New Horizons

Before digital audio, compact discs, cassette tapes with their ribbons of sound sandwiched within a small case, and pressed vinyl records, came wax cylinders to record and reproduce sound, thanks to Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention of the hand-cranked phonograph. As sound waves cause the diaphragm to vibrate, the wriggling needle draws a line across the surface of a rotating, hollow cylinder of wax. The needle, literally, cutting a groove in the transference of sound wave to physical recording.

Performance

Bangarra Dance Theatre:“Horizon”

Place

Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne, August 29, 2024

Words

Gracia Haby

Bangarra Dance Theatre in “The Light Inside.” Photograph by Daniel Boud

As Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Daniel Mateo lay centre stage, in the opening solo, Cylinder, of “The Light Inside,” he became a breathtaking recipient cylinder, gently rolling, recording, encased, as “ancient and sacred stories passed through generations, with voices so powerful, they reach beyond the horizon” draw lines across his form. The past reverberates “beneath the blanket of scratches and clicks,”[1] as the recorded songs from the Alfred Cort Haddon 1898 Expedition (Torres Strait and British New Guinea) Cylinder Collection[2] make of him a vessel. Each cylinder holds two-minutes of sound, but like all things, such measurements belie the universe they truly contain. The same, too, could be said of Mateo’s delicately unfurling solo.

Trace lines reach the core in Deborah Brown’s “Gur/Adabad/Salt Water,” from of “The Light Inside,” presented as the second half of Bangarra Dance Theatre’s double bill, “Horizon.” As Mateo rises from the floor, I feel a sense of what this might feel like, but I cannot truly know. The mechanical fragility of the wax cylinder throws into sharp relief Western notions of how and why sound is captured, recorded, and shared, and it cannot come close to how story, songline, connection is within every indivisible part of the knowledge systems of First Nations Peoples, where “the connection to the spirit realm and the way that informs sustainable living, the connection to place and the way that informs identity and relationships, and the connection to people and the way that informs shifting socio-political constructs”[3] is bonded and expansive. Stories are the light, the light within.

Bangarra Dance Theatre in “The Light Inside.” Photograph by Daniel Boud

Blown in on a forecast night of damaging wind gusts, “Horizon,” having opened on Gadigal Country at the Sydney Opera House, is currently on Wurundjeri Country, at the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne. For opening night, following community night, Brown’s “Salt Water” and Moss Te Ururangi  Patterson’s “Wai Māori/Fresh Water” collaboration is Bangarra Dance Theatre’s first mainstage cross-cultural collaboration, spanning the archipelago of the Zenadth Kes/Torres Strait Islands and across the water to the ancestral lands of Ngāti Tüwharetoa in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Cleansed by the winds of the Tawhirimatea, this “reaching out and meeting of two waters”[4] particularly felt in “Fresh Water’s” Pure: The Cleansing and Purification of the Soul, featuring the full ensemble. Comprised of each dancers’ hands, closed fists are stacked to momentarily draw horizontal and vertical lines of accent, where earlier, hands open, dorsal-side, a fanned headdress in flux had appeared about the face.

In Blue Star, Lillian Banks twinkles bluer, faster, to tell of a storm approaching, and, like Mateo before her, her magnetic solo ensures the warning is heeded. In Sails, Courtney Radford, Maddison Paluch, and Emily Flannery, with their arms extended at an upward angle, are the sails on the horizon,[5] part descriptive, part poetic. In costumes by Jennifer Irwin, one, a compass overhead, the other three, with single cascading sleeves, the means to return home safely to land. Behind them, the horizon line, still low, suggests distance, and the depths of the sea. Elizabeth Gadsby’s set design gradually changes throughout “Salt Water,” with the rocky crop of the horizon line ever being pulled up higher and higher until we reach “Fresh Water,” the second half of “The Light Inside,” and what was a ribbon of land viewed in the distance is now a looming rockface, misted. Rocks, wind, water, and message, all held in balance.

