BlakForm

Garabari

by Joel Bray Dance, Wiradjuri

Garabari means Corroboree in Wiradjuri and will be a large-scale new work by Wiradjuri choreographer Joel Bray in co-production with CHUNKY MOVE, Victoria’s leading contemporary dance company. The Wiradjuri are called The People of the Three Rivers and Garabari will be a contemporary Corroboree celebrating rivers as the veins of Country and as the ancient songlines and trade routes that have always connected the many Peoples of this continent. The work will be developed over a series of creative developments in Melbourne and out on Wiradjuri Country.

“This work has been appearing in my dreams. Sometimes it is a series of pilgrimages through manicured gardens, sometimes it is a massive rave in a warehouse, sometimes it is a collection of canoes on the river with the audience watching from the riverbank. Sometimes it is on the stage. Perhaps it will happen in all of these places.“ - Joel Bray

Garabari is supported through the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund - an Australian Government initiative, the Australian Government through the Indigenous Languages and Arts program and through Creative Australia, the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, BlakDance through BlakForm, the Besen Family Foundation, and Eastern Riverina Arts.

Garabari was commissioned by Chunky Move with the support of the Tanja Liedtke Foundation through the Chunky Move Choreographer In Residence program.

The Reckoning

Image credit Emma Fishwick

by Joshua Pether Projects, Kalkadoon 

The Reckoning is a durational performance ritual drawing upon the knowledges locked within the performer’s own body that are the result of our traumatic past history and this drives and moves the performance. Audiences are invited to ‘witness’ this event unfold whilst also allowing a sense of contemplation to occur in relation to our bloody and colonial history. At the heart of the reckoning is an understanding that we must acknowledge our traumatic past as a country and also create a way to move forward. The Reckoning also becomes a site specific work that will be performed across various sites of historical interest where past traumatic events have occurred. 

The Reckoning is funded by Australia Council through Signature Works initiative. The Reckoning is supported by PICA and BlakDance, through BlakForm. BlakForm is funded through Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government initiative.

Garabari

by Joel Bray Dance, Wiradjuri

Garabari means Corroboree in Wiradjuri and will be a large-scale new work by Wiradjuri choreographer Joel Bray in co-production with CHUNKY MOVE, Victoria’s leading contemporary dance company. The Wiradjuri are called The People of the Three Rivers and Garabari will be a contemporary Corroboree celebrating rivers as the veins of Country and as the ancient songlines and trade routes that have always connected the many Peoples of this continent. The work will be developed over a series of creative developments in Melbourne and out on Wiradjuri Country.

“This work has been appearing in my dreams. Sometimes it is a series of pilgrimages through manicured gardens, sometimes it is a massive rave in a warehouse, sometimes it is a collection of canoes on the river with the audience watching from the riverbank. Sometimes it is on the stage. Perhaps it will happen in all of these places.“ - Joel Bray

Garabari is funded by Australia Council through Signature Works initiative. Garabari is supported by BlakDance, through BlakForm. BlakForm is funded through Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government initiative.

Considerable Sexual Licence

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by Joel Bray Dance, Wiradjuri 

Date Premiered: May 2021
Presenting/host partner: Northcote Town Hall and, Yirramboi Festival
Location: Melbourne 

A queer pop caberet immersive audience experience that reimagines the sexual ecology that might have existed on this continent before the Coloniser. Considerable Sexual Licence brings together four award winning performers. Proud Wiradjuri man Joel Bray and a talented team of collaborators including Carly Sheppard, Dan Newell and Niharika Senepati come together for a flirty, occasionally filthy and deeply passionate look at the true history of sensuality ‘down under’.

Considerable Sexual License is a playful invitation to explore your own history and relationship to sex, sexuality and personal freedom, and a celebration of Country, community, consent and kinship.

Through painstaking research and personal reflection, the team delve deep into the deliberately misrepresented practices of ceremony to reimagine the songs, dances, partying and perhaps something a little sexier. 

Considerable Sexual License was created with development support from Creative Spaces, PACT and Lucy Guerin Inc. YIRRAMBOI Festival, Australia Council for the Arts, Arts House, Creative Victoria and Chunky Move. Considerable Sexual Licence is supported by BlakDance, through BlakForm. BlakForm is funded through Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government initiative.

Weredingo

Weredingo is the fifth full-length work by Karul Projects, the Queensland-based First Nations contemporary dance company led by Thomas E.S. Kelly (Minjungbal-Yugambeh, Wiradjuri an Ni-Vanuatu), and Taree Sansbury (Kaurna, Narrunga and Ngarrindjeri). The work premiere at Brisbane Festival 2021.

