Ochre Contemporary Dance Company’s latest show is double-bill feature two works from some of the most respected local dance performers.

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3.3 portrays a successful Indigenous dancer, on the brink of an international career, thrown into a holding cell because of his skin colour and torn between two cultures. Ian Wilkes dances the feature role, choreographed and originally created by Indigenous dance legend Michael Leslie who performs with him in this new adaptation.

Beyond, is desribed as a mesmerising and powerful new dance work performed by Floeur Alder and choreographed by State Living Treasure Chrissie Parrott.

The dancer at the heart of 3.3 is torn between excelling on the white fella’s world stage or staying on his country and cultivating his community and culture.

Ultimately, he just wants to dance. If he goes the blackfella way he breaks whitefella way, if he goes whitefella way he breaks blackfella law.

The young man is caught in the middle. The terrible legacy of this dilemma is that the young black fella believes gaol is also a rite of passage for young men in his community. Aboriginal people represent 3.3% of the total population, yet more than 28% of Australia’s prison population.

The young man communicates his anger, frustration and people’s history via 100 original dance steps described by words from the Gamilaraay and Noongar languages.

Joining him in the cell is his mentor, Michael Leslie, who has deliberately got himself arrested so he can talk some sense into the young man. The older man implores the younger man to stay on the right track to succeed in the white fella world, to claim what is rightly his.

The younger man has heard this dialogue before, to him nothing has changed, he and his community are still being persecuted. He questions the point of succeeding in his chosen career in a white world and wonders how things can change for the better. What have his mentor’s achievements meant to the community at large?

Ochre Contemporary Dance Company have shared that they are thrilled to present Michael Leslie, doyen of Indigenous Dance, in his first performance in decades.

Sixty-year-old Leslie was a poor kid from Moree who fled to Sydney to become a dancer, won a Churchill Fellowship, spent seven years in New York with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, choreographed Bran Nue Dae and established the Michael Leslie Foundation to mentor indigenous youth across rural WA.

This work is the first to feature his Aboriginal Dance Method, developed as a Masters Thesis, a fusion of African American and contemporary dance, ballet and physical theatre.

Leslie performs alongside Ian Wilkes, master of Noongar Dance. Indigenous musician David Milroy composes under the direction of Mark Howett, who is also designer for the production. The work is invited to the Berlin Be-Bop Festival in 2019. 

3.3 is a work of Dance Theatre, exploring contemporary and traditional dance, text, language, music and comedy.  It is an explosive contemplation of culture and survival… and why has jail become a rite of passage for so many young indigenous kids.

Ochre’s Artistic Director, Mark Howett he was excited to bringing Leslie’s latest work to the stage, explaining that it had been quite a journey to get to this stage.

“It started off with me meeting up with Michael when we went to Kalgorlie when we did the Kaya tour, which was the first show I did with Ochre in 2016.

“It was around the time of the Kalgoorlie riots, and we opened up the doors and performed with Michael’s youth company which is from the Laverton and Leonora regions, all these indigenous kids doing traditional dance, they performed before us.

“Micheal told me that he’d just finished his thesis and it included a 15 minute performance, and I said he should work with us.”

The plan changed though when Michael Leslie injured his shoulder ruling him out of being able to take on the role as originally planned. Rather than postpone the show, they decided to expand the show and bring in company dancer Ian Wilkes to perform the part, while Leslie takes on a different part in the production.

The challenge for Ian Wilkes was learning to perform Leslie’s style of choreography in a short period of time, and understand the deeply personal work. A challenging task given the two dancers very different backgrounds.

“Ian’s not a classical or contemporary trained dancer, he’s a traditional, so he’s had to learn all these all thse classical and contemporary moves as part of Michael’s piece, and we some of that within the show as well.” Howett said.

Beyond is the result of original Ochre Contemporary Dance member Floeur Alder commissioning Award-winning Choreographer Chrissie Parrott to make a solo work. It is 30-minute transformative  solo that takes dancer and audience on a transformative journey. A poetic and surreal work that asks the performer to uncover the ‘pure’ form that often lies dormant in classical or contemporary dance – to go beyond the conventional.

The double-bill dance performance is accompanied by a screening of Snake Dance, a ten-minute film made by Mark Howett during Ochre’s residency in late 2017 with the Daksha Sheth Dance Company, based outside Trivandrum in Kerala India.

The work is a reaction to the dance development and content discovered during the project. In Sand the performers transform into powerful dancer/deities who struggle with their godly powers and ancient wisdoms, trying to help make sense of our modern world.

The show is on until Sunday 3rd June at the Subiaco Arts Centre. Tickets are available from the Perth Theatre Trust. 

OIP Staff