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Abstract
Australia’s brutal carceral-border regime is a colonial system of intertwining systems of oppression that combine the prison-industrial complex and the border-industrial complex. It is a violent and multidimensional regime that includes an expanding prison industry and onshore and offshore immigration detention centres; locations of cruelty, and violent sites for staging contemporary politics and coloniality. This article shares insights into the making of a radical intersectional dance theatre work titled Jurrungu Ngan-ga by Marrugeku, Australia’s leading Indigenous and intercultural dance theatre company. The production, created between 2019–2021, brings together collaborations through and across Indigenous Australian, Kurdish, Iranian, Palestinian, Filipino, Filipinx, and Anglo settler performance, activism and knowledge production. The artistic, political and intellectual dimensions of the show reinforce each other to interrogate Australia’s brutal carceral regime and the concept of the border itself. The article is presented in a polyphonic structure of expanded interviews with the cast and descriptions of the resulting live performance. It identifies radical ways that intersectional and trans-disciplinary performances can, as an ‘act of liberation’, be applied to make visible, embody, address, and help dismantle systems of oppression, control and subjugation.
Highlights
Humanities 2022, 11, 28 below in Boxes 1–3) we aim to demonstrate an Indigenous-intersectional reclamation and re-mapping of the concept of ‘boundary’ as a site of care, responsibility, and negotiation
I noticed in your performances there is this kind of jittery, agitated physicality or response
When I started training in contemporary dance I was learning contemporary Western techniques without any knowledge or any interest in learning about traditional Filipino dance or any other forms such as Indigenous dance
Summary
In April 2021, Australia’s leading Indigenous-intercultural dance theatre company, Marrugeku, presented a community preview of its latest work Jurrungu Ngan-ga to audiences in the small remote town of Broome, north Western Australia. This is performed and staged in Jurrungu Ngan-ga through choreopolitical acts of resistance, survivance and straight talking To undertake this ‘act of liberation’ Marrugeku’s co-artistic directors: Yawuru/Bardi dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram and settler director Rachael Swain, together with the wider artistic and cultural team have applied Marrugeku’s improvisational dance theatre processes to investigate two key source texts. With its trans-disciplinary language of installation and real-time security camera footage; its costume design of ‘immigration basics’ and ‘corporation state’ and choreography channeling fear, denial under pressure, brutality, and theatricalised moments of listening and straight talking, Jurrungu Ngan-ga embodies and foregrounds the sites, bodies and voices of multiple marginalised communities This trans-disciplinary and intersectional expressionism is key for exposing Australia’s carceral fetish and creates visions and strategies for abolition.
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