Image Credit: Mick Richards

Image Credit: Mick Richards

Choreographers Thomas E.S. Kelly and Taree Sansbury started a multifaceted approach to the subject of shape-shifting four years ago, commencing with a mockumentary and performance in Sydney at PACT, which interviewed people who revealed that they have other, animal selves.

The first development ‘conjured everyday fantasies of transformation and then moved on to something more serious: dance performance imbued, at first impressionistically and then quite specifically, with First Nations cultural shapeshifting’. Keith Gallasch REALTIME.

Over the next few years, the creative developments took place back on Karul’s homelands, as the company relocated back to the Gold Coast (2018). 

Further creative developments began to further explore the work from a narrative and text based perspective. The original pitch to Brisbane Festival was that the work would be mostly text based theatre, of which this has undergone its own shapeshifting journey to now include animations and projections by Studio Gilay (who animated Cooked) shot at Wirrim Studio on the Gold Coast.

Lighting and production is being done by an all Indigenous team: Chloe Ogilvie (trained by Mark Howett) has managed to safely cross borders from WA and is plotting the lighting now, dramaturgy is happening largely over zoom with highly accomplished director, actor and playwright Isaac Drandic (who worked on Jacob Boehme’s Blood on the Dance Floor) and Mamu man Simon Cook holds the ship steady as the BlakDance Production Manager.

Add in sound design by Sam Pankhurst and lifelike animal costumes by the talented Selene Cochrane and the work boasts incredible production values and high quality design. A surprising addition to the cast is Grayson Millwood from The Farm (Throttle).

Weredingo was the first of BlakDance’s produced works to undertake a new model for feedback on a work in development through BlakForm. The Critical Response Process (CRP) was a facilitated process that allowed the makers to question their work in open dialogues with industry and community leaders. We were delighted to undertake this initiative earlier this year with Joyce Rosario, a first-generation Canadian of Filipina descent, privileged to live on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. 

Brisbane Festival

Previews 3 & 4 September, Opening Night 7th, until 11 September, 2021

Weredingo is the  fifth full-length work by Karul, an emerging Queensland-based First Nations contemporary dance company led by Thomas E.S. Kelly (Minjungbal-Yugambeh, Wiradjuri and Ni-Vanuatu), and Taree Sansbury (Kaurna, Narrunga and Ngarrindjeri).

Weredingo is about shapeshifting. It's about universal stories of First Nations creationism and the history beneath shapeshifting, stories far older than familiar western tropes. Weredingo is also about duality, cleverly utilising the metaphor of shapeshifting to reveal tokenism, blackfishing, racial profiling and allyship. This powerful dance theatre work combines Karul's distinctive contemporary choreography with narrative storytelling, animation and projection for a thrilling and interactive dance experience.


Director/Choreographer Thomas E.S. Kelly

Rehearsal Director/Performer Taree Sansbury

Performers Benjin Maza and Grayson Millwood 

Costume Designer Selene Cochrane

Sound Designer Sam Pankhurst

Lighting Designer Chloe Ogilvie

Dramaturg Isaac Drandic

Animation Studio Gilay

Videography Wirrim Studio

Producer BlakDance

 

Weredingo was produced by BlakDance and supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, the City of Gold Coast, the City of Melbourne through Arts House, and was developed in the CultureLAB program with the assistance of Creative Victoria. Weredingo has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body and Queensland Theatre. Weredingo is commissioned by BlakDance, through BlakForm. BlakForm is funded through Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government initiative.

Preparing Ground

Preparing Ground

By Marilyn Miller (Kukuyalanji and Waanyi), Jasmin Sheppard (Tagalaka and Kurtitjar) & Katina Olsen (Wakka Wakka and Kombumerri).

Preparing Ground is a powerful First Nations-led independent contemporary dance project by leading choreographers Marilyn Miller, Jasmin Sheppard and Katina Olsen. 

Employing a framework founded on a deep relationship between humans and environment, Preparing Ground is an urgent call to action to us all to address colonisation’s impacts on Country, language, people and place through First Nations knowledges.

It will feature a dance work for mainstage presentation alongside audience engagement activities chosen and led by local First Nations knowledge holders to platform local responses to the project’s themes.

Preparing Ground is currently in creative development.

About preparing ground

Preparing Ground means to prepare land for our future survival. It is about preparing land for Ceremony, preparing us with the knowledge to survive, and preparing community to lead change into the future Future. It’s a multidimensional metaphor that challenges postcolonial ethics, morality, politics and emotions, through the lens of Country. 

