TG I remember the very first paper I ever gave and it was 15 years ago: and it was a contemporary dance conference. The theme of the conference was In Time Together: Temporality and Contemporary Dance. I was teaching at NAISDA, which is our national training organisation for developing performing artists and young cultural provocateurs. The paper was called Dancing the Dreaming and it was really about Blakfulla time: what it is for mob to be coming from community suddenly up to the big smoke and having to suddenly work on that 9–5 and the corrosion points that arose out of that.
I found that paper again just recently and it was amazing to me how the things that I was thinking about 15 years ago; I’m only just actually realising myself now in a real way. Even then I was talking about, ‘If you really want to experience the Dreaming, you have to go back to Country’. Or I would say, ‘Well, how does the Dreaming inform your movement choices?’ One of the students was young Anthony Mayo, an amazing young cultural man from Thursday Island and he said, ‘I really don’t like this idea that people say our dancing is raw, that we’re so raw, we’re just so organic’. He said, ‘Mate, we’re well cooked.’ He said, ‘We’ve been cooking for ages’, and it was the most profound thing he said, because things are given the time that they need to get where they’re supposed to be.
And so, for me, I’ve started working, probably the last five years, a lot more with durational works because I grew up trained in Western styles of dancing … the only real traditional dancing, if you could even call it that, would be when my nana in a trauma moment remembering things. You wouldn’t be dared to ask, ‘What’s that step mean?’ or ‘What’s that for?’ And so, coming through the Western ways and then reclaiming my Indigeneity in my early 20s, it really made me start to think about how much I had been marching to the beat of a Western drum in the movement choices I was making, for like that sense of downbeat that you march on the count and that’s it; there’s nothing in between.
BDRS Like counting in 8s — a lot of our songs are not like that. I used to struggle counting and being consistent with an 8 count, for example, where I would hear the music and so I’d be counting — it wouldn’t even be an 8. I’ll just be singing my own rhythm while I’m creating or dancing in whatever project that I’m in. It’s this fight, the struggle between the two.
TG The body remembers all of these things about the circadian rhythms and the natural time and all that; you know, the sun goes down, you’re probably going to start getting a bit tired. The system’s already here; we tried to come in and do something different with it. I’m really interested in how that plays when we choreograph and when we’re playing with the different rhythms that we’ll pick up on in our music.
I’m just wondering if your connection to Ancient Time, which we have as First Peoples, obviously it informs the philosophy and the anchoring, but does it actually translate in terms of choreography? Is that a different sense of rhythmic time born out of a relationship to Country or is it just we’re hearing different things? I used to say, when we were talking about songlines, ‘Each of us is just one string in a strum of a chord of a song’ and all of them strings coming up against each other, they all affect each other. It’s always that knock on effect, those hula hoops: you can jump from one onto their little songline for a bit and then catch another one and it’s the spirals. How does it inform your choreographic practice?
