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Dig the Didge

By Gord McLaughlin

15 June 2006 - (Eye Weekly Toronto) - When the Aboriginal dance company Red Sky Performance presents Shimmer, a collaboration by two indigenous choreographers from Canada and Australia, six semi-naked men in ecstatic motion will be one of the attractions.

Another will be Arthur "Turtle" Tamwoy, one of the world's leading players of the didgeridoo, the famed traditional instrument of Aboriginal Australia. Sandra Laronde, the artistic director of Red Sky, says it will be a rare treat for Toronto audiences, who seldom have occasion to hear the "didge," as she calls it. "When you think of it, it's just the sound of a eucalyptus tree that's been hollowed out, and it's just breath within that," says Laronde. "But that's a sound all people know, just like the drum.

I think it activates something within us." It will certainly be animating the all-male cast of Shimmer, a piece created by the internationally accomplished Canadian dance artist, Michael Greyeyes, and Albert David, an acclaimed Aboriginal dance artist from Torres Strait Island, north of Australia. It was Laronde who suggested the collaboration, which synthesizes Aboriginal traditions with a modern dance feel. She notes that indigenous dance traditions vary even within Canada or within Australia.

But she says there were certain similarities that helped in this creation. "The big similarity is the connection to land and where we're from, and how that is part of our identity as indigenous peoples," she says. "What was nice was right away we had a shared vocabulary, a shared language about indigenous culture and shared depths of understanding, of world view."

Source:Eye Weekly

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