Preparing Ground - the future Future

Developing the phrase “future-Future”, Preparing Ground takes on the longevity of Indigenous worldview. It acknowledges that taking care of Country and Community means continuing the work far into the future, over thousands of years – part of a continuum of knowledge, since the first sunrise. 

Repeatedly returning to their Wakka Wakka, Kukuyalanji, Tagalaka and Kombumerri homelands over three years (2021-2023), these artists nurture long-term cultural exchange, listening to and learning from Country to engage with millennia of knowledge in land management and cultural survival. This deep research and development connects and reconnects the choreographers to the complexity of relationships between each other and their Countries in a never ending cycle of being, knowing and doing.

It is a contemporary application of ancient protocols; a process of belonging and becoming. 

This experience then infuses and provokes responses in their choreographic language as they devise an immersive, multi-sensory dance production together with a wider creative team. The project’s process-driven, relational approach also deeply informs its long-term model of community engagement, which aims to support it’s core goal of platforming local First Nations voices and knowledges through its presentation.

Preparing Ground does more than embody the resilience of the world’s oldest surviving culture. It shows us how dependent our collective survival is on an enduring connection to land and sea.

Download 2023 Project Update

Watch the Community Engagement pilot - Kombumerri Country, October 2023 (trailer)

"There is a stronger elemental guidance influencing movement and how the body responds to Country that comes from such close association with, or being on, Country… It has been an extremely rewarding, renewing, and reinvigorating process. The realisation encapsulated as: 'we ARE Country'; we present the voice OF Country." Marilyn Miller, Co-Director Preparing Ground

“Working on Country or being connected to Country has been the springboard from where every concept, creative ideas and information which makes the bulk of our content has come from. It has informed the decolonized process of our creative development in the studio.” Jasmin Sheppard, Co-Director Preparing Ground

"Preparing Ground cannot happen without dedicated time on Country. Having this time researching and developing on Country means that our communities are involved in the making of our work right from the beginning and throughout the process of making the work. Therefore we are honouring our own protocol and duty to our communities, and the voice of community is then reflected in the work." Katina Olsen, Co-Director Preparing Ground

Image credits: Samuel James, Katina Olsen, Jade Ellis Photography

Community Engagement pilot images feature Kombumerri Rangers from Ngarang-Wal Gold Coast Aboriginal Association Incorporated

 

Preparing Ground - Creative Team

Co-Director - Marilyn Miller (Kukuyalanji and Waanyi),

Co-Director - Jasmin Sheppard (Tagalaka and Kurtitjar)

Co-Director - Katina Olsen (Wakka Wakka and Kombumerri)

Projection Designer - Samuel James

Sound Designer - Samuel Pankhurst

Lighting Designer - Karen Norris

Dramaturg - Victoria Hunt (Ngati Ohomairangi, Te Arawa, Ngati Kahungunu, Rongowhakaata Maori, English, Irish, Finnish)

Dancer - Audrey Goth-Towney (Wiradjuri)

 

Choreographic Outside Eyes

Tammi Gissell (Muruwarri)

Yolande Brown (Bidjara)

Raymond Blanco (Magarem, Erub Island and Malay)  - Cairns, 2021.

 

Cultural Advisors (on Country developments 2021 - 23)

Kukuyalanji / Mossman: Uncle John Hartley and Juan Walker

Tagalaka / Croydon: Patrick Wheeler and Victor Steffenson

Wakka Wakka / Eidsvold: Aunty Yvonne Chapman, Warru Olsen, Natalie Chapman, Corey Appo

Kombumerri / Gold Coast: Warru Olsen, Justine Dillon, Maxwell Dillon

 

Elders-in-Residence

Brisbane 2021: Raelene Baker (Yuggera, Birri, Bindal and Warranghu)

 

Preparing Ground is supported through the Australian Government’s Indigenous Languages and Arts program. It is assisted by the Australian Government’s Major Festivals Initiative, managed by the Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body, in association with Brisbane Festival and Sydney Festival, and additional project funding from the Creative Australia. Preparing Ground is also supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, and the Council of the City of Gold Coast.

Preparing Ground is produced by BlakDance and supported by BlakForm, funded through Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government initiative.

The 2023 creative development phase has received additional support from Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC), The Art House Wyong, HOTA (Home of the Arts), Bulimba-ja Arts Centre, The Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF) which is a partnership between the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and Sunshine Coast Council through ArtsCoast, and LJ Dance Projects.

September 2021’s creative development has been supported by Brisbane Powerhouse, Judith Wright Arts Centre, QPAC, The Art House Wyong and Ausdance Queensland.