Dione.Joseph

Aboriginal Australia is one of the oldest living cultures on our planet today with over 60,000 years of history. Unfortunately, during the last 200 years this culture has suffered the onslaught of colonialism with a barrage of horrors that has not only dramatically reduced the Indigenous population, destroyed numerous languages and torn apart communities; but has also had an unprecedented impact on the production and recognition of Aboriginal art across all its mediums. Today contemporary Aboriginal Australian performance is often seen as a hybridized art form. Honouring the traditional aesthetic of this ancient culture and its strong emphasis on ritual, myth, story, song and dance, contemporary Aboriginal artists work towards articulating a new intercultural language that engages the past, whilst simultaneously looking towards the future. Through research conducted over the past three years there have been several patterns emerging as to how different contemporary Aboriginal artists and companies express their work at a local, national and international level. Accordingly, this research presents how three different artistic productions present their own particular inter-cultural engagement. The productions chosen are as follows: of Earth and Sky, a dance-theatre production produced by Australia’s foremost Indigenous dance theatre company Bangarra; Jack Charles vs. the Crown, a political revue devised production produced by Victorian state theatre Ilbijerri; and finally Namatjira, a community based theatrical production on the life of Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira, produced by Big hART. Through a close analysis of these three shows, this research hopes to offer the global theatre community a quintessential glimpse into how traditional aesthetic forms along with cultural and historical associations inspire dynamic modern works of artistic merit.

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