Keynote address for the 6th Australian Circus and Physical Theatre Conference - Geelong 2005 by Rachel Swain

Towards a paper on circus and physical theatre and Australian identity
I have been asked to give a paper about the “contribution of physical theatre to Australian national identity”

I would like to begin by accepting that contribution as a given, we do , we are… we all know the arguments… something to do physical theatre in Oz being the wayward child of a mutant national sport fetish, an expression of wide open space through which we believe we can fly, and perhaps even an understanding that here, in our postcolonial disorientation we are looking for other, more dangerous ways of expressing the hybrid, multi layered and complex Stories we have to tell about ourselves and our troubled relationship to our colonial ghosts.

So…. By way of moving on from this premise, that I think we here all have some sense of, I’d like to make some reflections on the contemporary physical performance in Australia that I dream of… some reflections drawn from the artists and companies whose work inspires me in Europe, from our current work in Marrugeku as well as some reflections of how physical theatre and circus might go about provoking a more nuanced national identity than the current nationalist and mainstream agenda we are facing in this country.

I dream of a Physical theatre in Australia that is Intercultural, experimental, interdisciplinary, poetic, dangerous (in form and expression, not safety) hybrid, private, intuitive, radical, rude, sexy, solicitoious, intimate, raw enigmatic and above all fuelled by imagination, desire and a politic that grows out of lived experience of place.

Physical theatre is not just a question of athletic performance or complex gymnastics in the space where a narrative might have been, it is rather a collection of ‘indicative signs’, replacing or supplementing the purely verbal for which we all too quickly and easily reach.

I am going to to discusses some of the attributes I have just listed as provocation for physical theatre in Australia.

So I have dreamt of a Physical performance that is political but what could political theatre mean now in a new century and how does it relate to art practice?

Romeo Castellucci one of my all time favourite theatre makers has said-

This fact that theatre creates a community is also about politics in theatre. Politics in its primary political sense–the idea of politics in the individual. It creates this need in the individuals. Here is how theatre can once more be a dangerous art. And from this point of view theatre must be a dangerous art.

When I talk about danger, I talk about tearing apart the law that governs that language as we know it. Language we belong to but language that keeps us prisoners. I believe we can push further.

Contemporary theatre becomes political where it succeeds to disturb the system and to create an exception, but not outside of the artwork, from inside of the art, radically questioning old rules and re-inventing the medium.

To quote my good friend dramaturge Marijke Hoogenboom in Amsterdam:

"Politics suggest that we have to live in an age of certainty. But certainty is dangerous, for it is quick to discard, what is not immediately useful. Arts and culture are especially occupied with uncertainty, failure, unconsciousness and imagination and exercise a democratic society, where you are not only talking to your friends, but also to the people we do not agree with.

There is no doubt that the great times of political, or socio-realistic theatre in Western Europe are over. No more enlightenment, no more unified line of thought, or modernist belief in the general evolutionary progress and rational control. But on the threshold of a global society, contemporary theatre is not at all suggesting that art should be an exclusive and private practice. Quite the contrary is true. Artists turned crisis into change and developed new and very different ideas of their political or social responsibility."

“Making art”, said the writer Joseph Brodsky, “is not an attempt to escape reality, but rather the opposite. It is an attempt to bring reality to life.”
In the work of the Belgian company Les ballets C de la B I find a great example of artists combining a variety of physical disciplines to create new forms of political performance.

Les ballets' work is testament to the fact that a radical combination of dance, street arts, circus and theatre can be used as a political wake up call. The work of the company uses astonishing, colossal vision and startling ingenuity to answer the question "how can dance theatre be used to reflect the current political situation"

The bold productions of Ballets C de la B combine a variety of artistic disciplines with actor-dancers and acrobats from diverse backgrounds. Founded in 1984 by Alain Platel, this socially committed troupe has dedicated itself to breaking down the barriers between dance, theatre, music circus and street arts. Platel defines himself as a catalyst who creates images and organizes the ideas of his performers, which reflect and embody contemporary society.

One of my favourite quotes from Alain where he is refusing to be defined as dance or theatre he says:

Performances arise mainly out of non spoken theatrical improvisation. It can sometimes lead to people dancing.

Often set in urban environments a frenetic tangle of seemingly random events: a man allows bowling balls to rain down on his taut stomach; another sports gloves of fire; circus entertainers or asylum inmates are bruised and battered while nine classical musicians perform music by Bach. The unclassifiable works of Les Ballets C de la B feature dancers with both classical and contemporary training, as well as children, fairground performers, and amateurs who Alan finds on the streets or at parties with no theatrical experience whatsoever.

