Yellamundie Festival – Opening Night
Moogahlin Performing Arts
Carriageworks
January 22, 2021
Under new Artistic Director, Lily Shearer, this year’s biennial and fifth Yellamundie Festival, a unique platform for the identification, development and presentation of First Peoples stories, opened up submissions to composers and choreographers. As Shearer commented in her opening address telling their stories movement and sound has been a First Peoples practice for thousands of years: playwriting evolved After Cook (AC).
In addition, there has been a greater emphasis this year on language. Moogahlin’s Co-founder and Senior Artistic Director Dr Liza-Mare Syron will host Yawarra, a panel of well-known First Nations theatre makers from Australia, New Zealand and Canada in a discussion of the role of theatre in the renaissance of native languages in colonial contexts. In her opening address Shearer introduced her excited audience to various words in language for English theatrical terminology: yellamundie (storytellers), yawarra (dramaturg), birrabang miil (outside eye) or dumbaldhaany (director), moogahl (players) and yabun (composer).
Opening night presented two works chosen from Australia-wide submissions: a live reading of The Lookout (yawarra, Jane Harrison, dumbaldhaany, Kyle Morrison) and dance performance Waterholes (birrabang miil, Peta Strachan, yawarra, Kirk Page and soundscape, Amy Flannery). First time writer, Dalara Williams, began writing The Lookout at Nambucca Heads, which does possess a wonderful lookout with 360 degree views of the ocean and from which whales and dolphins may be seen and, more sadly, is in a region with the highest rate of youth suicides in NSW.
With Kyle Morrsion reading the stage directions, William’s haunting play tells the story of Jack (Ari Maza-Long) who seeks respite from his problems by losing himself in looking at the vastness of an ocean whose rhythms both reflect and influence human emotions. He is joined at the lookout by a mysteriously prescient woman (Phoebe Grainer) who appears both to him and later to his distraught girlfriend Miller (Abbie Lee-Lewis), but is unseen by his overbearing and jealous brother Ashley (James Boyd). While the play highlights the difficulties both young men have in showing vulnerability and developing selfhood, it also represents their inadequacy as destructive to the sensitive Miller’s physical and emotional security.
Choreographer, Shana O’Brien, in the evocative Waterholes explores both connection with ancestors and the power water has to heal and regenerate. Like Williams, O’Brien sees the importance of “going to a quiet place” and her sanctuary in 2020 when “the world felt so out of control and unpredictable” became the waterhole, a symbol of both physical and spiritual sustenance. Performing on a bare stage, the intense, searching or often anguished movements of the simply dressed two dancers, Kate Leslie and O’Brien, were brilliantly and lyrically contextualised by Amy Flannery’s merging of synthetic and natural sound.
Unfortunately, owing to border restrictions two pieces had to be withdrawn from the festival – a dance performance, Seventh Season Dreaming by Sermsah Bin Saad,and Aidan Rowlinson’s play Capricorn. Both will be available via SydFest at home, Moogahlin YouTube and Facebook in February and March.
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theatre@ssh.com.au
