Franca Tamisari writes:
Dancing establishes relationship between people, country and ancestors as well as between the participants in a ceremony… In Yolngu dances ‘the body speaks — directly and in its totality’ of our being-in-the-world and being-with-others.[25]
Let me remind you of a part of the Wagilag Sisters story:
Frightened, the Sisters perform dances and sing sacred songs to deter the Python. Finally the Sisters drop in exhaustion, and Wititj is able to enter the hut and swallow them, their children and their dog.
The Sisters come to [their clansmen] in a dream and reveal the secrets of the sacred dances and songs they had composed in their efforts to stop the rain.[26] [my emphasis]
It is the Sunday after Garma has finished, and most of the Balanda have gone. My companions from the Music Forum have gone to a motel, but I choose to stay on at the campsite, not wanting to sleep inside if I can be in the bush. I have tried to get an earlier flight out, unsuccessfully. I have heard today there is to be a ceremony, but I don’t take too much notice, as I imagine it will be held deep in the bush, away from the eyes of myself, or other Balanda.
A handful of Balanda are still there at Gulkula, the Garma site, and about 300 Yolngu — gradually drifting into the bunggul [27] space.
It is hot in the sun. I have been collecting tea in large tin cans for the women, for Galarrwuy, for the women in the weaving shelter, back and forth in the heat to the kitchen, finding cups and sugar and milk to bring for them. It seems appropriate to tell Galarrwuy as I bring him tea, ‘Gulumbu says I am yeppa (sister)’. He has shown us the elaborate head-dresses and armbands that will be for the boys, woven with coloured feathers. ‘These must be special’, I say. ‘Special’, he acknowledges, as he gently puts them back into a bag. Increasingly, it is emerging, that the ceremony will take place here in the bunggul space, for two boys from two clans, one of them Galarrwuy’s son.
I go to join the women, as Gulumbu has invited me to do, sitting in the women’s shelter near where she is tending the fire. She leaves me in the care of her daughter, Dhambit. Gulumbu, I realise only later, is Galarrwuy’s sister. Kin establishes obligations, responsibilities, roles, everything. I observe that she has a leading role to play in the unfolding event.
The groups for singing and dancing have assembled on either side of the ceremonial space where the evening’s bunggul for each day of Garma have, it seems, been gradually building to this climax.
In shelters[28] on opposite sides of the performance space where the figures of Ganbulapula [29] and a great funeral log stand, sit the groups of the two related clans. To the accompaniment of yidaki and clapsticks, they sing, each clan alternating, and the men and women of each clan also take turns to move into the performing space to dance in the sequence occasioned by the ceremony.
Eventually, I am told, the two boys from the two clans will emerge from the bush at one side, accompanied by the older men of both clans, to be ushered into the space for the climax of the initiation ceremony and circumcision. They are being prepared, painted up, in Yirrkala, the Yolngu town some distance away.
I stand near Gulumbu, tired now of sitting still in one place with the women in the shelter for most of the day, as the singing and dancing go on, and preparations around the bunggul continue. A great turtle is being roasted in the ground. (Gulumbu calls to me to come and look). It will later be fed to the clan elders at the end of the ceremony.
Gulumbu is tending the fire that is to be used for the ‘smoking’ of the relatives,[30] and for boiling the ‘treatment’ for the boys, following the ceremony. I get up, stiff, and beginning to feel my body mightily in need of movement after four or five hours of sitting still. I have been saying to myself to just observe, not ask questions on this special day, to be grateful to be present (which I certainly am) and wait. I cannot sit still any longer. My body won’t allow it. I get up and walk across to Gulumbu at the fire. Standing opposite her as she stirs the ‘treatment’ over the fire, I begin to move my body a little as I see the women doing in the central sandy space.
I am itching to be dancing, restless from being still for so long.
Maarr, which manifests itself in the footprints left behind by ancestral beings in the landscape features, names, objects, designs, songs and dances — is not only ancestral power, it also refers to people’s innermost feelings of love and care, silent wishes ‘which make things happen’, concealed desires which are not expressed but which nonetheless are felt and met.[31] [my emphasis]
I have always loved to dance almost more than anything else, and it is always hard for me to be on the periphery of any dancing, painful to be looking in, unable to participate. I am unsure of the codes here. I have been sitting in the shelter observing, cautious of moving or of asking questions, conscious that I am privileged to just be here watching, conscious too, of Gulumbu’s having made my entry possible.
‘Can you teach me the dance?’ I ask Gulumbu. I do know this important principle of being in Yolngu country. Always ask. Be respectful. I have also been cautioned by a Balanda who has worked with Indigenous people for years: ‘Don’t ask more than once’. I can never know if what I am asking is crossing an unknown boundary. I am risking something, transgressing the boundary of being still, being quiet, just observing. It is risky business. But I trust this woman, her presence, her warmth. I have put on the armband she has made me. I am wearing the string with possum fur inserted into it she has given me.
Gulumbu looks up from her work of stirring the pot with the stringybark in it for the boys, straightens up from her task, then turns and gestures to the far side of the ground, ‘You go right around the outside to that other side. Keep right behind, and do the dancing there’.
With her blessing on the enterprise giving me permission and courage, I walk carefully around the outer rim of all the people and the activity in the middle of the sandy performance space, trying not to run in my impatience to be dancing — to where the group of women are seated in another shelter, as they rest in between each segment of dancing. A tremor in my body. I am moving at last — always for me, a favoured state.
When the women of this clan get up again to dance, I kick off my shoes and begin to mimic them, staying well back in the background from all the people.
