You might remember Ghenoa Gela as a funny, bright and
engaging Casca in Bell Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar last year. Here’s a performer who knows how to grab
an audience.
My Urrwai is more subtle and personal stuff, about family
and culture and gender and stories and hard questions about prejudice and
attitudes. She’s a Rockhampton born Torres Strait Islander and initially she
tells her story through Torres Strait dance and language. She makes the
audience experience language and gestural blindness at the beginning. Finally
she explains in English.
She tells of intensive schooling in the dance traditions of
the Torres Strait from her family but pretty intensive schooling in the
Christian religion as well. Her first name was changed by a teacher who could
not deal with its original pronunciation.
She goes to visit the Torres Strait and is shunned by some women
in a kitchen because she isn’t seen as one of them. The door is closed on her.
That’s balanced by her successful performance of a particular dance. Her parents made sure she had the dances
and the language. Prejudice comes out in complex ways.
Encounters with cops and people selling ballet shoes to a
woman with larger feet (off to the men’s section…) are set against her cultural
strengths.
She pulls in audience members too to be part of the story.
At the Friday matinee where there were students present it was a couple of them
who found themselves on the stage. The handling of these episodes was done with
a sensitive good humour.
And she impresses upon any post 1788 Australians that there
is a hell of a lot more still to this country and its cultures than the old
school social studies books ever taught us.
It’s a pity that My Urrwai was only able to play two
performances here.
Ghenoa Gela is a teller of stories to be watched. And to be
heard.
Alanna Maclean
