MIGRANT MEMORIES:
A journey into things of The Migrant Project past
|| About the Migrant Project
Watch Excerpts from The Migrant Project Performances:
Standing, Performance Space, Sydney, September 2005 || Drifting, Canberra Multicultural Arts Festival, February 2006
Grounded, Seymour Centre, Sydney, March 2006 || This City is a Body, Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, May 2007
THIS CITY IS A BODY
For the first time in a long time, we can take a breath.
Our sold-out season of This City is a Body at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum is over - and we can honestly state that CuriousWorks has never done something which generated so much stunning, positive feedback from so many different people before.
It's not often you get to put on a show in one of Sydney's oldest and most beautiful buildings - a show that challenges and celebrates what the city is built on. It's even more rare to be able to share your creations with so many different, appreciative people from across the city - from Koori aunties to recent migrants to attentive groups of eastern suburbs school kids.
One punter even wrote to the organisers of the Sydney Writer's Festival, stating that we'd set such a high standard, he was worried the rest of his festival tickets might be a let down!
A HUGE thank you to everyone who came along and helped make the final installment of The Migrant Project such a success - especially the Historic Houses Trust for being open to bringing the cultures and traditions of many Sydneysiders into one of the city's most beautiful spaces. It means a great deal to us and was the perfect final installment to our live outings.
Our final ever work will be Suitcase for a Sydneysider, containing an interactive journey through Sydney detailing our activities over the last two and a half years. It'll be ready before the end of the year. If you can't wait, you only have to scroll down for a taste...
_this city is a body - diary entry, January 2007 (observations from the sea-side
at night):
this city is a body remembers what it felt like to arrive here for the first time, curious and displaced. she wonders at the roots of our fears: those assumptions which make islands out of people. as she breathes, her lungs fill with the ghostly sediment hovering above our cleanest streets.
she knows what forces us out of safety. she watches us belonging - and again, she recalls the feeling of arrival, of being a traveller in her own city.
this city is a body knows that ultimately we depend on each other and share the same streets.
she
isn’t so good at tolerating, integrating and winning the values
debate. she might not even
pass her own citizenship test. she’s been too busy talking to people
and charting one of those maps you might find of us, stitching our ways across
the city.
and all she really wants is to share her map of sydney, with yours.
(Tickets on sale for _this city is a body from 25th February at CuriousWorks.
Saturday
7th October, 2006: The Migrant audiovisual
crew have been working with the Villawood Koori Kids on
making bits of film and music.
We'll post some excerpts from their work here soon, but for now enjoy
these pics from a recent paint up the kids had.
June 21st, 2006: The Migrant film crew documented the activities of MusicFest today (some tidbits here). A few musicians from Migrant played a gig too, featuring originals and this bit of tango-fun, 5.4MB.
April - June 2006:
Some sleep and being quiet/invisible; and preparations for the
next installment.
March
2006: Grounded
Migrant Performers captured by Papa Steve; Rehearsals for Dark
Continent in Glebe Town Hall
In the last two weeks of March 2006, The Migrant Project had
its most recent 'major' public outing: Grounded.
6 performers, 2 singers, 4 musicians, 2 visual guys, specialised lighting
and sound guys doubling as production savers, a wall of TV's on one side and
a wall of clothes on the other, very little money and one director who forgot
for a while the experiences of solitude and sleep... and the show was still
only settling by its end, still rises in my head like fire. We shot Grounded
both weekends, including the forums, and recorded the audio
onto DAT - and the whole thing looks and sounds quite beautiful actually (surpised
even us). Excerpts from the show and pieces of publicity are below - all photos
are courtesy of the stellar Steve Papadakis,
(or Papa Steve as we like to call him).
Forum
Excerpts:
One, 10.5MB
- you'll like this, sure beats us trying to describe the project
Two, 21MB
-
a typical Migrant Project conversation-discussion-argument
Paul in full flight at rehearsals, captured by Steve Papdakis;
the 'Rebirth Array', a still from our visuals for Grounded
Grounded
Media/Publicity:
India Link Review
- Avijit Sarkar
"... managed to successfully blend various
forms of art and media to give a new meaning to visual imagery."
Mahesh's
Letter to the Editor
Sydney Morning Herald Preview
Spinning outside the artistic - and racial - boundaries
By Clare Morgan
March 22, 2006
The artists and performers who have spent the past year devising
a show about the migrant experience certainly haven't been short of material.
