Jurrungu Ngan-ga 

Marrugeku

Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

Jurrungu Ngan-ga is the latest work by Broome/Sydney-based intercultural dance theatre company Marrugeku. 

Jointly led by choreographer-dancer Dalissa Pigram and director-dramaturg Rachel Swaine, the company creates work through a deep and long-term process of consultation and collaboration with Indigenous communities, before touring to urban and remote Australia as well as internationally. More recently they’ve expanded their remit to connect with First Nations peoples around the world as well as other minority communities back home. 

 

Jurrungu Ngan-ga makes a compelling link between the treatment of Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers in terms of their incarceration, brutalisation and death while in detention. In doing so it paints a convincing picture of White Anglo-Celtic settler Australia as shaped by an inherently carceral form of colonisation that can be traced back to its convict origins and is still going on today.

 

The title means ‘straight talk’ – a Yarawu concept that refers to direct and honest communication between family members. In the context of the show this takes the form of a frank and fearless conversation between Indigenous, refugee and settler populations, trans and CIS gendered subjects, prisoners and guards, performers and audience. 

 

The work is informed by a similar process of ‘straight talk’ between creatives, performers and cultural dramaturgs. The latter include Yarawu elder and senator Patrick Dodson; Kurdish Iranian journalist, writer and former asylum seeker Behrouz Boochani (who was detained on Manus Island for five years); and Iranian-Australian philosopher and activist Omid Tofighian, who co-translated Boochani’s book No Friend But The Moutains (which was based on text messages from Manus Island sent via a smuggled mobile phone). This book is one of two departure-points for Jurrungu Ngan-ga; the other is Australia’s Shame, the Four Corners documentary about the torture of Indigenous youth at Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in the Northern Territory that was broadcast on the ABC in 2016.

 

Rather than directly staging or quoting from these sources, however, most of the scenarios in Jurrungu Ngan-ga have been developed through improvisation (the cast are listed as co-devisors). Nevertheless these clearly allude to scenes and images of Manus in the book or Don Dale in the documentary, framed by a nightmarishly surreal composite ‘prison of the mind’.

 

Visual artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah’s simple but devastatingly effective set features a towering cage-like fence or wall of perforated metal that also serves as a projection surface, with a doorway that opens and slams shut, and a surveillance camera mounted high up in the centre of the fence that the performers frequently interact with, turning their backs to the audience while large scale projections of their images stare or talk back at us. Downstage of the fence – and as it were inside the cage – huge brightly lit chandeliers are lowered and raised above the otherwise bare stage: obscene signifiers of wealth and power juxtaposed with the poverty and deprivation signified by the rest of the set. Andrew Treloar’s costumes are a ragtag mishmash of ‘found’ items like trackie pants, footy shorts, sweatshirts and tank tops, with a few creative adornments like baseball caps and chiffon slips.

 

Sound is also crucial to the evocation of place and atmosphere, and includes mechanical noises, walkies-talkies, barking dogs and tropical birds. There are also pounding dance tracks by composers Sam Serruys, Paul Charlier and Rhyan Clapham (aka DOBBY), and a haunting song by Kurdish Iranian singer Farhad Bandesh.

 

The heart and soul of the show however is provided by the powerhouse ensemble of First Nations, Filipino, Palestinian and Anglo-Celtic Australian performers, each of whom brings their own unique physicality and personality to the show. Memorable sequences include a Don Dale/Dylan Voller-like scene featuring Wiradjuri performer Chandler Connell manically pacing inside an invisible cell (defined by Damien Cooper’s harshly effective lighting), punctuated by outbursts of furious dancing or yelling at the security camera; Australian-Filipino dancer Macon Escobal Riley dragging himself along the floor while being menaced and finally stripped naked by a pack of human hyenas; and Australian-Filipinx trans performer Bhenji Ra telling the story of the suicide of one of her Vogue ‘mothers’, and then beginning a Voguing routine while leading a group chant of the names of Indigenous people and refugees who’ve been violently killed or died from neglect while in detention. This leads directly into a climactic ‘krump army’ sequence, in which all the performers take turns to climb on a table and do their own wild solos – including White Aussie kangaroo-hopping security guards – while swapping clothes, cheering each other on, and embodying the spirit of resistance and freedom that defies all systems of domination and subjugation. 

 

Marrugeku has developed a form of dance theatre which is radically different from most ‘contemporary dance’ in Australia. Its intercultural focus, raw physicality and generation of material through improvisation are all directly inspired by the ‘Flemish Wave’ of dance theatre – in particular the work of Alain Platel and les ballets C de la B (performance dramaturg Hildegard de Vuyst is a long-term collaborator with both companies). 

The use of a strongly gestural language based on the stories and bodies of the dancers is also clearly influenced by the Tanzteater of Pina Bausch. Just as the latter’s work dealt with historical trauma and denial in post-war Germany as well as enduring gender-based hierarchies of power, Jurrungu Ngan-ga contends with the ongoing trauma and denial of colonisation and racism as well as intersecting forms of oppression like heteronormativity and transphobia. 

In doing so they’ve conjured up a form of ‘horrific surrealism’ (a phrase coined by Tofighian) that reminds me of Kafka as well as Expressionist painting or the cinema of David Lynch. More vitally, they’ve enlisted the subversive forces of resistance and creativity that belong to some of the most oppressed communities in our society and transformed them into something powerful and beautiful.

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he wasthe lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen), in which capacity as the band’s front-man he developed a unique form of contemporary dance combining elements inspired by Isadora Duncan with the traditional Austrian Schuhplattler. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He’s currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He’s also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.