Edwin Lee Mulligan in Ngarlimbah, part of Burrbgaja Yalirra, Marrugeku (photograph by Clare Hawley)

Ngarlimbah (You are as much a part of me as I am of you) opens on a quiet note. Mulligan stands before us. Video projections fill the expanse of three concrete blocks lined side by side in the background. Two fiery-eyed dingos appear on the screen –Yungngora and Jirrilbil – a semblance of Mulligan’s dreams. The dingos morph into a pixilation of starry red-and-white constellations and then to a lake covered in waterlilies, near Mulligan’s hometown of Noonkanbah, Central Kimberley.

Mulligan’s words resound through Carriageworks: ‘In the pitch black darkness / In the shimmer of light …’ We are plunged into a world mediated by Mulligan’s visions, a trajectory we follow through the gentle power of his poetry, the unassuming way he moves across the stage. There is nothing performative about his gestures. Long moments are punctuated by stillness, save for a dance resembling a low-flying bird, and tumbles across the ground that look like they are propelled by breath alone.

Miranda Wheen in Miranda part of Burrbgaja Yalirra, Marrugeku (photograph by Clare Hawley)

While Ngarlimbah enraptures with its solemn fortitude, the second performance, Miranda, takes a sharp veer into the frenzied and the camp. Co-choreographed and performed by Miranda Wheen, it is the only non-Indigenous work on the program and, as such, directly confronts white Australia’s obsession with the bush as a romantic symbol of lost pasts and spiritual reverence at the cost of Indigenous livelihoods. Wheen takes the final, initially unpublished chapter of Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) as her starting point. She embodies both herself and her fictional namesake ‘Miranda’, the protagonist who disappears and falls into a ‘hole in space’ during the novel’s last pages.

Barefoot and dressed in a white smock, Wheen throws herself into a sequence of rapid twitching and stop-start movements. A soundtrack of dissonant strings creates an unnerving mood. Wheen radiates anxiety and nervousness, an expression of her inability to resolve the sorrow and guilt she feels because of the deeds of her white ancestors.

It is easy to be lulled into the orbit of Wheen’s dance. Her steps often begin with a twist of the shoulder, her arms acting as pallets of direction to something more unexpected and frantic. She spins frequently, and in one moment does a ballonné sequence reminiscent of a demented ballet swan. Later, she explores different iterations of how to sit cross-legged on the floor, legs and arms zipping around in rapid fire.

Miranda builds to a crescendo in the latter half of the work, Wheen unable to keep up with her own hysterics. Face twisted and comically weeping, she shouts platitudes at us (‘I believe in an Australia Day where people can be happy!’). Political satire perhaps, but it feels too tragic in its obvious farce to have impact. More effective are her cries of ‘Where’s Miranda?’ which bring to mind the spectacle of tourists who visit the Rock every year, voicing the same question, searching for the spiritual, virginal ideal the character monumentalises in the Australian national identity. With this, Wheen expresses the fruitlessness of such nostalgia, rethinking the troubling colonial implications of Lindsay’s novel.

Eric Avery in Dancing with Strangers, part of Burrbgaja Yalirra, Marrugeku (photograph by Clare Hawley)

What then can be defined as continuity? Some answers are found in Eric Avery’s closing performance, Dancing with Strangers, which reclaims a past and future where there is no colonisation of Indigenous people. For Avery, power lies in how imagination can wither away the colonial reality, how it can rebel and produce ways of being full of possibility, and ultimately live in these interstices of hope.

Dancing with Strangers begins with Avery playing the violin, an instrument he later melds into his dance as an extension of his limbs. He holds his bow as if brandishing the end of a spear, and later he shapeshifts it into a sword, turning and slicing the air with centrifugal force. He wears a reversible tailcoat that he frequently switches from one side to another; denim to animal hide and back again. Avery’s on-stage presence transitions between a multitude of characters. He crafts himself onto the persona of the British military officer, his ancestors, and versions of himself. His body becomes a place where time and space collapse, resurfacing archives in order to dance them into the future. At one point, he gets down on his knees and writes on the ground with the microphone, intoning: ‘All that I hear is not in my mind … but a language of my mob.’

At the end, Avery leaps with arms spread open as if hoping the air will bear him up longer than gravity permits. Earlier, he says to the audience: ‘I can send messages through my heart. I am okay.’ And when I see him jumping to the sky, I believe him.

Burrbgaja Yalirra (Dancing Forwards) was performed at Carriageworks, Sydney, from 30 May to 1 June 2019. It continues at several venues, found here.