SILENCE is about the space in between. The conversations not being heard and the responses that are muted. Through the beating of a drum, bodies thrash through frequencies to uncover what lies in the SILENCE, the world premiere of this intergenerational outcry for TREATY.
SILENCE can give stories and strength, yet SILENCE can wound. There’s SILENCE between the stars as the Emu travels across the night sky, or the dancer’s energy when they hit the Cut between rhythms. It’s also the deafening silence under white noise. The same questions echoed through generations.
We have marched across Country. We have had promises made, and promises broken. We have drafted our own, and we are still the only sovereign peoples without one.
Choreographed by Bundjalung-Yugambeh, Wiradjuri and Ni-Vanuatu man Thomas E.S. Kelly, this new dance work pulls Treaty from under the rug and slams it back on the table. Listen to the SILENCE and design an agreement to heal us, our land and the wound of this nation.
Thomas E.S. Kelly is a proud Bundjalung-Yugambeh, Wiradjuri, Ni-Vanuatu man, creating work that explores high intensity physical works stemming from a cultural practice woven with contemporary, which incorporates voice and physical percussion.
In his distinctive role as performer and co-artistic director of Karul Projects, a performing arts company sharing stories of cultural relevance, First Nations Knowledge and responsibility in Australia’s current and future identity, Thomas creates work that reveals subject matters that offer an opportunity to learn and develop. Remembering the past to better understand the present so we can move forward into the future.
SILENCE features in the Brisbane Festival 2020 program, opening on the 10th of September.
SILENCE was first developed through the pilot undertaken in Brisbane for the BlakDance Residency Program in 2018. SILENCE has since been co-commissioned by HOTA Home of the Arts, QPAC, Brisbane Festival and City of Gold Coast through the pilot BlakDance program Performing Country, which sees makers from the residency program enabled to keep making on Country. Performing Country has cultivated 14 partners who are co-investors of three new contemporary dance works homegrown by First Nations makers here in Brisbane and surrounding regions.
SILENCE is the first independent, full-length First Nations contemporary dance work to be created and premiered in Brisbane in over a decade. Prior to this, we witnessed Marilyn Miller’s Quinkan at the Festival of the Dreaming 2008. SILENCE is also the first full length independent First Nations contemporary dance work to be commissioned by Brisbane Festival.
BRISBANE FESTIVAL MEDIA AND REVIEWS