Cut The Sky

Climate change raises so many immense and challenging global complexities, that a physical theatre company is naturally overstretched in offering a meaningful perspective in barely an hour.

Marrugeku is well placed to give it a go, as an innovative yet decades-old company of Indigenous and non-Indigenous players, with one foot in Broome WA and another in Sydney. 

Cut the Sky is here revived after premiering at the 2015 Perth Festival.  It’s about climate refugees dressed in plastic rubbish, huddling in hovels or incessantly tossed around the stage by storms. They emerge vaguely as mining workers, a geologist and a sex worker, all with little agency except perhaps the protester, summoning up demonstrations in 1980 against mining on sacred Noonkanbah land along Fitzroy River in WA.

Edwin Lee Mulligan from nearby Nyikina and Walmajarri Country delivers his own poetry as a displaced traditional owner, while singer Ngaiire Pigram gives voice to stirring songs from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Buffalo Springfield and her own. Both however are under-projected, words often unheard and songs not strongly forged into the narrative.

Some words and songs of course are in language.  But reflecting the work’s underdeveloped dramaturgy, both singer and narrator often wander aimlessly around the huge old gas pipe which is central to Stephen Curtis’ design.  Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya’s stunning back projections of landscapes, spinifex and destruction has an emotional impact to match the score. 

The dancers’ running and panic brings a kinetic energy to the show but the thrashing is too often generalised and the reaching arms from grounded bodies too repetitive, in the choreography by Dalisa Pigram and Serge Aimé Coulibaly.   

Director Rachael Swain achieves moments of moving drama, especially in solos, from the dancers and a powerful welcome climax of rain by the end.  She and Dalisa Pigram are the long-time co-artistic directors of Marrugeku and have been applauded for earlier creations. Odd then, that such a decade-old and toured work like Cut the Sky should still require basic surgery.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Prudence Upton