From debate about Islamic culture to the Cronulla riots, issues of race and
national identity have dominated headlines for months.
Those issues have found creative expression in The Migrant Project, in which
artists and performers with cultural heritages from around the world have
come together to weave music, dance, theatre, visual media, sound, light and
installation.
After 12 months in development, the project culminates this week with Grounded.
The first instalment, Standing, played at the Performance Space last September,
and Drifting, was part of the National Multicultural Festival in Canberra
last month.
The man behind The Migrant Project, Shakthidharan, says he wanted to create
art that moved away from compartmentalising migrants. "I have seen some
really amazing shows, often from quite mainstream companies," he says.
"But I was thinking about it and realised they are all very much about
one particular culture, one particular issue. I was worried that while they
were fantastic shows, in a way they were supporting the very thing they were
criticising. They would be outside everyday Australian life, and people would
come and see it as being outside Australian life. "We wanted to explore
what happens when these things come into contact with each other. We talked
a lot about that and what came out was the idea that everything we have in
common in Sydney is our identity as migrants." The 23-year-old set up
the group Curious Works to bring together "people who don't usually meet
each other, ideas that don't usually come together and community groups that
don't normally speak to each other". "To the extent that we could
manage it, they are a bunch of strangers in a room trying to find out common
points between each other. It was about people stepping outside their boundaries,
artistic as well as cultural."
That has meant some creative friction: "The dancers want to know that
the whole story can be told in movement, and the musos say you can't do that.
It's about being co-dependent, and working that way is really hard. We argue
a lot but it's all really good argument."
The Cronulla riots inevitably get a mention, although Shakthidharan says it
is not in the context of an expose or laying blame. "With the Tampa and
the Cronulla riots, they're all about this idea that some group somehow possesses
something," he says. "If you start from the viewpoint that all of
us travelled here, and none of us own this place, I think it would help things
a lot."
Conscious that some might regard the project as a leftie love-in, Shakthidharan
says: "It's not about having a show that says 'Howard's an arsehole'
or a show that says 'Aren't people beautiful?' We want to bring those things
together to see them in contrast with each other. There are parts of the show
where people who are 'left' will be challenged."
He admits that whatever audiences take away from the performance, it's not
going to change the world. "It's a show, so it's not going to create
legislative change. But unless you're a superhero politician or a really good
leader, the arts is one area that can bring different groups together."
Primarily, he wants to celebrate Australia's diversity. "It's unfortunate
how desperate our need is to do that now. We are built on migration - if we
can just get that idea across, I'd be so happy. The whole argument about who
is Australian and what makes somebody an Australian is a waste of time. What
makes us Australian is what makes us human beings."
Grounded opens at the Seymour Centre on Friday.
Grounded Flyer
----------------
February
2006: Drifting @ The Canberra National Multicultural Arts Festival
(which is it's full name, I believe).
Canberra
Times Preview (click for larger pic)
pre-opening
night chat; kishan our (single)
tabla player/matha-musician; cast photo with heavy-duty flash
never leave
your cello player happy and with a bottle of champagne; sound/image boys with
sugar/caffeine in the dark
Silly
files to right click and open in a new tab and leave to load while you browse
other pages:
Blowing off nerves on opening night - method
#1 (1.4 MB) and method
#2 (aka, stop filming me now, 2.7MB)
---------------
September 2005: Our first development show, Standing.
Albert David's
Solo, 11.3MB
(based on the first time Albert put on shoes and left the island
for his first trip to Sydney, age 17)
Photo Collage, Standing Tech Run
Standing
Media/Publicity: (designed by the wonderful Stuart Gibson @ Petergate)
Sydney
Morning Herald Preview
MIGRATION PATTERNS
Torres Strait Island dance meets Indian singing in this exploration of migrants'
lives.
BENITO Di FONZO reports
Immigration and multiculturalism are emotive and potentially explosive issues.
Politicians on both sides often use them as footballs to score votes. Yet
Mahesh Radhakrishnan, the musical co-ordinator of Standing, a work that mixes
song and dance with the stories of migrants, would like to put the politics
aside for the sake of art.
