My second activity in the lead up to NAIDOC week was the attendance of Marrugeku’s Cut the Sky, a remount over ten years in the making. Yes, you saw that right, Cut the Sky’s illustrious extended world tour was, like everything else, cut off at the knees by that pesky COVID virus.
Cut the Sky is a dystopian dance theatre piece aiming to foretell a dismal fate of the planet approximately fifty years hence, however it seemed to represent the environmental crisis of the present with alarming accuracy. Cut the Sky literally acts like a weathervane featuring portrayals of extreme weather events which are mirrored in the depictions of the extreme human behaviours (namely greed) which precipitated the condition of our current climate, and as ramifications of our anthropogenic acts.
Initially created in 2012 as a response to the impending gas mining of the Jabir Jabirr country sixty miles from Rubibi (Broome) in the Western Australian Kimberely region, Cut the Sky seeks to give voice to the resultant ruptured interiorities of the land and its inhabitants.
What makes this work interesting is not the overall aesthetic, which is evocative of George Miller’s Mad Max film franchise, nor the dance, which is superbly executed by a fantastic ensemble ranging from hip hop dancer Samuel Hauturu Beazley, to actor and traditional dancer Emmanuel James Brown who lives in Fitzroy Crossing and led by the inimitable Dalisa Pigram, but the drive to present works that defy Western dramaturgical convention. I was first caught off guard by the dramaturgy of Marrugeku’s previous work Le Dernier Appel / The Last Cry. Le Dernier Appel / The Last Cry defied the format of a presentation in three acts whereby a theme is established, a problem is introduced and a resolution is offered. Instead Le Dernier Appel / The Last Cry threw us in the midst of political chaos, beginning as a rumble and ending with the lights going out in mid-flight of a social maelstrom. Similarly Cut the Sky defies convention by placing us in the middle of the environmental mess and although the end came with the relief of rain after an unbearable drought, the downpour also left us the audience in a state of uncertainty as its force equalled the dry in its intensity. Additionally, Cut the Sky animated the land through the voice of singer Ngaire Pigram firmly placing the work within the Australian First Nations canon whereby everything in existence is related equally, interwoven as part of the fabric of the Dreaming. In Cut the Sky Man is certainly not at the apex of existence but at the apex of the grandest folly currently in play.
Highlights from this work, and from many of Marrugeku’s works featured the consummate marriage of characterisation and physicality of Miranda Wheen. She played a range of characters, from crazed soothsayer able to intuit the disturbance from the natural world, to the corporate culprit which white washes the deeds that sanction ugly acts with mercurial aplomb.
Shout out to Emma Harrison whose backbend in the opening defied gravity and which set an expectation of excellence, of pure liquidity of movement, which was a delight to uphold. And lastly a shout out to Taj Pigram, a newcomer to the Marrugeku fold, who in this work made his mark in a lightness of being, depicted in a sequence featuring so many barrel turns I’m getting dizzy just recalling their relentless number. A young dancer to watch out for.
From Marrugeku I hotfooted it to Parramatta Riverside Theatre to catch two of a triple bill with the overarching titled sixbythree presented by FORM Dance Projects.
