Burrbgaja Yalirra 2 is an epic dance narrative of indigenous Australian and South Pacific peoples, and the ancient and mystical elements which inform the glorious Present.
This is a Tempo Dance Festival 2024 presentation, this special performance representing the First World indigenous tribes and beyond, from Marrugeku dance company in Australia. Based in the remote town of Broome, Western Australia and urban Sydney.
The trilogy begins with No New Gods and a bewitching performance from Filipino Bhenji Ra.
She has the appearance of a demigod or demon, a werewolf who moves with bold aggression and conversely timid and seeking to hide. Long hair and strikingly made up, wielding stick spears
The dance is an invocation to the legend of Bakunawa, a serpent who swallowed the moon, and caused earthquakes, volcanoes, and wind and rain.
The natural phenomena of the planet billions of years before humans came along. Therefore, the essential nature of the planet, and humans needed Gods and spirits to explain its fury.
Until they abandoned the spiritual to the industrial and technological age. Your God has gone away (Sex Pistols). Nothing left but the recordings (William Burroughs).
Descends to stupidity when you wage war on carbon and cows.
This is a ferocious invocation balanced by a good old-fashioned haunting of the space.
Ra finishes this piece holding a huge black bull’s head, instantly reminding us of the conclusion to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The horror, the horror…
Bloodlines announces itself with shouts and yells off stage, as two Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer characters arrive on stage, accompanied by Reggae and sunshine music.
Straw hats, labourers kit, callused hands (imagined) and wide grins.
Clowning and swaggering, these two have physiques honed by hard manual labour and exposure to the elements.
Ses Bero (Torres Straits, Broome) and Stanley Nalo (Vanuatu/ Papua New Guinea) appear to be happy-go-lucky Blackbirders.
The practice of indentured slave labour to supply the huge plantations, primarily sugar cane, through Queensland to Fiji toward Tahiti and Hawaii, and finally to Central America.
Indigenous people drawn from Aboriginal tribes, Solomons, Papua New Guinea hill tribes, and of course the Indian and Chinese Coolies.
The mix of old cultures intermingling birthed a hybrid melting pot. Reggae was drawing roots from Old Abyssinia more than Ethiopia.
Dance and movement are a hybrid language as performed tonight. Whilst one cuts the sugarcane, the other enters an altered state where the body spasms, fits, and contorts to unseen dark forces.
The history of slavery is played out in the unwinding tape of memory and corporeal body.
Nyuju is an homage from performance artist Emmanuel James Brown (Fitzroy Crossing), for his great-grandmother Nyuju Stumpy Brown, who was one of the last Nomads to walk out of the Great Sandy Desert.
She was a renown Wangkatjunka artist, and her fierce spirit is the dance of Nyulu.
The performance is the narrative of sixty millennia inhabiting the land, and the deep connection to a vast continent.
Brown speaks in sad incantations. You have to eat, you work, get pissed, get happy. No work, can’t feed yourself, get pissed, feel sad.
Aboriginal tribes, who understood time is not linear but at the apex of past and future, saw the colonisation of the European as the prophesised time of degradation. Of the human spirit.
Brown dances like a bird. Several times he breaks out some JB hardest working man in show-bizz moves.
Paints himself white stripes (luminescent under stage lighting) and he is the shaman, the healer.
The dark foreboding of King Heroin James Brown remains ever-present.
It is a compelling extended dance from a performer who appears to move effortlessly, as if he is channelling ancient spirits.
Burrbgaja Yalirra 2 delivers an emotional and visceral gut punch. Especially as it taps recent Australian cinema, The Nightingale and Sweet Country, cathartic experiences.
Rev. Orange Peel