In 2014, self-taught Walmajarri-Nyikina painter and poet Edwin Lee Mulligan was talked into becoming a dancer. The cross-cultural dance company Marrugeku from coastal Broome in Western Australia had travelled 400km east to remote Fitzroy Crossing, seeking untapped talent.
Derby-born Mulligan, who grew up in Yakanarra and spent his earliest years in bough sheds and tents among “the last of the nomads”, had many stories to tell. For instance Mulligan knew from his elders that spilt dingo blood had sustained the earth and created red ochre; he knew that floating water lilies when eaten “remind us we are children under one sun”.
He thought such ideas might be performed as dances by other people. “[The company] said, ‘No, this is your story; you should get involved’,” recalls Mulligan, 38, who soon joined Marrugeku. He then co-devised, wrote poems for and danced in Cut the Sky, the company’s work about Indigenous perspectives on climate change, which has since toured Australia, Europe and New Caledonia.
Marrugeku’s dancers aim to respond to environment, to place, to non-human species and to each other, aspiring to what the company’s patron, the Yawuru law man and national reconciliation advocate Patrick Dodson, calls the “essence of connectivity”.
Marrugeku is a rare company in Australia in that, for 25 years, it has worked with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous creators and performers. The company’s name, meaning “clever people”, was bestowed by Kunwinjku elders when it was formed in West Arnhem Land in 1994.
Marrugeku moved to Broome in 2003 and later gained a second base in Sydney. As a company, it sets an example for other companies by working to what its directors call “reclaiming emotion” in dance, allowing performers to put their personal feelings, experiences and a sense of where they come from into creating their work.
For instance Mulligan painted a work titled Ngarlimbah – a Walmajarri concept of unity and reciprocity between Indigenous people, spirit and environmental realms. Now he has turned Ngarlimbah into a solo dance performance, during which he recounts his dream stories while moving in front of wall projections of dingoes, a billabong, lilies and fish he created in collaboration with Perth-based animator Sohan Ariel Hayes.
Mulligan has performed Ngarlimbah in Broome and Perth and soon in Sydney as the opening work in a Marrugeku triple-bill show, Burrbgaja Yalirra. The Yawuru phrase means dancing forwards. “I didn’t even know I had this in me,” he says during rehearsals. “It really brought this little desire to give people a glimpse of what it is like to be an Indigenous person, living on this country.”
The founding Marrugeku co-artistic director Rachael Swain says: “I hope people learn from the risk-taking we do.” Marrugeku starts “without a road map” when creating a show: “A lot of people close doors on that risk [of collaborating] between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. They’re afraid of it, so they shut the whole possibility out.”
Swain says 20th century American choreographers such as Ted Shawn, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham have had a “big influence on contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance”, but modern western dance was also “damaging” because it treated nature and culture separately, when in fact the natural world and human culture are bound together.
However a recent Marrugeku work, Le Dernier Appel (The Last Cry), conveyed the emotional weight Indigenous people of New Caledonia and Australia carried during their respective national debates on independence, constitutional recognition and reconciliation.
Yawuru dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram, who was 18 when she became a Marrugeku founding member before becoming co-artistic director in 2009, says the concept of liyan is the lens through which she feels an artistic work. The shared word across Kimberley language groups means spirit and intuition connected to wellbeing. “I need to stay connected to my country and my culture to feed my liyan,” she explains.
But when Pigram sees the work of other dance companies in particular, she often doesn’t feel their emotion. “I see shapes and things that represent a flavour, but I don’t see the uniqueness and diversity of our Indigenous people,” she says. “My yearning when I see work is to feel where that person and story comes from.”
Feeling a dancer’s sense of emotion about their story and origins is better than seeing a “predictable” performance, says Pigram, “even if you’re not fully understanding what that dancer is experiencing”.
Miranda, the second work in the Burrbgaja Yalirra triple bill, is performed by Miranda Wheen, who is of English, Irish and Scottish heritage. It is inspired by the character Miranda in Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, a story about British colonisers trying to impose their order on the Australian landscape. Swain says non-Indigenous audiences find this work confronting because Wheen “reveals a rant from this white person trying to be understanding but who is deeply racist underneath”.
Wheen says Marrugeku has made her comfortable with dancing in a “liminal, nebulous” space while never knowing fully how Indigenous people understand country. “I think that’s what white Australia needs to be doing – learning to be OK with what they don’t know and can’t know,” she says, “and value what they do know as well, of course.”
In the final triple-bill work, Dancing with Strangers, Eric Avery dances and plays violin. Avery, who grew up in Sydney, retells the story of a Yuin forefather on his mother’s side who saw white men arrive in ships, but reimagines how Australia might have been if Indigenous and non-Indigenous people had shared music and culture. “Imagine all the positive collaborations that could have happened between black and white instead of starting with animosity,” he says.
Avery has previously played songs sung by his Ngiyampaa family members on his father’s side, recorded by a linguist in the 1970s, such as a lullaby that “healed my inner child”. He says his Marrugeku collaboration taught him to “structure a piece with emotion” – and other arts companies could learn from this approach.
“It’s about having an openness but also a bravery to look at contemporary issues from a variety of viewpoints,” he says. “And even if they clash, they can still exist on stage together. There’s discord in the world, there’s discord in us.”
• Burrbgaja Yalirra is showing at Carriageworks in Sydney from 30 May to 1 June
