Ngapartji Ngapartji

When my shakuhachi practice-buddy Margaret told me there is a big shakuhachi part in Ngapartji Ngapartji, my first thought was:  What is a traditional Japanese instrument doing in an Indigenous play?

This shows how little I understood of the whole nature of the Ngapartji Ngapartji experience.  This piece of theatre, dance, mime, music, and cultural exchange joyfully draws on both global and local traditions.

The story begins with the Spinifex people of the Western Desert, specifically the parents and grandparents of key performer and co-creator Trevor Jamieson.  This story is utterly local, linked to real family members (some of whom are on stage) and real stretches of country - country now poisoned by British nuclear testing in the 1950s.  It is a story of dispossessed families working to love and heal each other.

And the story is also utterly global.  Into the mix come Hiroshima and Nagasaki; European war and the British government; and the young Tony Blair who lived downwind in Adelaide as a child, and whose mother, we are told, later died of a rare cancer.  There are Australian army personnel exposed without safety equipment, Hiroshima civilians, and global technologies reaching across continents.

In this mix the shakuhachi, played by master Andrew MacGregor, sits with great presence.  It creates a whole atmosphere for the parts in Japanese, for butoh dancer-performer Tomoko Yamasaki, whose Hiroshima mixture of dance, mime and words is one of the most powerful parts of the play.  But MacGregor’s playing also runs hauntingly throughout the whole show.

Shakuhachi solos are central to the music (directed by Damian Mason), ranging across traditional lullaby ‘Shimabara no Komoriuta’, and improvisations on traditional music, to Burt Bacharach, Bowie and Dylan.  There are also a number of Western Desert songs.  You know you are at something special when you watch a group of senior Pitjantjatjara women sing, in their language, Talking Heads’ ‘Once in a Lifetime’ (or ‘Wantiriyalani’) to the cadences of a shakuhachi!

The play is serious and its purpose, including encouraging the teaching of indigenous language (check their web-site to start learning! -http://www.ngapartji.org/) is serious - but it is often also extremely funny.  Jamieson is a gifted mimic, a hilarious mime.  It was amusing to watch a solemn Perth Festival audience struggle happily to sing ‘Heads and Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ in Pitjantjatjara.  It was even funnier to hear them giggle at Jamieson’s dead-pan evocation of an even more solemn, very naked, boomerang thrower.

It was inspiring to hear the shakuhachi take such a central place in this piece of contemporary Australian drama, and to do so with such flexibility, originality, and flair.

Ngapartji Ngapartji opens in Sydney on 12th January 2008.

Cecily Scutt
Shakuhachi beginner, Perth
2007

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review by Cecily Scutt, B.A.(Hons), PhD