SYDNEY — This year, two festival directors are making powerful statements about the central place of Aboriginal and Torres Strait culture in Australia. For his final year as artistic director of the Sydney Festival (Jan. 8-26), indigenous theater director Wesley Enoch anchored almost all of his artistic weight on indigenous storytelling through song, ceremony, and play-making. In the west, Australian composer Iain Grandage inaugurates his first season as artistic director of the Perth Festival by dedicating the entire first week (Feb. 6-9, 2020) exclusively to First Nations’ practice across every art form.
Both programming decisions act as barometers of Australia’s metamorphosis. Both festivals divert our attention away from the familiar offerings from Eurocentric heritage that Australia has adopted since white settlement more than 200 years ago.
There are a host of messages here. The bold shifts in direction in the context of an international festival send a timely note to artistic directors across the globe: Recalibrate your thinking on the primacy of First Nations creativity or risk missing out on documenting the cultural history of your people. The center stage programming of indigenous creativity calls audiences to reassess their view of diversity.
Enoch took a maximal approach. He scheduled work from Australia’s premier indigenous theater company, the twenty-year old Ilbijerri Theater Company, through to large-scale co-commissions with the Perth Festival as partners. One event is Bungul, the indigenous Yolngu name for ceremonial celebration. Bungul was a one-part ceremony and one-part symphonic performance that memorialized the legacy of the late Gurrumul Yunupiŋu, an internationally recognized singer-songwriter who is credited for fostering racial harmony through his music. With interpretations by the song-men and dancers of Northeast Arnhem land combined with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Bungul follows a legacy of Australian cross-cultural endeavors highlighted by composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, who set the path with his concertos for didgeridoo and orchestra, and commissions for the Kronos Quartet.
One of the more accessible indigenous events for this festival was the 30th-anniversary production of the musical Bran Nue Dae. Written by the late indigenous composer Jimmy Chi with his band Kuckles, Scrap Metal, and the Pigram Brothers, Bran Nue Dae represented a landmark in Australia’s musical theater history when it first appeared in the ’90s because it dared to represent the indigenous experience.
While international audiences may be more familiar with The Boy from Oz and Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Bran Nue Dae slipped under the Broadway radar. Together with its remake as a film, Bran Nue Dae was was considered a highly successful musical play. This three-week revival (Jan. 15-Feb. 1) is presented in Parramatta — a satellite suburban city — 30 minutes by train from downtown Sydney. Australia’s Opera Conference — a consortium of companies that includes Opera Australia, State Opera of South Australia, Opera Queensland, and the Western Australian Opera — is producing the Australia-wide tour. The decision demonstrates a commitment to addressing issues of inclusiveness, diversity, and low-brow/hi-brow programming.
You might wonder what an indigenous musical sounds like, especially one created by a composer with a multicultural background. Chi was born to an aboriginal mother with Scottish ancestry, and a father with Chinese and Japanese heritage.
The score is quintessentially country and little bit reggae, with layers of musical theater staples such as anthems and ballads. The result is a patchwork, and the musical hums along with very catchy commercial songs. There is an earthy, unpretentious feel to this minimally scored musical backed by a four-piece country band. If you are looking for something sophisticated, you are in the wrong theater.
Partly biographical, the musical’s plot is a coming of age meets road trip story. We are in 1960’s Western Australia, and the narrative follows the journey of teenage schoolboy Willie (Marcus Corowa), who is expelled from his Catholic mission school in Perth for stealing chocolate.
We follow Willie as he winds his way back to his hometown, Broome. Along the way, Willie meets his long–lost relative Uncle Tadpole. Australia’s most prominent indigenous film and television star Ernie Dingo performs the boisterous uncle with subtle sensitivity and charisma. There’s a short jail spell with some mischievous marijuana-smoking hippies before the touring party eventually lands in the coastal pearl diving town, where a grand family reunion solves all the riddles.
The musical moves into tricky territory when it tries to interpolate political reminders of the bitter history of indigenous peoples with themes of the stolen generation, land rights, reconciliation, mass incarceration, and deaths in custody. In this uneasy mix, the gloss on the toe–tapping songs gets scuffed. You are caught unawares by the lyrics. Songs like “Nothing I Would Rather Be” nestles barbs: “There’s nothing I would rather be than to be an Aborigine, and watch you take my precious land from me.” You would be forgiven for missing the message in the upbeat.
Apart from veteran Dingo, Bran Nue Dae is largely a cast of ingenues. Most of the performers credit this production as their first musical. It’s a daunting task for any unseasoned performer, but this athletic cast exudes enough energy and wide-eyed optimism to leave the audience sated with entertainment, if also a little perplexed.
On the more serious end of the musical spectrum, the festival has programmed contemporary art music in a Salon series aimed at representing Australia’s grown assets. Contemporary ensembles like Sydney’s The Offspring, as well as composer Elena Kats-Chernin and pianists Simon Tedeschi and Tamara-Anna Cislowska, formed the main thrust of this program.
But the festival offered its best opportunity to capture art music with Liza Lim’s Atlas of the Sky, a staged oratorio for soprano (Jessica Aszodi), percussion (Speak Percussion) and a 16-voice citizen chorus crowd.
Performed for only one night at the City Recital Hall midway through the festival on Jan. 16, the 70-minute work is a sophisticated ritual. The spine of the libretto is based on three poetic works: The Stars, an excerpt from An Elemental Thing by Eliot Weinberger,and two poems by Chinese poet Bei Dao. The core of the poetry selections deliberates on multiple themes. from contemplation of the power of the stars to a discussion on the power of crowds. Lim’s score has a sense of other-worldliness. We are engaged in a spiritual world. We can partly attribute this feeling to the percussion-laden core, which takes influences from Japanese Den-Den Daiko drumming, Indonesian spinning sounds and traditional western orchestrations.
It is a mesmerizing experience with Australia’s Speak Percussion taking top honors for its elegant, precision-drilled reading. Lim is one of Australia’s most prominent composers. Atlas of the Sky represents another installment of her commitment to finesse and detail, resulting in a distinctive musico-theatrical experience.
Xenia Hanusiak is a New York-based writer, festival director, and scholar whose writing has appeared in London’s Financial Times, Music and Literature, National Sawdust’s Log Journal, and the New York Times. She is an advocate for contemporary music and cultural diplomacy. www.xeniahanusiak.com.