And inspired by the work of Les Ballets I imagine a physical performance for Australia that is also private, intimate and somehow very real.

The idea that acting is a re-presentation of a reality is not the concept of these actors from Les ballets. They present themselves almost privately and show how they move in and out of their roles. Since they do not wish to portray psycho-‘naturalistic’ characters, or to fill a section with emotion - more abstract and musical methods have a greater impact on the staging: the rhythm of the language, the timing of events, the physical use of the body etc.

And Again from Marijke:

Contemporary notions, like multidisciplinarity, process and experience radically explore A private investment of performers and artists that make very clear that it is vital to show from which particular part of the world we come and what haunts us. Far beyond an individual exercise, it is exactly this privacy that enables theatre makers to re-claim reality and to re-enter an arena where to investigate political ethics in the early days of this century.

Director of British company forced entertainment Tim etchels uses the term Investment: "Investment is what happens when the performers before us seem bound up unspeakably with what they are doing, to be at risk in it, to be exposed by it, they lay their bodies on the line... It seems to matter to them, it appears to hurt them or threatens to pleasure them, it seems to touch them in some quiet and terrible way."

I imagine a physical performance that is disorienting and re orienting, that questions our past in order to re identify our future

For those of you who know my work it’s the meetings of forms and cultures that interests me, the collision of approaches to narrative and meaning, and the confusions thrown up… the disorientations and reorientations which occur in the process of telling a story together in an Australian context.

I’m interested in what kinds of ‘active listening’ have to occur for this kind of intercultural and interdisciplinary physical performance to come forth, that is, listening in the form of rehearsal process, community consultation, choreographic methodology and a relationship with the community based audience. What kinds of listening might this demand from audiences, where narratives are produced which conceal as well as reveal meaning, where polysemic, or multi layered, story structures abound and where ghosts are stirred but not laid to rest?

What does this ‘theatre making as listening’; reflecting a private and individual lived experience of place, have to say to the future of physical performance in Australia but also to contemporary Australian multicultural experience and to reconciliation?

In their excellent book Uncanny Australia Gelder and Jacobs asks how familiar is Australia with its own ghosts?

Who ‘smiles’ at them and who ‘worries’ about them? This is a question of particular relevance to a nation which is involved, as Australia is, in an officially sanctioned process of reconciliation. Reconciliation is a policy which intends to bring the nation into contact with the ghosts of its past, restructuring the nation’s sense of itself by returning the grim truth of colonisation to the story of Australia’s being–in–the-world. But it is not surprising that, rather than laying things to rest, these ghosts (and the past is always ghostly here) in fact set a whole range of things into motion: arguments over land, debates over the ‘proper’ history for Australia, the bother about compensation and saying ‘sorry’ (and whether these things would settle the past down, or whether they would unleash it to the extent that the sayer-think Prime Minister John Howard here-feels he would be subjected to a multitude of claims from which the country may never recover).

In our work in the collaborative indigenous/non indigenous laboratory that is Marrugeku we have been absorbed with finding new forms and processes as well as appropriate structures for performance in a post colonial Australian context. The experimental rehearsal process is concerned with finding ways to tell the very particular kinds of multi layered, intercultural, or the ghost narratives which haunt this country and our experience.

For a while I have been wondering what is the artistic equivalent of culture shock might be, because this is the effect I often try and reach in my rehearsal processes. I am interested in creating environments where we my self, my collaborators and especially the devising performers enter territory which is foreign for them, culturally or artistically where they are disoriented and where they are required to place what they know and who they are in the context of a new set of givens. It’s the moving backwards and forwards between the known and the unknown which creates the space where the ghosts can be heard. This is where we learn about ourselves, the half buried narratives of our country and this is where unexpected discoveries can be made. Its where the work we are making allows us to discover it.

Again from Uncanny Australia, where a range of unsettled, uncanny and unresolved positions in a postcolonial understanding of Australian Identity are considered:

We have used the uncanny in this book to elaborate a modern Australian condition where what is ‘ours’ may also be ‘theirs’, and vice versa: where difference and ‘reconciliation’ co-exist uneasily. In an uncanny Australia, one’s place is always another’s place and the issue of possession is never complete, never entirely settled. The conventional colonial distinctions between self and other, here and there, mine and yours, are now by no means totally determinable; a certain unboundedness occurs whereby one inhabits the other, at one point, disentangles itself at another, inhabits it again, and so on, in a relationship we have designated as soliciting. (Gelder and Jacobs 1998:138)

I would like to imagine an Australian Physical performance that is solicitous, promiscuous, dancing in that unsettled and uncanny place outside the definitions of the mainstream, listening to our ghosts and finding new voices.

