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"Aboriginal people are invisible and they are a minority, and us Torres Strait Islander people, we are the minority of the minority. We are invisible."
Artist, storyteller and dancer Ghenoa Gela is a Koedal (crocodile) and Waumer (frigate bird) woman who wants to educate people who may not even realise there are two First Nations peoples of Australia.
Torres Strait stories are rarely seen on main stages in Sydney, which makes Belvoir St Theatre's decision to host back-to-back performances by Torres Strait Islander artists this summer all the more remarkable.
Gela's show, My Urrwai, unfolds through 20 carefully directed and curated stories that have defined her life so far, and focuses on her experience of otherness, identity politics and cultural continuity.
My Urrwai doesn't have a direct translation. It can mean "my spirit", "my style", or can be considered as the embodiment of who you are. The phrase is from the Kala Lagaw Ya language, indigenous to the central and western Torres Strait Islands.
In one moment during the performance, Gela plucks audience members from their seats and has them take part in re-enactments of low moments in her life, such as being intimidated and racially profiled at a Sydney train station.
Gela teaches her audience how to act and the realities of being black in Australia, citing the unjust deaths of TJ Hickey and Cameron Doomadgee, and Sheila Oakley's blinding by a police taser.
"Don't run, shut your mouth, make no sudden movements and remember to breathe."
"You're lucky though, because these things will never happen to you," she says, before gently ushering an audience member back to the darkness of the theatre.
Keeping culture alive
In many ways, My Urrwai is the perfect counterbalance to Jimi Bani's My Name is Jimi in Belvoir's Upstairs Theatre.
Audiences again are invited to take part, but in a spirit of playful optimism and a sense of shared responsibility to keep culture alive.
The script was inspired by Bani's conversations with his late father Dimple, who passed away during the writing of the performance.
The much-loved actor reveals he is the imminent ninth chief of the Wagadadam tribe on Mabuiag Island. Bani takes on the responsibility and work of his father and grandfather to "keep the fire burning" and ensure that generations to follow will recognise and claim ownership of their culture.
He calls upon his actual family members, spanning four generations, to join him onstage and challenges his teenage son to use technology to reclaim his culture and sense of place.
Bani follows a long line of proud Torres Strait chiefs who have championed and fought for future-proofing solutions to preserve Wagadagam culture and language.
"I see my nieces, nephews, brothers, sisters and they don't really know where they come from," he says.
"The past must exist in the present to create the future. We are not a dying culture … life without culture is life without life."
Like Gela, Bani seamlessly swaps English for Kala Lagaw Ya and at times Torres Strait Creole. Both performances ponder the ramifications of colonialism on their identities, culture, language and people.
Gela says she was inspired to perform My Urrwai after seeing Bani's performance.
"There are people out there who need to hear [our stories] vocalised. Sometimes you must do — instead of being silent," she says.
Bucking expectations of black theatre
My Urrwai and My Name is Jimi are important inclusions in Sydney Festival artistic director Wesley Enoch's Blak Out program.
The former director of Queensland Theatre Company says although the stories of the Torres Strait are relatively hard to find in Sydney, they are more prominent in Queensland, where there is a larger populations of Islanders.
For Enoch, the key to seeing more stories from the Torres Strait is tied to the way black theatre is viewed in Australia.
"I remember in the '90s there was this push to get some sense of definition of what black theatre needed to be — is it political, is it community-focused, is it all Aboriginal written and directed, what forms of control have we got?" he says.
"In the end, any definition stopped certain things from happening, rather than helping."
Enoch says the significant talking point shouldn't be that Gela and Bani are telling personal stories, but rather that they have sovereign control and ownership over their stories.
He also thinks non-Indigenous readers of black theatre need to change, as many believe Indigenous artists "cannot create something that is metaphorical or new and that the authenticity of story must make it personal".
"It's a kind of primitivism that says we aren't sophisticated thinkers and artists, and that we can't transform out of our sense of cultural heritage — that we can't be anything more than who we are. It's a form of racism," Enoch says.
"Artists feel limited by what has gone before, but I think that for First Nations artists in Australia now — everything is open, just get in there and have a go."
My Urrwai runs from January 19-February 4 at Belvoir St Theatre as part of Sydney Festival.
Ghenoa Gela features in episode two of ABC iview series The Movement.
Topics: performance-art, arts-and-entertainment, theatre, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, community-and-society, aboriginal-language, languages, indigenous-culture, community-and-multicultural-festivals, sydney-2000, torres-strait-islands
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