‘This is my country! This is my country.?’: Stalker Theatre Company's Incognita and the auto-ethnographic turn in post-dramatic, site-based Australian theatre

Abstract

Stalker Theatre Company is a Sydney-based company renowned for the production and execution of spectacular outdoor performances. Stalker claims to create ‘a theatre of dimension’ (Stalker website) in which the large scale and heightened physicality of performance reflects the monumentality of the Australian landscape and its impact on the Indigenous and non-Indigenous inhabitants of the country. Described as ‘structural and physical, a blend of acrobatics and architecture’, Stalker performances are ‘at times site specific yet always outside the confines of a traditional theatre environment’ (Stalker website). Stalker's site-based performances1 encourage ‘audiences to consider the lay [sic] of the land… as an integral part of any theatrical moment’ (Stalker website). Stalker's Incognita premiered in 2003 and tackled the considerable problem of belonging to place in a contemporary Australian geo-political context. This conundrum is succinctly expressed by Australian historian, Peter Read: ‘How can we non-Indigenous Australians justify our continuous presence and our love for this country while the Indigenous people remain dispossessed and their history unacknowledged?’ (Read 2000: 1). This article explores the ways in which the site of performance, itself, figures in the expression of a sense of place overwhelmed by a legacy of invasion, dispossession and occupation. The discussion is in three parts: the first introduces the work of Stalker and examines the genesis of Incognita; the second describes and analyses the performance; the third engages with matters of site, place, belonging and performance.