Marrugeku's Crying Baby is the favourite of the Earagail Arts Festival this year. The Marrugeku Company is a collaboration of indigenous dancers and musicians from Broome and Perth, physical theatre practitioners from Sydney and Kunwinjku dancers, storytellers and musicians from Kunbarllanjnja, a remote community in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory.
Crying Baby is the name of storyteller Thompson Yulidjirri's Dreaming place. A little boy cries all day and night for food and no one feeds him.
Two tribes, the Orrpu and the Ngaladg, were travelling to that place, Kaparri, for ceremony. The Rainbow Serpent Kunjikuime came to Kaparri and killed everyone in a storm and then everyone was turned to stone.
The story goes further down the Gumadeer river to the camp of James Watson, first missionary in Arnhem Land, and to Goulburn Island, where Thompson grew up, winding up in Kunbarllanjnja where the Marrugeku Company first came together. .
The stage set looks bleak - the bones of an old boat, a lone telephone booth, five television sets and life-size electric pylons all on a bed of sand. People dressed in tracksuits are huddled around campfires with ghettoblasters. A man in a tracksuit gets up to do a tribal dance.
In the background people fight and loiter. Tribal dancing weaves in and out of rap and Bob Marley.
The choreography is brilliant. The two tribes appear on stilts, one in coloured costume, the other white.
They spin and swoop and bend, perhaps most brilliantly when the Rainbow Serpent inflicts her storm. The squat, thick missionary Watson in longjohns embroidered with the cross, clutching an illuminated bible as he flees the dancing tribemen has the flavour of a circus act. As the baby cried, the rain began to fall. But the show went on.
The show, in the intensity of its fragmentation, forces us to question how the culture of indigenous peoples can possibly survive the colonisation process.
The Elder Thomson has made it his mission to tell the stories of his tribe all over the world, so that the younger members cannot forget. But the world of ghettoblasters, alcohol and rap is an enticing one.
This enactment of the Crying Baby story is at least one that will not be forgotten.