In his dramaturgical notes on Stalker’s last large scale production Incognita the dramaturge and historian Paul Carter said:

The shape of Incognita is the peculiar reward of its hybrid genre. Only a physical, rather than psychological, theatre can make a story of repeated, thwarted beginnings. For, in essence, the movement grammar informing Incognita consists of two physical gestures: coming towards and going away, the opening up or the closing off of human relations – the two primary modalities of life which, in Australia, are also written into its geography and its history.
Reconciliation here does not have a date attached to it. It is a condition of relating differently, and it incorporates into its movement the counter-history of forgetting and stumbling in the darkness. Here momentary balance signifies a history of unbalance; and the resolution of unbalance is not standing alone, but learning to move, to lean, to incline towards another. So in the end it is as at the beginning, but in the angle the two halves make with each other, leaning together, falling apart, all is changed.

In Australia when we consider our history and founding stories we come up against a kind of amnesia…an institutionalised, government assisted amnesia which I think has a profound effect on the kind of narratives which have the potency to inform performance making in this country. Narratives which you can’t see if you look too directly for them, which may be paradoxical or ambiguous, which may ask non indigenous Australians to consider a different way of being with country, or place, with belonging and with who we think we are.

I dream of a physical performance which is ambiguous, which demands new dramaturgical structures reflecting other relationships with place and time.

Perception has radically changed and challenges performance artists to operate beyond the powerful tradition of European drama and theatre. When creating their work, they intuitively choose entirely different criteria than the Aristotelian unity of time, space and action. The old paradigms hardly serve to speak of what it feels to live in a world of second, third and fourth hand experience. Of CNN and late-night television, of half-remembered stories, the search for identity and the need to confess.

-One of the fundamental characteristics of new theatrical approaches is the choice of a process-oriented method of working where the execution of a well-defined dramaturgical concept is condemned to be “the death of all theatre”, as the East-German writer Heiner Müller stated. The meaning, the intentions, the form and the substance of a play arise during the work-in-progress, so that performances often consist of a collage of material, texts, images, sounds, movements and motives, full of personal stories and memories, rather a public reflection, or a theatrical essay on themes, ideas, concerns, than a dramatic play.

The emphasis lies on an open structure, on intuition, chance, dream, accident and impulse, all those moments of creation that can't be fully controlled. Not what is, is important, but what has to become. “I don’t make it up”, admits Jan Lauwers from the Flemish Needcompany, “it happens.”

And Tim Etchells again:

"It is also a process which refuses to know, at the outset, what it is looking for. Remaining, rather, a journey undertaken, in which the territory unfolds, as much of a surprise to us as it may be to anyone else. We say without hesitation that it takes us time to find out what a certain piece of work might mean or even be concerned with, and that this discovery, if it comes at all, is made by doing - making, talking, touring - a discovery based on risk and uncertainty, not
by our adherence to a plan. At best, we say, the work is ahead of our thinking."

In fact, this way of working is based on the conviction that the world and life do not offer up their ‘meaning’ just like that; perhaps they have no meaning, and the making of a play may then be considered as the quest for possible understanding. Dramaturgy is no longer a way to bring out the interpretation of a play, but a provisional or possible arrangement which the artist imposes on those elements he gathers from a reality that appears to him chaotic. In this view of life, causality and linearity lose their value, storyline and psychology are put at risk and there is no longer a hierarchy amongst the artistic means…

So, what kinds of physical performance might this all breed? This political art as personal or private, this performance making process which ‘happens’ or reveals itself to us in the making, this dramaturgy as disorientation, this meaning as enigmatic?

I’ll talk to you a little now about the new Marrugeku work we have in development called Burning Daylight.

In contrast to our earlier work in Arnhem land with its focus on the issues facing Kunwinjku elders the current work Burning Daylight is being developed in Broome, Western Australia with a focus on the experiences young ‘mixed breed’ Broome locals (local lingo) .

Burning Daylight is seeking to move beyond the rigid binary of traditional/contemporary that is mapped onto Indigenous Australians, centrally through the opposition of remote vs urban. This binary presents young Indigenous Australians with a double bind: to choose is to loose. Nowhere is this more evident than in a place like Broome, which is, we believe, unique in its negotiation of Aboriginal identity. As a result of the pearling industry and the dynamic of Anglo, Malay, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese and Aboriginal influences on the cultures and histories of Broome, many local Aboriginal people have 'mongrel' identities, (Broome lingo). Burning Daylight sets out explore these identities, these potentials, without presenting a reductive model of 'choice'.

