The world premiere season of Mutiara debuted as part of the Sydney Festival 2024 (which runs from 5 to 28 January). Performed by Marrugeku, an indigenous dance theatre company based in Broome, Western Australia, mutiara is Malay for pearl.
The Mutiara experience begins before entering the theatre: the foyer of the Seymour Centre in Sydney has been transformed into a miniature museum, with exhibits of pearl shells, banners providing an educational history on the Aboriginal and Malay people’s involvement in the pearling industry, and a silent, black and white film of pearling in Broome in the late 1940s projected onto a wall. We learn that the pearling industry was ruthless, involving the forced labour of Aboriginal and Malay people. In the early 20th century, Broome was at the heart of a booming global industry, and many pearl divers died.
Once entering the theatre, the centre stage is filled with a column of hundreds of thick, textured ropes cascading from the ceiling. Then, in the front, stage-left corner, a pile of pearl shells, their natural luminescence peaked by a spotlight. From the stage sides, murky, opalescent light filters through, ushering the audience into the submerged world of the pearl divers, known as saltwater cowboys.
The cast consists of four performers, all with shared Malay heritage. Zee Zunner, a graduate from London Contemporary Dance School, and a dancer with Hofesh Shechter company, is a standout. Zunner’s roots are in traditional Malay dance, and her movement is both fluid and articulate. The first time we see Zunner, she emerges from the middle of the ropes, long hair flowing over her face, and limbs pouring and rolling like the waves off the Broome coast. Regrettably, the choreography (Dalisa Pigram) in Mutiara, doesn’t allow Zunner to showcase her full prowess. Overall, the movement vocabulary in this piece is bare boned, tending more towards elaborate staged movement than strong contemporary dance. As Mutiara focuses on themes of connection and disconnection, I would have liked to see more interaction between the dancers themselves, rather than what appeared to be multiple solos danced in parallel.
The narrative is driven by visuals and voiceovers, over movement. Credit goes to set designer, and visual artist, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, who has created an arresting visual spectacular (as well as lighting by Aiden Brennan). The centrepiece of Abdullah’s set is the waterfall of thick, textured ropes, which become such a vital part of the performance that they are almost a fifth ensemble member. They reference not only the rig of the lugger boats in pearling, but, once submerged, the diver’s umbilical cord, lifeline, and only form of communication from the isolation of the seabed to the surface; the ropes are liminal, a contiguous zone connecting opposing worlds. Throughout the show, they’re manipulated into different configurations and used as a projector screen for the clips of pearling. Tableaux of men and boats working on the ocean bob against the textured coils. We see divers suited up in diving suits, helmets screwed on, four fathoms of pressure, a single rope looped through to tether, dropped into the vast, salty ocean (never to be quickly removed, due to ‘the bends’). Against the water, the divers look small and vulnerable; watching footage of them under the pervasive, rolling sea, it’s impossible not to feel for them: claustrophobic, pressurised, and alone.
Themes of submersion permeate this performance, not only literally with regard to diving, but culturally. A voiceover speaks on behalf of the Commonwealth government, discouraging Asiatic people having children with Aboriginals, purportedly in the name of ‘native welfare’. The images of the divers under the endless expanse of the ocean speaks to this: it’s not just they, as individuals, who are weighted under fathoms of pressure, but the Aboriginal, Torres Strait and Malay cultures, surrounded by racist colonial forces that view their labour as cheap, their lives as disposable and their procreation with other races as ‘culturally deleterious’. Mutiara represents people whose cultural narratives have been made subterranean by force.
While this is a compelling story, about connections to land and sea, the coast as a threshold between the two, and colonial exploitation of resources (both human and natural), the difficulty with reviewing this piece is that dance is not the main vehicle used for telling this story. With stronger choreography, the audience would benefit from embodying the story of the pearl divers, rather than largely voyaging the visual surface.