Whenever we talk about multiculturalism as more than just people dressing
up in traditional outfits and serving food, or whenever we talk of reconciliation
outside of Cathy Freeman carrying the Olympic torch, it seems as if we're
being overtly political," he says. "The very fact that what we're
trying to do is tell migrants' stories, and the whole question of whether
or not we're being political comes up, is indicative of that.
"I think the important thing is that if we are to have multiculturalism
as a concept then I, as the refugee activist son of a migrant living in Lidcombe,
should be able to stand shoulder to shoulder and converse with a Liberal voter
in Padstow or wherever. Those dialogues don't happen enough. We want to get
people talking to each other, no matter who they vote for."
Standing initiator Shakthidharan agrees. "We have this great diversity
of experience in Australia; we have this common identity as migrants. All
of us have arrived in this space at some time and forged a new sense of home
here," he says.
"The reason it's called Standing is that it looks at the different ways
that a body can stand up straight, be grounded."
Standing is the opening work for the Migrant Project, run by an eclectic artists'
collective including Indian Australian classical musicians, Maltese Spanish
dancers, as well as Torres Strait Island dancer and choreographer Albert David,
formerly of the Bangarra Dance Company.
A mix of music, dance and theatre, the Migrant Project will culminate in a
series of performances and exhibitions next year. "It doesn't have a
conventional narrative, but rather in the sense that the stories move in and
out of each other, and there's a framework that connects it all," Shakthidharan
says. "Each actor tells their personal story, but the opening and closing
are geared towards creating a language that covers all these."
Writer
performer Gary Lo says they want audiences to walk away with an understanding
about how difficult it can be to be a migrant. "Migrants are often portrayed
in the media as freeloaders, coming here and taking ourjobs, our welfare,"
Lo says. "My father had to work 16 hours a day, six days a week, and
he had to learn the language, and he had very little in terms of government
support. And that's part of the reason I wanted to do this piece to tell the
stories that haven 't been told."
Does Lo feel that multiculturalism has less mainstream support than it did
a decade ago? "We could go into a big political debate about that."
Well, go on then. "We'd rather let the theatre speak for itself than
show our political colours," he says.
Shakthidharan says Standing starts with an empty stage. "Then we drag
all these suitcases on, this baggage, the shit that everyone brings to Australia,"
he says. "It's a complex metaphor."
Shakthidharan approached David about collaborating on the project after working
with him on Lingalayam Dance Company's
production of Shakespeare's Tempest, in which David played Caliban opposite
visiting Indian dancer Astad Deboo. "Albert had a knack of making everyone
feel at ease in rehearsals and was very grounded," he says. "He's
also very open to new ideas. Our show starts with a dance inspired by a traditional
Torres Strait Island piece, accompanied by classical Indian singing and all
over a flamenco-inspired beat. "We showed him what we'd been getting
up to and he just jumped into it. But at the same time he's also been a kind
of mentor, especially in terms of the dance and physical work. "His own
ability is quite infectious he makes those around him feel more confident
in what they're doing,"
With 15 artists including actors, dancers, musicians, and a culturally diverse
band playing tabla, violin and cello, Standing explores eight tales of migrant
experience. "What we want to know is do communities speak with one another?"
Shakthidharan says. "We all arrived here at some point, we have that
in common, do we feel like we share a space together?" The response to
Standing will be used to develop later works. "That's why we're having
forums after the show, so that people can go, 'Yeah, that happened to me as
well', or, 'None of these stories are like me,"' Shakthidharan says.
"On our website (migrantproject.com.au) there's a blog, and on Wednesday
and Friday we're inviting the audience to talk to the artists about their
stories. This is just the end of this stage of development, not our final
work. We'll expand a lot from here."
Where Performance Space 199 Cleveland Street, Redfern
When Wednesday to September 24 2005
How much $10
Bookings 9698 7235
--------------------
September
2005: Earthdance
We
took our suitcases to the opening ceremony and will hopefully be there with
the band in 2006 - check out the website
for more information on what Earthdance is about (free,
worldwide party sounds good to me, kinda like musicfest
- check out the migrant project tango).
----------------------
May
2005: The Migrant Musicians travel to Uluru
Jamming with locals
- 9.3MB
Permission has been obtained for these videos and to our knowledge the images
contain no deceased peoples.
Some of the landscape in the area around Uluru
------------------------
April 2005: Some of our first ever rehearsals
Albert
'superman' David - Abung vs. the kids, 9.9MB
Rehearsals at Queen St. Studio; just starting out
