Weaving Narratives

For renowned former Bangarra dancer and now choreographer/director Vicki Van Hout, the creative lure of the long grass was hard to resist. Indeed it has provided the inspiration and the title of her latest work. “I want to bring attention to the fact that there are no shelters up there,” she states. “In fact, the only real shelter is the evening ‘spin dry’. If people have had a little bit too much to drink or they’re a bit fearful for their own safety then they can get into the ‘spin dry’, which is the colloquial term for the nightly lock-up. Not gaol, just a lock-up that’s run by a philanthropic group.”

A lock-up which, as it stands, only has room for 38 people a night; a tiny fraction of the top end’s homeless blackfella population. “When you put it in those terms, well, it is quite appalling, but at the same time we’re in the middle of a paradise. It’s not like Sydney, where you see people lining up outside the National Library. So this show is kinda shining a spotlight on this paradoxical situation; but I’m trying not to cast judgement.”

 “It is dire but people get by. Culture still happens and there is a community feeling and camaraderie.”

Indeed it is immediately apparent that Van Hout speaks about Long Grass with a grace and humour that belies the shock/horror headlines. “It is dire but people get by. Culture still happens and there is a community feeling and camaraderie.”

While insisting that she is not looking to “romanticise” the situation, Van Hout has clearly adopted a wide screen philosophical view. “Is this idea of community and valour just tied up with the commercial trappings of goods that we own? Can the person with the least inspire the most? It seems to me that at the bleakest times, this is when people rally.”

Van Hout has long been fascinated by the stories of the Yolngu clans of Arnhem Land. With Long Grass the choreographic connection is based around the Yolngu women’s practice of parallel walking. (Ordinarily, our walk is ‘oppositional’, meaning that our arms swing laterally opposite to our legs.)

“Even if the dance looks as though it doesn’t have a pure Indigenous aesthetic, it does begin its investigation in specific languages, but by the same token I don’t want to just out and out replicate them. This work has a different dynamic focus and tries to build a new vocabulary from that.”