Burning Daylight

Burning Daylight is a multimedia production incorporating contemporary dance, film, live music and karaoke! The project combines the unique performance style of Western Australian Indigenous dancers and musicians with Malaysian martial arts, and the company’s visual and acrobatic performance language. Burning Daylight was researched and created in Broome, with its unique history of cultural relations between the local Aboriginal and Immigrant Japanese, Chinese and Malay communities.

The performance is set from late one night until dawn outside a notorious pub on a Broome-style Karaoke night. A series of contemporary dance scenes unfold expressing the friction, local humour and cultural collision in the streets at night in the part of Broome known as ‘The Bronx’. With Karaoke country songs sung by the talented Broome line up, the karaoke videos ‘shadow’ the onstage performers with historic Broome characters (such as the pearl diver, geisha, Aboriginal cowboy). The multi-screen short films, shot and directed by acclaimed Aboriginal filmmaker Warwick Thornton explore classic inter-racial love stories set as Westerns against the backdrop of the racist government policy of the 30’s to the 50’s.

Burning Daylight has been choreographed by Serge Aimé Coulibaly from Burkina Faso, West Africa, a former member of leading Belgium contemporary dance company Les Ballets C de la B, assisted by Indigenous choreographer Dalisa Pigram from Broome. Serge’s process of combining traditional and contemporary dance provides a dynamic collaboration with Marrugeku’s existing style and Australian context. Associated with the 2009 national tour is a major documentation. To see some aspects of the project online, please follow the link: Burning Daylight