It was very special to be in the audience at WOVEN SONG on the eve of Australia Day, and hear content directly relevant to public issues in this country and the national day.
WOVEN SONG is or at least has been a work in progress – what we saw was 7 of 9 works, each about nine minutes long and interpreting textile pieces from the Australian tapestry workshop. The project is ambitious and international: the textile images projected on a large screen during the performance The actual textile works are based on traditional paintings by prominent aboriginal artists (such as Daisy Andrews and Nanyuma Napangati), produced with assistance of the Australian Textile Workshop, and hung at Australian Embassies and High Commissions in New Delhi, Tokyo, Singapore, Washington DC, Paris, Rome, Dublin, The Holy Sea and Beijing and other sites around the world. The program of Tapestry has already been performed in full or part at many of these sites.
WOVEN SONG therefore is designed, in full or part, to be performed in situ in public spaces adjacent to art works. However it is has previously been performed in concert mode at the Melbourne Recital Centre in 2021. The version seen in Sydney included video of Deborah explaining works, projected before each work is seen. In addition there was spoken introduction and welcome before and during the program, as well as welcome to country. The videos each went for several minutes.
The support shown by the audience, by way of full standing applause, was fully deserved. Deborah Cheetham simply is an outstanding, accomplished, even venerated singer. Her voice soared and prayed and cried and honoured. It was a delight to follow her contribution to each item, as she was supported by a rich ensemble of players from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Short Black Orchestra.
All the compositions were by Cheetham, and the variety of instrumentation and arrangements helped make the evening entertaining. Gulaga was a haunting and delicate use of woodwind, Pukumani has a fine alternating balance of voice and instruments, Ngarrgooroon used strings to convey an expansive sense of landscape. Instruments at times took on an organic resemblance – oboe trilled like a bird, the spare piano a desert emptiness, and the Guzheng instrument played by Mindy Meng Wang which resembled a didgeridoo in sound quality. Catching Breath featured a haunting repetition of the guessed name of a past unknown man, accompanied by a veiled image of the man’s face. There is certainly a place for commemoration of the unknown aboriginal fighter, perhaps in the Australian War Memorial.
Each piece was accompanied by an exquisite separate gown designed by Linda Britten These drew applause in their own right – the meta Diva touch was taken in good humour and visual delight.
A paradox can be sensed between operatic/couture format and themes of aboriginal impoverishment – unlike Bangarra there is no staged grounding in the visceral elements of actual lives or country.
The program was called WOVEN SONG because of the interweaving of artforms. Because projected images were featured, and items were short with intermittent videos, overall the items did have an elegant similarity about them with their studied lament and reflection. One could want more contrasting shifts of celebration, of achievement, of life, and colour, even associated with the same images.
One might also expect or want diversity of material from a superb singer like Cheetham. An accomplished opera singer in her own right, it would be great to hear her singing, at least on behalf of the oppressed, materials from other places – North America, South Africa, even a song based on World War 2, or ones chosen from a wider palette of humanity. After all, as the elder said in acknowledgment of country, we are all part of one tribe – humanity. Perhaps half a program for 5 tapestry items and a different second half might have been a production idea worth considering.
It is of course a liberty for a performing artist to explain a work on the same occasion as it is performed. However worthy the cause, I am not entirely sure how well the format worked in theatre mode. It would certainly suit an occasional gallery event, when presumably the short speeches could be live. However the evening lacked the through line or narrative possible with a fully theatricalized or musical content.
The video speeches also brought an element of didacticism to the evening. If there were messages, about displacement, death, loss of country and discovery, the continuity of art, frontier wars, these were clearly and discursively stated, such that the performance items became slightly diminished in their power to goad and lead us to their meaning.
The program was of course “sung” to a captive audience, many of whom, white as well as black, have worked for aboriginal causes for many years, or at least offer active sympathy or support. In view of this, the title of the third item “Above Knowing” or “Is Australia above Knowing” must be meant as rhetorical. Of course we are not and cannot be above knowing. An increasingly large sector of Australians are fully equipped and already know the history of massacres and displacement, and “conversations” surrounding the Voice in 2023 must make sure to acknowledge and include such support that has occurred over years of reconciliation and further back to land rights and the 1967 referendum.
The item is clever, referencing a work hung in the Australian embassy in Paris at the site where Jews were rounded up before transport to camps. The video then shows a group of Aboriginals chained together, and leaves the audience to join the dots between Nazism and Australian history. As bad as Australian history can be, and it certainly does need to be acknowledged, the holocaust comparison, made as generally as it was, simply overstates and simplifies the full and complex picture of race relations in this country.
The program occurred on Australia Day eve, and explicitly invites consideration of issues in public life, including the forthcoming Voice to Parliament referendum. As far as that goes, it would be good if the sense of tapestry of peoples, language, and country, demonstrated in WOVEN SONG, could be extended into a cultural grounding for the Voice project. One hopes that in its governance and structure, the representative body proposed by The Voice will be based on the traditional tribal landscape and peoples – and reflect the territorial map of Aboriginal Australia, along with tribe and country names. These names are becoming widely used, so its reasonable they are extended further. That way, the Voice to Parliament would reflect the cultural and artistic tapestry Cheetham strives to express in this performance. What other structure would suffice or indeed even work? What a wonderful legacy for true conversations between all Australians.