★★★½☆ Immersive Indigenous installations enthrall, though rain affects play.

Alice Springs Desert Park
September 16, 2016

By the time the full moon rose over the forecourt of the Alice Springs Desert Park a large crowd had gathered. To one side a projection screen paced through images of Aboriginal artists and their work. Coming in I had passed a ‘tree’ laden with felt beanies made by artists and children from remote Indigenous communities, canvas flags adorned with photographic digital artworks by students. I was enjoying the wide angle – the patterns of congregation, the MacDonnell ranges looming close, garden beds laden with wildflowers.

When at last we were told to move in we proceeded through a band of smoke, wafting from two tin cans being tended by a group of Arrernte women. As we passed they indicated by gesture how to draw the smoke to the face and body. The sweet scent of the bush medicine permeated the space, entered my clothing, transforming both site and self momentarily in the way of ceremony, suggesting that we would soon be taken on a journey of a kind, something outside the ordinary.

Only we wouldn’t. Instead of progressing as planned ‘along the pathway’ that meanders through a series of recreated desert habitats, where we would come upon a series of performance installations, an oncoming storm meant the show was relocated to a small theatre. The artistic repercussions of this were many and it is almost impossible to appraise what followed without continuous reference to it.

According to Co-Artistic Directors Jenine Mackay and Virginia Heydon, the show endeavoured to “share the stories of how we feel and experience connection to nature, place and belonging”. Stripping the installations of their intended surrounds meant that essentially the main character was missing from each. Visual projections, which might have been rendered at different scales, were projected onto a giant screen that filled the whole back wall. What was to be an immersive experience for the audience became a more conventional theatre experience of sitting and watching at a remove. While the audience would have been free to move through each installation as they chose to, now we would watch each in succession, from start to end.

The show I watched might be described as a series of vignettes, with a live cast of up to 60 performers, a series of short film pieces and audio throughout. As to be expected from community theatre the spectrum of skill was broad but the show was beautifully structured to contain this, enabling a place it felt, for each performer to bring what they had to offer to the audience. It was some of the less experienced performers who really moved me.

Memorable, for example, were the short solo performances from the stArts with D Performance Ensemble (a local performing arts group of people with disability). Two of these in particular struck me – both young Aboriginal women whose dances were mainly gestural, simple, but whose investment was deeply felt, compelling. The rest of this series didn’t always seem to fit what had started to emerge as broad themes of place and country, but each was disarming in its honesty and authenticity. “You wanna see my dance?” a young man shouted out to us. “Yes!” the audience cheered. His guilelessness reached everyone, relieving us of the convention of passive appreciation.

Local dancers from Dusty Feet Dance Collective stood out with a beguiling piece referencing the Bloodwood tree, their bodies twisting and balancing in gnarly formations. In a welcome break from the succession of single performances, interstate Indigenous dancer Katie Lesley’s solo dance of the Seven Sisters overlapped this, stirring the stillness of the stage with her grace and strength.

Both performances took me back to the show’s title, Unbroken Land, drawn from a blurb projected at the start from Tangentyere Artists, an Alice Springs based Aboriginal owned Art Centre. “The land is unbroken”, it read, “as are the spirits of the people”. There was something about these dances – the perpetual movement, the endurance – that spoke to me of that which cannot be broken, of weathering time, of continuity. But placed together they also spoke of relationship, often absent from the work.

I experienced this again with another coupling of pieces – a trio of musicians playing a haunting mix of tabla, percussion and wind instruments accompanied by a stunning series of black and white photographs by Tamara Burlando depicting young people from the Aboriginal community of Papunya. The contrast was uncontrived and powerful.

It is questionable how cohesive a work of this magnitude can be. Stephanie Harrison’s music, along with recordings of people speaking of their connection to Mparntwe or Alice Springs, assisted with threading the work together, in the absence of the link the environment would have offered. Still, connections between pieces felt tenuous and curatorial, choices sometimes unclear.

As it is Unbroken Land is an ambitious undertaking, a celebration of community, an attempt to seek out the essence of a place and sit its elements side by side. In such a complex place that is no mean feat.

Dani Powell is a writer, performance-maker and producer based in Alice Springs