I have positioned myself where I feel myself to be solitary, inconspicuous, unobserved. There are only Yolngu here, but their attention is focused on what is happening in front of me, in the bunggul. I am well behind them all. I am enclosed in concentration, focused on being present to just the dancing. I have the dancing group of women firmly in my sights through a kind of soft focus vision, imitating as closely as possible their every movement — allowing my body to dance the movements, being there, simultaneously as it is happening. It is something I have learned to do — to let go and mirror the movements, be the moving bodies there, with my body-mind, here.
So it is startling for me to hear what next takes place in the sequence of events.
I have been dancing for just a few short moments alone, but in unison with the group a little distance away in the performance space. The lead dancer turns her head, continuing to dance as she does so, and calls over her shoulder to me, ‘Come into the canoe with us!’
At the sound of her invitation, and without a nano-second’s hesitation I leap into the performance space (it feels in many ways a great ‘leap’), keeping my body and mind open to picking up the steps and the rhythms as they are done, moving with them. I am alert, but relaxed, excited, keeping my peripheral vision open, breathing into my belly and letting the body know, forgetting any thinking about this strange and daunting thing I may find myself doing, if the focus stumbles. It is my body which is the dancing, the knowing.
The reality of Yolngu performance, and especially dancing, is thus one of epiphany and transformation in which relationships with place and people are established, lived-in and embodied by the dancers.[32] [my emphasis]
I am aware of the other Yolngu women dancers, though I am focusing on the lead dancer. I am in line with the women. The lead dancer is in front of the other dancers, closer to the singers, and seems to emit the dance calls and to direct the dancers.
I am kicking up the dust with my feet touching the earth and sending dust rising as each foot turns in and up slightly to the inside with each step. (This is different from the men’s ‘hitting’ the earth with their feet). The dust itself reminds me of a liminality of body meeting the country.
As the meaning of footprints can be said to reside in between, that is in the social, political links and emotional bonds they fashion between places and ancestral events as well as people and country, the meaning of dancing is between the steps, between the participants of a ceremony, the inter-subjective space of desire and compassion, love and competition, that one enters through dancing.[33]
My hands follow the dancers’ movements. I bend slightly forward as they do, and turn as they do, re-enacting and re-embodying the journey of the Ancestors, re-storing it to the present, re-storying it in the present.
I am dressed all in black (with long white hair); they are in colourful dresses, their dark skin glistening in the sun. This country, this story, these people, this dancing, myself Balanda, here with Yolngu, now, all related, storied, in the dance.
My hands gesture the different aspects of being in the canoe. Just dancing, just following, being with the whole group of women, allowing my body to keep in tune with the lead dancer who gives signals for changes in the movements. I can just do it by focusing my attention and at the same time opening to the body and the vision of being with what the women are doing.
With a sharp shout the sequence is finished and we all retire to sit down and the women laugh and chat among themselves in language, a language I wish deeply to understand.
Corporeal connection is enacted and elaborated in the cosmology of Yolngu people in Northeast Arnhemland through images of bodily transformations, journeys and traces…the body as the ‘hinge’ between self and the world underlies the idea of ancestral power and the experiential character of Yolngu knowledge.[34] [my emphasis]
In the dance, the body provides a silent hinge between self, world, ancestral powers — through embodiment of ancestral power and ways of doing things. I was, though I could not reflect on it at the time, stepping directly into this embodying by being in the dance with the Yolngu women. No matter that I did not comprehend. I was enacting the story that was the story coming in the dance. I was in the canoe[35] with the women, travelling with them, in the in-between space and time between their culture and mine, between Ancestral Past and contemporary time at Gulkula and between that time and the writing now. Something of a liminal silent gap quality invoked this transforming — unplanned, unforeseen, startling.
My footsteps had taken me to Darwin and the meeting with Wandjuk so long ago, to Garma, and to meeting Gulumbu, Derrkngu, Rarriwuy, Wityana, Mandawuy, Raymattja, and other Yolngu people, and into the dancing. All of these events were connected it seemed to me, in tracings, in footsteps on the country, connected through a kind of silence, the in-between and ultimately in the embodiment that occurs as dancing the country.
I had traversed three kinds of silence to reach this place: the protocols of storytelling for Yolngu, the understanding of the parallelling of inside and outside knowing, and a culmination of stepping into and dwelling as ancestral spirit with the Yolngu women. All three kinds of silent knowing had coalesced and actualised in the dancing, and in the embodying of the stories in the land and of the land that had birthed them.
I left Garma with the dust of that place, Gulkula, on my feet.
‘We are here now; we are the voice of the serpent,’ say the Wagilag Sisters.
‘Now I give you my ceremonies’, says the Snake, with their voice. [36]
[25] Franca Tamisari, 2000, ‘Dancing the Land, the Land Dances through us’, Writings on Dance, no. 20, p. 31.
[26] The Wagilag Sisters Story, version in Caruana and Lendon, op. cit., p. 9.
[27] From bon and bun’kumu kneecap or knee; the knees of the performer moving up and down in the dance stepping are said to be talking (bonwanga). Tamisari, op. cit., p. 35.
[28] These are wood and bark-covered areas with sand on the floor.
[29] Ancestral figure associated with re-configuring of knowledge.
[30] Or cleansing.
[31] Tamisari, op. cit., p. 39.
[32] Ibid., p. 33.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid., p. 3.
[35] The canoe is part of the Djang’kau Sisters story, not the Wagilag Sisters, but it has an in-between, liminal quality which seemed part of my experience at the time.
[36] The Wagilag Sisters Story, version Lenore, Mirelle, Balanda poet who lived in the Northern Territory for a time with Indigenous people. She was unable to locate the sources she used for her more extensive poem when I phoned her in Adelaide.