KOHL AND HUMMINGBIRD

Cross Culture

Dawn Jackson will perform Hummingbird/Kohl at the Midland Junction Arts Centre, from Thursday, January 19, until Sunday, January 22. Tickets are available at kulcha.com.au, or by phoning (08) 9336 4544.

A WAAPA trained dancer who has performed with the WA Ballet and the Kalika Dance Company, as well as training in Indian dance during a residency with Dr Ileana Citaristi, Dawn Jackson is back in WA to perform her new piece Hummingbird, and her WA Dance Awards nominated solo piece Kohl.

Hummingbird was co-written by her collaborator Lee West, and in fact it was he who inspired the piece. “It really started with one of Lee’s songs,” says Jackson. “His song Hummingbird has this kind of imagery, about landscapes and the bird and the flower. And Lee used to be an Aboriginal dancer, so we just started to play with this idea of the musician and the dancer.

“My training as a dancer meant that I was kind of mapping his song with movement. I trained in Indian dancing many years ago, and the musician would actually walk around with the dancer [while performing]. In dance now, you see more of the musician sitting on the side, just accompanying the dancer.

“So we went back to this old, old tradition of the musician walking around with the dancer. Lee is actually a mover, a dancer, because it’s not easy to walk and sing and play guitar. But he was very obliging and we moved around this little spacial pattern, and we performed it at the Perth detention centre, we’ve been doing some performing with the guys in there.

“It was this little piece that translates to so many different environments.”

Originally a ten-minute dance piece, Jackson and West have since received funding to develop the work into a 30 minute piece.

“It’s contemporary, but it sort of has this familiar feel with the rhythm, and the guitar. As a dancer, to work with live music is fantastic.”

The performance combines storytelling of different racial histories, with a landscape created by West’s music and Jackson’s movements. West hails from the Pilbara, having moved to Perth when he was a young boy, and Jackson’s parents are English immigrants.

“For me, what I like to do in my work is create a series of duets. I like to just meet someone and comment on Australia’s cultural diversity and engage with the multiculturalism community.

“I think it’s something really important to reflect on, as a migrant. I like to do that on a personal level, because it’s all about breaking down stereotypes.”

After West and Jackson discussed how they could make their separate stories part of a piece, deciding that the hummingbird could bring their stories together - she, the English immigrant who learned Indian dance; he, the Aboriginal who was moving his traditions into his contemporary world.

“When Lee wrote the song, he wrote it about the bird and the flower, and how the bird had a really unique relationship with the flower, and how it always comes back to the same flower. I thought it was really interesting and I started researching them, and they capture people’s imagination.

“In terms of choreography, I started studying their wings; they have this incredible aerodynamic that means they can move around quickly and hover in mid-air, which is a phenomenon in nature. I was using that choreographically so the hum of the wings was the beating of my feet.”

After further research, Jackson discovered that the hummingbird was the symbol of the environment, which she took as a sign to include an environmentally friendly edge to the show.

“For me, when I travelled up north, seeing that landscape... The land that we have here, and how we walk on it, the Aboriginal culture is so much about sustainability. It’s about me realising too, how desperate we are in Australia for protection from the environment and to learn the proper ways to treat it.”

Jackson says that when she is choreographing a piece, particularly one with such a strong message, she looks for difference, purpose and engagement.

“Engaging with people with different cultures allows their viewpoint to be change. It allows you to change your outlook, if you let it.”

It was a similar mentality that inspired Jackson to put together her award-nominated work, Kohl.

“Kohl started when I received money to go to a residency in India, so I went to Orissa and trained. It was the first time I’d ever been to India and I had that whole culture shock, and it was a real struggle and real cultural shift for me.”

Along with director Paea Leach, Jackson worked to create a piece that enveloped many different cultures.

“She had a lot of experience with contemporary practices, but hadn’t done Indian dance in her past. So we collaborated on this work, applying a lot of choreography l practices with it.

“It was a very personal experience - a lot of it was improvisations, what I experienced in India, and the whole struggle with two different things coming together at once. It was about moving through these physical textures.

“It was immediately recognised as something quite special.”

Bringing in a third collaborator, Holly Boyton - a costume designer, capped off the trio and it was then that the work was fully produced in 2009, when it was nominated for Most Outstanding Design and Most Outstanding Performance at the 2009 WA Dance Awards.

After the performances of her critically acclaimed works are complete, Jackson will be heading off to work on her next inspired project.

“I have another project called Cotton, which looks at the combined history of the British and the Indian histories around the cotton mills in Northern England. I’m working with an Indian-Malaysian dancer, and we just finished our second development.

“We’ve just been invited to perform it at Presten, in the UK, so now I’m just busy getting funding for that one.”

With her enjoyable shows that aren’t afraid to change their audience’s viewpoints, it doesn’t sound like she’ll have too much trouble.

_TARA LLOYD