Review: CUT THE SKY COMPELS CHANGE IN CONTEMPORARY CLIMATE CREATION at Sydney Opera House, Drama Theatre

How do Australia's native owners dream climate change? How do this country's custodians explain a destructive phenomenon brought about by the disastrous decisions of those who have worked hardest to displace them? How do the communities with the deepest knowledge of the land we live on see and understand its continued resilience and adaptation to what crimes are inflicted every second of every day? In a performance so compelling it made me question why I was wasting time watching it instead of writing more-than-firm letters to local government, Cut the Sky is undeniably unmissable.

Marrugeku is a Broome-based contemporary dance company fusing traditional narrative with modern themes, clear styling, original music and digital storytelling to make a raw and relatable art form. Cut the Sky is a piece divided into five acts, each featured the poignant poetry of Edwin Lee Mulligan. These acts take place in the sometimes desolate, sometimes enriched landscape of Australia for which many Australians feel no empathy for. Land undressed by buildings, civilisation or automobiles, land which is devastated and deforested to sustain resourcing for seven areas on its coasts. In an effort to generate this relatability, Cut the Sky introduces us to four characters: the miners (Eric Avery and Josh Mu), the sex worker (Dalisa Pigram) and the white protester (Miranda Wheen). As they weave a spasmodic and atrophied story choreographed by Dalisa Pigram and Serge Aimé Coulibaly, we are brought into the action by Mulligan's verse and the vocal powers of Ngaire Pigram integrating original songs and some potent covers to thread the message of changing our destruction whatever way we can into our daily context.

Highlights of the performance included Dalisa Pigram's wanton solicitation piece, inviting and demanding love and violence simultaneously which, when juxtaposed against the environmental themes, brought more insight into how our Indigenous peoples are linked in identity to the land that we (and by we I mean invader-Anglos with all due or undue respect) and our ancestors have changed so dramatically. Thereby, the anguish of Aboriginal peoples becomes clearer, it is in some ways a communicable anguish of the land, a way that non-Indigenous society can interact with Australia and see what erratic pain we've caused not just upon land, but on people.

Although some of the content stumbled into the realm of being obtuse or preachy, and the set pieces felt redundant in all but hiding smoke machines, this performance is a must-see for its truly inspired position on tackling this serious issue for our planet. Where many performers seek to pull us from the future from the past, Marrugeku have chosen to push us from the future with the present. How does animistic spirituality interpret plastic? What does ancient tradition interpret from uranium mining?

The video content developed by Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya of Desire Machine Collective played a fantastic part in the piece, particularly during Act Four "History Repeats", where the audience finally loosened up at the prospect of deflecting responsibility to our grandparents. Thankfully Wheen's final piece reapportions that to the audience in a cleansing final act that I hope distills our action going forward rather than washes it from our minds.

Support art that is potent and has a message that we can actually take into our homes, teach our children. Take your children. This is 100% worth the ticket, your time and your mind.

Tickets can be purchased at Sydney Festival site
Find more information on Marrugeku's website

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