Gudirr Gudirr (2021)
Yuwu, Yuwu!
Waligarra ngayu
Waligarra nyamba gudirrgudirr
Nyamba wubardu bandarlmarra guwayi
Gala wanggabula jayida wangal jarrangu
Marlu buru, marlu wula, marlu ngarrungunil
Gawu minanyan jiya
Wirdu wangal
Wirdu nagula
Manyja wula
Yuwu, Yuwu!
Don’t muck around!
Look out!
Listen to me
Listen to this warning bird
This little bird ‘guwayi’
Big cyclone going to come for us
No country, no water, no people
Big wind
Big tides
Lots of rain
You better watch out! (1)
“Gudirr Gudirr” is an invitation to listen.
This immersive 3-channel video and sound installation was developed from Dalisa Pigram’s solo performance of the same name. It was first realised in 2013 with Marrugeku – the intercultural dance company based between Sydney and Broome – where Pigram is choreographer and co-artistic director alongside director and dramaturg Rachael Swain. Richly layered and deeply personal, Pigram’s dynamic movement and spoken word in Yawuru, English and the local vernacular of Broome Aboriginal/English represents an embodiment of the past, encounter with the present and redetermining of the future. Gudirr Gudirr is directed by Queensland-based visual artist Vernon Ah Kee who brings his particular aesthetic of text-based imagery, portraiture and hand-held footage, natural extensions of the stripped-back set design and video installation he created for the original stage production. This iteration of the work was shot on location in Broome during 2019.
For thousands of years the call of the guwayi signalling the change in tide kept the Aboriginal people of the region safe from the dangers of the ocean. In Gudirr Gudirr the call urges us to listen to the rhythms embedded in nature, and to the knowledge passed on by Elders. The call is a cry for the devastating impact of colonisation on the Aboriginal people of this Country – of massacres, forced separation and intergenerational trauma – and an alarm to warn of the dangers still present. Pigram embodies the anger and exhaustion of a community where the rates of suicide among Aboriginal people are seven times higher than the national average. (2) The complex history of the Kimberley and the exchange between Aboriginal people and Asian migrants who settled in the region is also a crucial element of this work. The stories of Aboriginal and Asian relationships in northern Australia have rarely been told as European colonisers controlled the legal status and rights of these people and systematically organised the separation of families, deportation of Asian men in relationships with Aboriginal women and denied a generation of children their cultural heritage. (3)
Through Gudirr Gudirr, Pigram responds to this call. Her choreographic language is a hybrid drawn from her ancestry; traditional Aboriginal movement (her family come from the Yawuru people of Broome and Bardi people of the Dampier Peninsula) is combined with the martial art silat (from her Malay heritage), as well as gymnastics, the observation of animal movements, and contemporary culture such as breakdance. Pigram enables this array of rich and complex movement to take new form through her body. There is a similar sense of unbroken tradition and resilience in Pigram’s use of Yawuru; at home in Broome, another of her roles is as a language teacher, having worked alongside and studied Yawuru from one of the few remaining Elders who speak the language fluently.
Ah Kee is best known for his searing text works that expose the systemic racism in Australian culture as well as remarkable large-scale charcoal portraits of his family. His direction tempers Pigram’s words and movement with text on screen and frequent freezes of the frame on her face or body in states of contortion. The incorporation of hand-held footage of young Aboriginal men street fighting in Broome and a lizard desperately trying to free its head from a discarded beer can provides a stark contrast to Pigram’s absolute physical control on screen. Gudirr Gudirr is the result of a long collaboration between two of the most important artistic voices working in Australia today with a message that must be heard.
——- Text by Beatrice Gralton - Curator visual arts, Carriageworks.
(1) Dalisa Pigram, translation from Yawuru to English of the opening monologue from Gudirr Gudirr, 2013.
(2) Nathan Hondros, ‘If the Kimberley was a country, it would have the worst suicide rate in the world’, WA Today, 3 Aug 2018, at com.au/national/western-australia/if-the-kimberley-was-a-country-it-would-have-the-worst-suicide-rate-in-the-world-20180802-p4zv3s.html, accessed 1 Feb 2021.
(3) See Regina Ganter, Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 2006.
Images: Gudirr Gudirr (video still) 2020-2021 3-channel digital video, colour image courtesy the artists, Marrugeku Inc and Felix Media Pty Ltd (c) the artists. Photograph: Emma Paine
