Burning Daylight
Documentary | 2007 | ABCBurning Daylight is a dance/film project. The performance is set from late one night until dawn in a transit zone outside a notorious pub on a Broome-style Karaoke night. A series of contemporary dance scenes unfolds expressing the friction, local humour and cultural collision in the streets at night in the part of Broome known as ‘The Bronx’.
Action centers around the Asian style bar, where the Karaoke convention of accompanying song with video creates a platform for a series of multi screen short Noodle Western films, projected on both the front wall of the bar and the billboard. The films ‘shadow’ the onstage performers with historic Broome characters (such as the pearl diver, geisha, Aboriginal stockman).
Thus each live performer on stage has a ‘ghost’ or ‘double’ on screen. The multi screen short films explore classic inter-racial melodrama love stories against the backdrop of the White Australia policy deportations and forced removals for co habitation.
Burning Daylight sought to break new territory in the arena of contemporary Indigenous dance. The collaboration between Indigenous dancer and choreographer Dalisa Pigram and contemporary choreographer Serge Aimé Coulibaly from Burkina Faso, West Africa, in negotiation with the elders of the Yawuru community and the dancers in the project is exposed in the documentary as the backbone of the final work. The question of what constitutes contemporary Indigenous dance and how aspects of traditional movement forms can inspire contemporary practice are explored from the personal point of view of the dancers and choreographers.
