The Bigger Picture | Sachém, featuring Matt Hsu’s Obscure Orchestra.

Reconciliation is a word without action. Reconciliation is an action.

These are the words book-ending the magnificent achievement of lyrical mastery, first-rate musical extravaganza, and unflinching emotional exploration that is multi-hyphenate Sachém’s The Bigger Picture.

Presented at QPAC as a one-night-only special performance as part of Reconciliation Week, The Bigger Picture is the truly delicious fruit born from an award-winning body of work of an artistic alchemist and his ongoing journey of self-discovery and reflection. With the colourful ensemble of Matt Hsu’s Obscure Orchestra providing a sonically vibrant depth to Sachém’s poetic innovation from his 2021 debut EP Part of the Picture, The Bigger Picture is explosive but not unstable, complex yet entirely focused, and expansive without ever being overwhelming. Altogether, the experience is simultaneously the manifestation of the incredible skill and ambition of one man while also being an unreservedly proud celebration of a rich, inclusive community. 

All images: Tai Bobongie

Through music, film, and spoken word, The Bigger Picture takes us on a journey of pleasure and pain. As a story about finding one’s place in the world, it is both universal and specific, told from the front-line perspective of a First Nations and African American experience. Broken into three chapters, from the very beginning we’re taken on a deep dive into vulnerability, only coming up for air in the brief interludes between pieces. Sachém is an expert emotional cartographer, able to map his experiences across familiar topics in ways that incite the sensation of discovery as well as traverse new landscapes so keenly observed that the audience feels intimately at home.

QPAC may seem like a strange place to hold an event that has evolved from the more informal tradition of concerts, and throughout the night I could see many people bobbing along, clearly wanting to get up and actually dance. Having been in the crowd for Sachém at a festival previously, I struggled to contain the same desire to move, but I also appreciated that being seat-bound kept the emotional focus on his words and his story. It’s also wonderful that the theatre’s First Nations program empowers artists to present their work in mainstream spaces like QPAC without needing to censor themselves.

There were some clever transitional moments that kept the experience fresh, such as the phone call interruption from Sachém’s mother that segued into the track Motherland. The promotional copy includes dance as one of facets of the production, which I felt wasn’t really present enough to be part of the description. Throughout the show, uniformly dressed stagehands appeared briefly to silently interact with Sachém, at times shining flashlights as if looking for him, other times standing in ominous judgement, but their inclusion didn’t feel fully fleshed out to me and I was left wondering what exactly they were supposed to symbolise. I would love to see that aspect developed further and crystallised as clearly as the music and film visuals were.

All images: Tai Bobongie

In The Bigger Picture, we were moved through so much emotional ground, intersecting the experiences of race, family, masculinity, mental health and more that it feels inadequate to try to cover it all in one review. Sachém demonstrates an incredible narrative intuition of pace, examining each experience through the lens of his word-smithing as well as presenting the candid audio and video footage of his life for the audience to reflect on.

At times, the emotional weight and impact was so much that I felt the breath knocked out of me, like when we watched the backstage footage from moments after Sachém had his mic cut during a performance just last year, but at no point did it ever feel like we were being mired in pain. There is just as much joy and celebration to be found throughout The Bigger Picture, from the sheer exuberance of the Obscure Orchestra supporting and amplifying the journey to the love Sachém has for whom and where he has come from.

There is a clear difference between exploiting and commoditising the pain of marginalised and historically excluded communities and allowing people to tell their own stories authentically, on their own terms. The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has often spoken of the “dangers of the single story”, of reducing people and places to a single, easily-digestible image or idea and how this erasure of complexity results in the perpetuation of harm. The Bigger Picture is the story of one man, but it is not just a single story; it’s a nuanced exploration of the countless threads woven together to result in this man and his life, as well as the threads he is continuing to weave into the world.

Over and over we returned to Sachém’s deep admiration and respect for those around him and those who came before him, and how the work he is doing is in service to those who will come after him. Through the reciprocal, inter-dependent nature of these relationships, The Bigger Picture calls us to the action of reconciliation by ultimately demonstrating what that action looks like: connection.

Now, you may have noticed there’s an elephant in this review that hasn’t been addressed. It would be disingenuous of me to write this review without also acknowledging the fact that I am a white person living on the stolen land of, and benefiting from the ongoing oppression of, the First Nations peoples of Australia. If you’re interested in the somewhat messy, potentially uncomfortable anatomy of this particular elephant, I invite you to continue reading here.