Bangarra Dance Theatre in “Kulka.” Photograph by Daniel Boud

Before such a rockface, situated on a volcanic plateau, Makawe Tapu/Sacred Hair sees dancers Flannery, Chantelle Lee Lockart, and Jye Uren braid their long hair together, literally, in the weaving of knowledge and deepening of strength. Having previously, with their hair still fastened in a high plaited ponytail, each used the plait like a tail or rope with which to pull themselves upward, their loose hair plaited together creates a powerful image, in the story of Maui attempting to tame the sun.

“Horizon” opened with an expanded version of Sani Townson’s earlier 2023 work, “Kulka,” which suspended a large, angled mirror above the stage, and so, too, typified that the horizon line can be between the sea and the sky, the earth and the sky, and the celestial horizon, the sacred realm, beyond reach, but ever offering guidance with the Universe as Mother. As such, Kassidy Waters, Kiarn Doyle, Mateo, Bradley Smith, James Boyd, and Kallum Goolagong are viewed in two realms that appear alike, but at this angle, different. The embodiment of Danalayg (Life), which flows seamlessly into Bloodline, on the stage before me, in the reflected world above, they reveal the belief that we come from the stars, before slicing their way through the water in Koedalaw Awgadh/Crocodile God, in reference to Townson’s totem. The dark and glistening scales upon their linked bodies, in the mirror, clearly evoking reptilian hallmarks from this new vantage point.

Crossing the Birrarung (Yarra River), on my walk home, the wind whipped the surface water up high, perhaps in a bid to smudge the horizon line, and I thought about the earlier read words of June Oscar AO: “This knowledge is from long ago, listen to our voices.”[7]

Gracia Haby

Using an armoury of play and poetry as a lure, Gracia Haby is an artist besotted with paper. Her limited edition artists’ books, and other works hard to pin down, are often made collaboratively with fellow artist, Louise Jennison. Their work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and state libraries throughout Australia to the Tate (UK). Gracia Haby is known to collage with words as well as paper.

footnotes

Cylinder synopsis, from the first section, Gur/Adabad/Salt Water, from “The Light Inside”, choreographed by Deborah Brown, presented in Act 2, “Horizon”, Bangarra Dance Theatre program, https://www.bangarra.com.au/media/bqpnmziw/bdt-horizons-program-a5-finalweb4.pdf, p. 14.
The British Library’s Alfred Cort Haddon 1898 Expedition (Torres Strait and British New Guinea) Cylinder Collection (C80) includes 141 wax cylinders recorded in the Torres Strait Islands and British New Guinea as part of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits. True Echoes, https://www.true-echoes.com, accessed August 29, 2024.
Bangarra Dance Theatre “Horizon” Study Guide for Teachers and Students, https://www.bangarra.com.au/media/kvydy0cf/bdt-horizon-studyguide.pdf, p. 4.
Shimmering Water synopsis, from the last section, Wai Māori/Fresh Water, from “The Light Inside”, choreographed by Moss Te Ururangi  Patterson, presented in Act 2, “Horizon”, Bangarra Dance Theatre program, p. 15.
In reference to the boats identifiable by their pointed ‘lug’ sails and multiple masts, the Pearling Luggers, used to harvest pearl and trochus shells in the 1890s, during the pre-plastic boom for buttons and buckles.
Danalayg (Life) synopsis, from “Kulka” choreographed by Sani Townson, presented in Act 1, “Horizon”, Bangarra Dance Theatre program, p. 13.
“Our ancestors that came before, created this knowledge. Our voices carry this knowledge to give to our children to carry forever. They must learn their knowledge so they can stand and speak with strength. So they can follow and know this wisdom. This is our umbilical cord to life. This knowledge is from long ago, listen to our voices.” June Oscar AO, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Human Rights Commissioner, ‘Close the Gap: We nurture our culture for our future, and our culture nurtures us’, March 2020, https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/document/publication/ctg2020_report_final.pdf, accessed August 29, 2024, p.4.

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