iDIDJ Australia Didgeridoo Cultural Hub

If anyone would like to take a look at the proposal for the grant that I just received, please feel free to email me, and I will gladly send it to you.

The proposal is entitled: "Silver Screen, Red Earth: The Impact of Digital Media Technology on the Aboriginal Revitalization Movement in Northeast Arnhem Land, Australia."

-Simon

Dear Lundu/Friend,

We enclose a link to a recent article about The Mulka Project.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/st ... 47,00.html

If you are interested in being included on a mailing list to update you on Yirrkala happenings please hit the reply button and we will include you on future mail outs.

Apologies for cross posting or any other annoyance.

Thanks.

Will Stubbs


Co-ordinator
Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre
Yirrkala NT 0880
08 89871701
www.yirrkala.com

Traditional twist to modern medium in Yolgnu culture
Nicolas Rothwell | April 07, 2009

DANCING to a sinuous rhythm, his face painted in white ochre, wearing a woman's dress, Bawaltja Munungurr, a traditional leader from northeast Arnhem Land, grins and accelerates his steps. Strange things are happening around him. Women, clutching fluffy toy pets, wearing oversize dark glasses, are swaying in support; other men, their faces painted white too, hover on the edges of the dance ground while trance music plays, for this is a video, made by the Yolngu people of Yirrkala, recording one of the less known features of Top End ceremony.

What on earth is happening? Bawaltja has an explanation, but let's begin with something about the clip itself, child of the ambitious Mulka Project, the first systematic attempt by a remote community Aboriginal art centre to move into the field of video arts.

Midway through 2007, at the Garma festival near Yirrkala, some short, experimental films made by young Yolngu film workers were premiered. A year later, a clip made by the same team to illustrate the story of a new bark painting was submitted as part of an entry to the Telstra Indigenous Art Award and won a prize. By this stage, the Mulka Project was attracting attention not just as a spin-off from Yirrkala's Buku-Larrnggay art centre but as a cultural venture in its own right. It had funding; it was supplying footage for exhibitions and commercial film productions; it was beginning to function as an archive of cultural heritage footage, films taken by anthropologists during previous decades and available for viewing in a special public booth in a new extension of the centre.

The Mulka Project is being guided by its co-director Wukun Wanambi, one of the most admired artists of Buku-Larrnggay and a leader of the Marrakulu clan. In its initial phase, Randin Graves, a Californian Fulbright scholar researching the yidaki (didgeridoo), helped shape the venture and its ambitious aims. But Mulka's energy comes from the young. During its first year it had 15 youthful casual staff drawn from various Yolngu communities and 40 senior Yolngu working intermittently as film crew, translators or research consultants.

As other Aboriginal organisations are glumly cutting back, Mulka hopes "to build a larger permanent staff as more Yolngu get experience with us, see the products of the work so far and learn the potential of digital media", the centre says. That early promise has already been fulfilled in the form of a pacy show reel DVD of the first Mulka clips. Some of the material can be viewed on the art centre's website or on YouTube, the communication portal of choice these days in Arnhem Land.

Nhama! Short films from Yirrkala, volume1 collects an intriguing range of Yolngu-directed dramas and mini-documentaries, including a look at the new women's healing centre in Yirrkala; a rap video on the charms of the country; re-enactments of ancestral legend; and a long clip of the Chooky Dancers, the teenage ensemble from nearby Elcho Island, going through their up-tempo steps at Yirrkala basketball court, while camp dogs wander in and out of shot. Plans for further cultural video projects are well advanced in the wake of song cycle recording sessions that have captured the voices of three generations of singers from one clan.

Mulka has held workshops for its young staff, overseen by film-making group Community Prophets, which will continue this dry season. Last April, director Tom Murray and cinematographer Bonnie Elliott spent time in Yirrkala, acting as mentors to young Mulka project workers, and shooting scenes for the film Two Brothers at Bulungani Nungatji, a story inspired by repatriated audio and directed by two clan leaders at the Dhalinybuy outstation.

From the perspective of community leaders such as Wanambi, it is this capacity to reach back into the past and explore recordings of old times that forms the heart of Mulka. A large video and audio archive is at the core of the project. Its office quarters, with their rows of computer screens, serve as a window on traditional ceremonies and everything tradition-minded Yolngu people hold dear. The new annexe houses a server that has access to an iTunes library, with sound and video, and can tap into the Northern Territory Library's database, replete with still images. Anyone in Yirrkala can walk in and view public material from these archives or see them on a 3m wide screen in the auditorium. Older Yolngu come in during the earlier part of the day; from 3pm onwards, Mulka is flooded with enthusiastic schoolchildren, the production staff and media professionals of the future the project hopes to create.

Since the Yolngu and their ceremonies have been a focus of near-obsessive interest to anthropologists and art lovers for the best part of a century now, there is rich material: the photographs taken by Donald Thomson during his field trips through the coastal region in the 1930s; the 58 films made by the Australian-American expedition in 1948; later audio recordings; up to the minute television news reports. Often the continuities between the life ways recorded in these various forms of media are as striking as the differences.

There is a sense in which the Yolngu are always on stage, always performing, always acting out themselves, and the Buku-Larrnggay Art Centre's success stems almost as much from this self-dramatising aspect of the local culture as from the subtlety and intricacy of its art. The Yolngu not only create their art, dance and music to be seen by outsiders, to share and demonstrate the depth of their culture; they do so because performance lies at the core of their sense of family and self. The timetable of their year is set by ceremonies of life and death; they are most themselves when dancing, when in song, when the paths of their lives are following those trodden by long-vanished ancestors.

Hence the richness and inventiveness of today's Yolngu dance and the ways being found to record and perpetuate it. Hence, too, its stranger reaches, such as the traditional cross-dressing performance captured on Dhapi Dance Madness, the new Mulka project clip. But is it really traditional for a man in a ceremony to cavort about, dancing in distinctly female fashion, while support performers, clutching plastic shovels and feather boas, snake their way across the dry grass clearing?

As it turns out, the answer is yes. When the dhapi ceremony for the circumcision of young boys is under way, as it was last June at the remote homeland of Boruwuy, tensions are high, the constant pressure of the sacred is a burden, the need for release mounts every day. Towards the end of the ceremonial period, the whole community begins "acting crazy" in a quest for relief. As Munungurr explains, recollecting the event at the Buku-Larrnggay gallery, "I was dancing in a skirt because I don't feel ashamed to dance exactly like my mother, who was a great dancer." Cross-dressing to produce laughter is itself a custom in local ceremony, "being funny for the old people, singers and women". Along with Bawaltja, 11 female performers were on the dance ground, swaying, "acting crazy", wearing masks, clutching toy children, hiding, gyrating and grimacing. There is clear testimony to the seriousness lying inside this wild humour: the cameraman chosen to film the event was Mulka's director, Wanambi. There is also a clue to its lightness and allusiveness: the backing soundtrack used for the clip is Madonna's Ray of Light.

"She would totally give permission" for its use, the DVD credits boldly announce, and here again the Yolngu are surely right.