the festival served to put this in a much broader context, and left us all, artists and audiences, feeling that corners were being turned, and that our coming together in London was part of a genuine movement towards global justice.  Justice in terms of equality, land rights and self-determination.  Justice in terms of the environment and food sovereignty.  Justice in terms of a revitalized youth and respect for elders.  It felt real.

The festival included the solstice, which marks a time of change.  The Voladores ceremony, which is about the environment and regeneration, was traditionally only performed at the solstice and the equinox - so it felt appropriate.  We coupled it with the Guatemalan play Oxlajuj B'aqtun, which was not only about the solstice, but about an entire change of era in the Mayan calendar, and ended with a profoundly moving sense of spiritual and cultural resurgence for the Mayan people, as they emerge from the near genocide in Guatemala towards an era of renewed strength and vitality. 

This may just be the festival effect talking.  But I don't think so.  I think we're on the edge of something. 

Zugubal Dancers at the British Museum