Weredingo | Karul Projects
“Are you coming as a human or as an animal tonight?” a well-dressed guy asked us as we descended into New Benner Theatre at Metro Arts on Saturday night. “Animal!” I said without giving myself the time to process the question. He invited me to choose and pick a mask of an animal to bring with me into the show. I did. He said “use it as you wish during the show.” I wasn’t sure what all of that was about, but my confusion was offset by the amusement for my new platypus mask. I giggled, thanked him, and walked inside the theatre.
As the lights went off, a human figure with a big realistic bird head appeared out of the darkness on the side balcony. It moved sideways, staring at us in silence, demanding attention and claiming respect. This human-bird figure was intimidating, and I wasn’t sure what the tone of this show was going to be. Light and fun like the guy who invited us to pick an animal mask or dark and heavy like the human-bird figure?
A few minutes after, the lights were on again and the guy who we met at the door was on stage. With a big smile, he paid respect to the Jagera and Turrbul Peoples, and welcomed us to the workshop for the ‘shapeshifters’. Then, he invited us to repeat altogether a few words about the animal kingdom after him, and so kick-started the shapeshifter workshop joining the dance of performers Thomas E.S. Kelly, Taree Sansbury, and Benjin Maza. The show was fun and light again.
Weredingo is the latest Karul project. Karul Projects is a First Nations performing arts company created by Thomas E.S. Kelly and Taree Sansbury who have developed a signature style combining Aboriginal and modern dance and Indigenous storytelling. The signature of Karul Projects are the fractal-like, asynchronous patterned choreographies: all dancers start together drawing from the same pattern, then they move away, reproduce and expand the pattern on their own, and finally they bring the pattern back together.
I have had the pleasure of attending two other Karul projects in the past, but this was the first time that I saw their signature dance incorporated in a play. The dance moves of Weredingo are primarily inspired by the animal world, and they are magnetic.
The main topic of the play is boundaries and safety in the relationships between Indigenous people and so-called ‘allies’. A growing number of Australians are reckoning with the genocidal past and the continued structural oppression of Indigenous peoples in this country, and many want to answer the call to support Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, land rights, and cultural resurgence. This creates a pressing need to state positions, examine positionalities, and demarcate boundaries to ensure that long-standing systems of oppressions are not reproduced in the revolution and that the revolution does not result in the same old structures of oppression.
The play of Weredingo uses metaphors, but speaks very clearly on this issue. The workshop for the shapeshifters is facilitated by Frank (Grayson Millwood) and is intended to be a safe space for humans to reconnect with their roots and shift back into their inner animal. Frank, however, is not a shapeshifter, and Denise (Taree Sansbury) does not feel safe shifting around him. Frank defends his position as a facilitator on the ground that his wife and kids are shapeshifters. He’s seen what shapeshifters have been through and wants to support them. But Denise bears the scars of non-shapeshifters hunting her and her people, and she draws a firm line: the place of non-shapeshifters to help and support shapeshifters is to work with other non-shapeshifters to stop the hunting and mistreatment of shapeshifters, especially when the latter are in their animal form. Shapeshifters can do the work to heal and rebuild themselves. They don’t need non-shapeshifters to do it for or with them.
In Weredingo, I also saw shapeshifting as a metaphor for code switching. Instead of switching language and customs between different racial groups, the characters of this show switch between human and animal form. The three screens on stage were an excellent addition to represent the shifting process. Animated drawings of animals complemented the dance of the performers. I found the dance of Denise shifting into a dingo particularly moving in the ways that it conveyed her suffering, which was amplified by glitching moving images of her dancing on the screens. The metaphor of the shapeshifters also allowed the director Thomas E.S. Kelly to include Indigenous stories about the free-spirited dingo, the lazy koala, the confusing platypus, and the rainbow serpent n the show.
As a non-shapeshifter, I found this show incredibly powerful and instructive. It was a privilege to be educated on boundaries and Indigenous safe spaces while watching the magnetic dance of Karul Projects.
Weredingo plays 3-11 September 2021 at Metro Arts as a part of the 2021 Brisbane Festival. Cover image by Mick Richards.
