Part of the Sydney Festival At Home online series , this thought provoking production asks what does it mean to be Australian ?
Combining live dancing, acting and singing meshed with recorded performance and music on ten high-definition vertically hung screens, presented by Western Sydney company Kurinji and Singapore sound ensemble SAtheCollective, 宿 (STAY) examines the sense of identity and connection to the land, ( ie Country ), class issues, racism, affinity, delayed recognition and enforced assimilation. It is based on the real life narratives of the performers and jumps between the vast Tagalaka country of the Australian outback and a tightly squashed block of units in Singapore, uncovering unexpected family links and hidden suffering.
The deceptively simple set, designed by Dale Ferguson, includes a sequence of raked stages while musically a Chinese plucked instrument called a guzheng, as well as drums, flute, percussion, cello, boomerangs used as clapping sticks and tabla are included .
The narrative of the show combines the stories and lives of three women who don’t know each other, but who find they are linked when two skeletons are disinterred in a dried-up creek bed on a remote Queensland farm .
Viewers learn that Violet’s ( Jasmin Sheppard ) Tagalaka ancestors have for some 75,000 years been custodians of the land where the skeletons were found. However Violet moved away a long time ago to the city. Then there’s Anglo-Maltese woman, Thwayya (Aimée Falzon), who faces the loss of her farm after five generations. Meanwhile, Tsuet-Cheng (Natalie Alexandra Tse) , whose story is told via the screens , is returning from Sydney to Singapore for “Tomb Sweeping Day”, a ritual in which families visit cemeteries to talk with their ancestors. Previously hidden information offers clues to the devastation that connects the women’s pasts, substantiating the bigoted class conscious domination that the white male colonisers enforced upon the Indigenous and the Chinese.
Sheppard also doubles as an ancestor, Daisy, alongside actor, vocalist and guitar player Charles Wu as a 19th-century Chinese gold prospector, An Hoo , and Singaporean son Desmond .
The issues and story of STAY are glaringly pertinent, probing the flow of Asian prospectors who emigrated to Australia seeking their fortune during the gold rush at the end of the 19th century : different cultures, understanding, assimilation and acceptance, or not of cultures, and how previously hidden family traumas have created much inherited distress. The work includes precisely controlled eloquent depictions of sensuality and constancy also using film and sound to intensify the atmosphere.
Whilst yes , STAY had powerful themes ,excellent performances and polished production values, overall I found it a bit jumbled and confusing with a lack of continuity.
Running time 75 minutes.
https://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/digital/stay-film