Cut the Sky draws on Indigenous Australian traditions to help audiences apply emotion, rather than cold logic, to climate change
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| Edwin Lee Mulligan stars in Cut the Sky, a new work by Broome-based dance company Marrugeku. Photograph: Marrugeku |
It’s a spectacular bit of country in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, with soil the colour of burnt orange, and sapphire blue waters.
But Walmadany is also a site of contention, and Woodside Petroleum’s plans for a $45bn gas hub on the site were met by mass protests. While those plans were eventually abandoned in 2013, talk of drilling for liquified natural gas won’t go away.
This is not the first time the remote and pristine Kimberley has resisted the intrusion of a mining company. In 1980, then WA premier Charles Court gave the nod to a 45-strong convoy of mining trucks and exploratory drilling in Noonkanbah, on the Fitzroy river. The convoy’s police escort had to clear a blockade of protesters that included traditional landowners.
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| Locals protest a proposal by Woodside Petroleum to build a liquid natural gas plant at James Price Point in Broome, Western Australia. Photograph: Cortlan Bennett/AAP image |
Marrugeku’s co-artistic director, Dalisa Pigram, says it has been “quite heartbreaking” to watch her people be torn in half by the creeping industrialisation of the land.
The proposed gas hub placed an ultimatum on the community to protect one of Australia’s last remaining wildernesses or pay the price – “how to maintain that care for country and make life for our people better? Those traditional owners were forced to make those decisions.”
While the work draws from the struggles of the Kimberley people, it is a much larger treatise on how Indigenous people around the world process the issue of climate change.
The diverse cast and crew not only features Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, others hail from afar as India, Burkina Faso and Belgium.
Together they share the difficult task set by Marrugeku: how to artistically engage with the issue of climate change. Pigram says the climate change discussion is dominated by “a lot of people coming from logic and science.”
Cut the Sky attempts to access a very complex, global problem using a different language, of theatre and dance. And at its core the work is about “valuing an Aboriginal perspective of looking at country”.
It becomes clear that it’s no easy feat to condense in just a few sentences the complicated and varied ways in which care for the land is embedded in Indigenous Australian social structures, philosophy and spirituality.
“You’re born with this responsibility to manage the balance of country,” says Pigram. These responsibilities are not forced upon but hang over every aspect of their culture and life, and they are always thinking “if we don’t keep that balance, there will be consequences.”
Alongside Pigram sits Rachael Swain, Marrugeku’s other co-artistic director, who adds that climate change is essentially about balance, or more accurately, an environmental imbalance. “A big part of Indigenous knowledge systems is around the balance of the seasons,” says Swain, “and weather patterns changing.”
The pair mention cast member Edwin Lee Mulligan, a custodian of Noonkanbah whose five poems make up the spoken element of the work. Mulligan’s descendants were some of the last Indigenous Australians to walk out from the Great Sandy Desert and their stories seem to illustrate how deeply attuned they were to a changing environment.
Since the coming of time the spirits of the skies have been painting their pictures, telling the story of changing season. They reached to the earth choosing individual vibrant colours to paint the universal giant canvas. Calculating the mathematics of day and night, of rotating cosmos with our sun, stars and the moon. Second by second in an endless equation.“There’s a lot more to it than a few dreaming stories,” says Pigram. “Our culture is the oldest living culture for a reason. There are things to value there.”
– An excerpt from Cut the Sky, by Edwin Lee Mulligan
There’s a lot more to it than a few dreaming stories. Our culture is the oldest living culture for a reason.Swain says the piece is split into five mediations on “what happens if we don’t listen to country”, and zig-zags through time. “We did that to break up the tyranny of some kind of lineal progression to climate change. Because that was killing us, artistically, having to carry the weight of that idea.”
The non-linear storytelling also shakes the audience free from their default mode of logic, instead opening up their ability to feel. “That’s the way Indigenous performance functions,” says Swain. “They engage with an audience from a place of feeling: feeling a different point of view, feeling a way of dealing with this information. Rather than understanding it in the way Western theatre operates where information is much more spoon-fed: ‘you will think this now’, ‘you will feel this now’.”
In her choreography work, Pigram set about creating a space in which the audience must actively enter. “To not be observing what’s going on over there, but to really come to us.”
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| Cut the Sky examines climate change through the framework of an indigenous culture. Photograph: Marrugeku |
Pigram doesn’t seem optimistic about the immediate future for Walmadany, which she predicts will be forced to come to the negotiation table and choose between a royalty agreement or compulsory acquisition. “WA laws say you can’t say ‘no’ to anything that’s going on.”
And just as they did Noonkanbah over 30 years ago, such discussions cause a painful riff in the community. “There’s still so much divide in the community with fracking and people’s opinions on water contamination. Sometimes you just want to hide away and not think about any of it.”
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