Burning Daylight is drawing upon popular mainstream forms such as the Western and ‘Noodle Western’, karaoke, hip-hop and rap, not simply because these are easy generic entry points for the audience, but because globalisation has made these forms available and attractive to young audiences all around the world, including Aboriginal Broome. Rather than offering a utopian notion of a return to indigenous identity, we are investigating ways in which the local exists in a dynamic relationship with the global. The project takes inspiration from journalistic descriptions of the bar scene in Broome around the turn of the last century where it is described as an ‘Asian Wild West’. Inspired also by the ‘constructed’ or ‘painted world’ and the genre bending of the filmic and photographic style of Tracey Moffatt, Burning Daylight takes place on a site which is part noodle western set, part contemporary remote town transit zone.

The performance begins outside a notorious pub on a Broome-style Karaoke night. A series of contemporary physical performance scenes express the friction and cultural collision in the streets at night in the part of Broome known as ‘The Bronx’. Drawing on the Noodle western we are able to 'shadow' the onstage performers with historic Broome personages (such as the pearl diver, geisha, Aboriginal stockman) as well as archival political and cultural material. Thus each live performer on stage has a ‘ghost' or 'double' on screen. The short videos will explore classic interracial narrative tropes against the backdrop of the White Australia policy deportations, forced removals and internship of the Japanese during the 2nd World War.

In the creation of a contemporary physical performance language for Broome we face the impact of The high number of forced removals in Broome and the Kimberley area and the resulting loss of many traditional songs, dances and stories. In the face of this our process has become a search for a ‘mixed breed’ movement language that draws on the multiple indigenous and Asian influences and their memories of movement forms which may be now lost. We are workshopping the development of a ‘contemporary Indigenous/Asian dance language’ woven together with Marrugeku’s acrobatic form and process to reflect Broome in its contradictions, richness and friction.

The cast of eight Aboriginal, whitefella, Malay/Aboriginal and Japanese performers have contributed immensely from their own movement traditions and cultural and personal perspectives as well as their lived experience of an intercultural working method. The project is being co choreographed by Dalisa Pigram from Broome and Serge Aimé Coulibaly from Burkina Faso in West Africa. Serge has been a member of Les ballets C de la B in Belgium for the past 4 years.

The development of Burning Daylight has grown out of a very different set of issues and relationships to country than Marrugeku’s previous productions in Arnhem Land. This relationship to country and history is steeped in loss, removal, deportation and the ghostly presence of multiple cultural traditions and stories. Listening to country and stories in Broome, has taken the form of listening for multiple memories and multiple losses, it requires understanding haunting as a very particular way of knowing, and memory of tradition as a valid and important place to create from as an artist.

In a discussion of the work of Australian visual Artist Tracy Moffatt, Régis Durand states:

One of the most remarkable things in her work is the condensation between the various temporal strata brought into play by memories, dreams and fantasies, between which she shifts back and forth with no respect for chronology. The work is anachronous, floating between memories of different times and natures; memories of lived experience, whether physical or cultural (memories of places, films and music which have meant something to her); collective memories which over determine social relations in any given situation; imaginary memories of adopted or appropriated identities.

And in an interview by Gerald Matt, Tracy her self says:

"I think all my imagery comes from my subconscious, from dreams. I am not talking about when I dream at night ( these are far to weird and sick) but the dreams I have when I am awake. We can dream with our eyes open. This is why I have been hesitant to be written about as a social commentator. I think my work is very dream like".

If the emerging possibilities of a contemporary intercultural physical performance were to encompass a process of ‘dreaming with our eyes open, and of listening differently,… that is listening for stories which are never fully told, where the order of meaning came from a perception of several parallel times and universes grounded in place and memory then we may have begun to unfold some definition of appropriate dramaturgies for this kind of work.

So I dream of a contemporary intercultural physical performance that is enigmatic…. accepting multiplicity of readings and uncertainty of resolution as the nature of this project exploring a fluctuating contemporary reality that forfeits closure and a refusal to nominate a single meaning for the work.

Speaking of enigma in Moffatt's work Durand says:

But the enigma implies something hidden, in Tracey Moffatt’s work, as indeed in many supposedly enigmatic situations or representations one must nonetheless accept the idea that everything is there, visible.
And as we communicate in a language that is visual, and physical if we consider this idea of the enigmatic, that ‘everything is there visible’, yet hidden, in notions of what contemporary post colonial physical performance in Australia could be, we come to an approach to narrative that is polysemic, where stories mean one thing and another at the same time… and it is precisely this floating and ‘feelingful’ approach to meaning which constitutes its strangeness or enigma and its wealth.

Such a physical performance has the potential to give the emerging narratives a restorative value, asking audiences to ‘listen differently’ and placing this understanding in the context of our national experience.

Rachael Swain
Artistic Director Stalker Blue
Artistic Director Marrugeku
April 2005