Founded in 1989 by South African, Cheryl Stone and Carole Johnson, an African-American and founding director of National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA), The Bangarra Dance Theatre is one of Australia’s leading performing arts companies with a mission “to create inspiring experiences that change society” [bangarra.com.au; May 2019]. The company’s dancers all come from a proud ingenious background of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander from various locations all around; and with current Artistic Director Stephen Page, each performance is “forged from over 65,000 years of culture, embodied with contemporary movement” [bangarra.com.au; May 2019].
In particular our group paid attention to the Terrain performance by Bangarra, initially premiered in 2012 in the Arts Centre in Melbourne, the performance focuses and explores the connection between the Aboriginal people and the land around Lake Eyre in South Australia. Overall our group decided to follow the spirit of Bangarra and rather than directly appropriate the ingenious movements decided to base our movements from our own heritages (Australian, Canadian, Chinese and Mauritian) to form the creative response of “Mangfold”. Mangfold – translating to ‘diversity’ in Norwegian – aimed to draw from Bangarra’s performative, communicative and storytelling qualities to portray harmony through cultural individualism and create a profoundly personalised artwork that celebrates multiculturalism through mixed media and collaboration. [Mangfold framing statement paraphrased].
While Terrain focused on Australia’s inland sea, our performance looked more toward the ocean between all our continents and how it connected all of us as a people, further exemplified by our soundtrack of crashing waves played over the Mangfold performance. We further continued our reflection to Terrain with minimising the amount of stagnent movement in the second half of our performance in reflection of the water always moving around us.
Out of personal preference, our group also chose to create a “tree of togetherness” inspired by one of the movements made during the Terrain performance in which the performers all form a singular line. We observed that while all performers were together, they all had their individual set of movements, as well as that everything was flowing in motion with nothing stagnent – this evolved into our tree with each member of the group performing a singular movement from our individual act to form part of the tree.
My personal inspiration for my movements came from a two main sources: The first coming directly from my Chinese heritage and tai-chi movements passed down to me from maternal grandfather. My second source reflected more towards my upbringing in Australia being the Korean sport of Taekwondo looking upon the Poomase (patterns/sets) of Koryo and Kumgang. This integration was important to me to reflect upon my own heritage from where I came from as well as where I am now and how I was raised (in a similar way to how Reko Rennie reflects his roots in Regalia).
Overall Bangarra performances primarily compromised of dance, sound and lighting; with the audience in a singular position (forth wall) watching upon the performers and becoming immersed with an additional audio aspect with the soundtrack. While unable to recreate lighting, it was important to our group to recreate the audio/visual experience for the audience. Originally our idea was to have both a series of print photos on display alongside the video performance; however the prints were eventually discarded from the final presentation due to a lack of means to display them. The final presentation of a video with photos was formed to encompass the multidisciplinary of our group as while predominately drama based some members are from alternate degrees.
Mangfold, 2019
Co-Director & Director of Photography
Choreographed by Marilyn Liew, Jon Matthieu, Nash Williams, Kate Yeung and Jonah Fruitman
The Bangarra Theatre Company’s “Terrain” performance, while not directly relevant to myself/my world/work allowed me to further explore into doing multidisciplinary works which is something I have been aiming for doing for a while but never taken the initiative to do. From a personal stand point, I wanted to achieve a multidisciplinary art work/performance that was outside of my regular discipline (photography), which has a genuine meaning and story behind it. I found that working in a predominantly performance based group really forced me into a position to do so and allowed me to help create the Mangfold performance.
Our team collaboration was predominantly managed as a team with no set leader rather having one person take leadership for a portion of the collaboration and rotate. For example, I took lead during the filming aspect of the project organising the space to film and directing everyone into position working to my strength/disciple; meanwhile, we allowed Jonah to lead the group during the class presentation for his public speaking skills. Overall, I personally think that the group worked efficiently and effectively as a team especially towards the latter part of the assignment. While initially there were some communication issues due to a lack of mutual communication medias (beside sms) and scheduling issues getting the entire group together at the same time; however once we came together each team member was able to voice their own opinion/s and idea/s for the group to hear and even in final filming, last minute changes were voiced and even implanted.
My main contribution to the group was to look after logistics of our final production. This included the booking of a studio space for final filming – we were only able to book one of the three spaces we had in mind – and for the video filming and editing and sound production of the final piece. Overall I feel that my contribution to the group fitted in as one of five pieces to the puzzle while also being able to bring an additional skill set/discipline.