Program A finds me hopping on the circuit with proud Githabul, Migunberri, Yumbeh woman, Keia McGrady’s regeneration after cultural burning, “Charcoal,” and Jo Lloyd’s rewriting of tragedy, “Agitato,” back-to-back at Sylvia Staehli Theatre, Dancehouse, Melbourne. “Charcoal” premiered as part of the Junction Arts Festival, at the Annexe Theatre, Lutruwita/Tasmania, in 2024, and “Agitato” premiered last year at Dancehouse, and having seen neither work before, I am here for the journey in all its time expansion and brilliance. I am ready to look into the marks we leave behind. 

As I enter the darkened theatre, at the foot of the stage, a large, folded, raw canvas basks in a warm glow. Distinctive, tell-tale charcoal smudges intimate what might unfurl, and render the stage “a living, breathing presence,” just as Country is a living, breathing presence. For “Charcoal” is not “just a performance. This is offering. This is remembering.”[1] As McGrady, joined by Amelia Jean O’Leary (Gamilaroi and Wadawurrung Yinarr), purposefully open the canvas, to the left and right, as if it were a book or an unstretched painting, the growing of the space is captivating. What was large is larger still, a broad expanse, a revelation. Across the surface a series of gestural marks in charcoal dance. A variety of sweeping curves and heavier, angular lines, they tell of place, memory, and learning. To the right, a lighter, fluid shape, river-like in its unfixed margins, is in contrast to the directional lines radiating from a central point, on the left.

From the centre point, two smudged circles on either side anchor the picture plane and indicate where McGrady and O’Leary have previously sat, two figures of and reading place. And as they do so, with lighting by Jason James, their silhouettes cast onto the canvas add soft strokes to the living drawing, in the perpetual shift of place meets map meets dance meets drawing. “Through the body and onto canvas, [they are tracing] a dialogue between spirit and land—a mapping of place both seen and felt.”[2] When McGrady and O’Leary stand and begin to rotate in their respective circles, a pleasing crackling noise builds an audible layer. Underfoot, charcoal snaps into shards and shades the soles of their feet. They have not so much become the drawing, rather they are a rendering of how nutrients travel through a tree, wisdom, through gesture, and how knowledge is passed, embedded, and understood. Later drawing with the sticks of charcoal, in a quiet meditation, the presented visual, laced with meaning, is so rich that my earlier sensation of having wished to see the drawing from the beginning slips away.[3] As O’Leary traces the straight lines, back and forth with an extended foot, the lines become darker yet less pronounced as the edges are smudged, and McGrady curls her form into the sinuous shape of a river. The physical and the felt, side by side, residue of the charcoal serves as a metaphor for the aftermath of cultural burning and the regeneration and renewal which follows.