In my poem The Future, which I perform in my solo Dancing with Strangers (Marrugeku 2018), I write:
The future is a place where we reside
in dreams corresponding
possibilities, notes unheard
seeping out of recesses (of our mind)
In this phrase I am alluding to the fact that there was a time when we were not colonised and when we lived very different lives as Aboriginal people. Now we have an interesting relationship with ourselves, our past societies, and to contemporary Aboriginal and western societies as a whole.
These time scales are imaginary and it is through our imagination that we can think of alternative possibilities to current cycles of dysfunction and dislocation in our communities. Our generation is interacting more and more with the idea of decolonization, interpreting this word in many different ways and using it for survival. It can mean a diversity of things for distinct Aboriginal peoples. What is understood as colonised is viewed through many different lenses and judged according to that individual or community.
Reimagining black futures and pasts and what we can do to make these into new realities is necessary at this time, especially with the looming threat of global warming. I think that sometimes we can get caught inside the trap of imagining that our choices are dictated by what we imagine to be real.
Decolonisation is deconstructing our understanding of the choices we have to make, and making them.
Artist statement from the rehearsal process of Le Dernier Appel/The Last Call, a new dance work co-created in New Caledonia and Australia in response to questions arising from the New Caledonian 2018 referendum on independence from France and Australia’s ongoing debates over constitutional recognition and treaty.
How can we embody the possibilities/impossibilities of decolonisation through dance?
Colonisation has defined us. To undo the past is impossible, Decolonisation is at once both a necessary goal and at the same time a false one. Instead we embrace ways of knowing that emerge from instability, unexpected reconfigurations, disruption, and the revaluing of old and new knowledges.
Inspired by the questions arising out of the New Caledonian referendum on independence from France and Australia’s debates over treaty and constitutional recognition, we ask ourselves how we, as artists and citizens, can recuperate in the aftermaths of colonisation and move forward.
Behind us are histories of invasion, migration, war, displacement, and also adaptation, transformation, and transmission. In front of us governments replicate new systems of control. While they debate the conditions for us to vote on independence or treaty, we wait… We wait in states of instability, confusion, tolerance, and frustration.
Ahead of us are living continuities, new realities that are multiple, complex, at once local and global. We face the deconstruction or collapse of old systems that define us and bind us, we gain new vulnerabilities and the possibility to lose and re-define our way.
Le Dernier Appel asks how these possibilities/impossibilities of decolonisation can disturb and regenerate dance in the Asia Pacific region, embracing reconfigurations of power and the transmission of old and new knowledges.