I Am Eora Update

By Lindy Hume, Festival Director

These are momentous weeks for Sydney Festival as we focus our gaze on the 2012 Festival. By the end of September the inevitability of the forthcoming Festival hits home as the brochure pages lining up, the launch is in the schedule, brutal decisions have been made and everyone is walking around the office faster. Earlier this month, we had a milestone as director Wesley Enoch led a public work-in-progress showing of one of our 2012 Festival centrepieces, I Am Eora. This project is unusually significant for us because of its scale and ambition (30+ artists), because it tells important Sydney stories from an urban Aboriginal perspective, because it brings together an amazing cast and creative team - mainly Aboriginal, but some non-Aboriginal artists too, because it has been developed with Aboriginal community involvement all the way, and because of the amazing breadth of support and community interest I Am Eora has already generated.

Wandering in and out of the creative development process over 14 days, I could sense the creative momentum building. One of the many great benefits of this job is that it that enables me to sit in on conversations between Festival artists – to listen as Wesley reads to veteran actor Jack Charles an excerpt of Bennelong’s plaintive letter to Mrs Phillips in London, to hear their discussions about the law of payback, to see the very first broad strokes of the design and watch the legendary producer Wendy Blacklock wrangling her rehearsal schedule around the next morning’s photo shoot.

About 50 community members and supporters of the project gathered in the Red Box in Lilyfield to hear Wesley outline his ideas and the themes underpinning the production, to see some initial design thoughts from Stephen Curtis and to hear Dave Leha (Radical Son), Nardi Simpson and Kaleena Briggs (the Stiff Gins) in a first tantalising glimpse of the show’s potential. This was also the first gathering of the Associate Producers, those wonderful people who immediately answered our call for financial support for this project and reassured us that this idea had all the resonance with the broader community that we had hoped it would. (It’s also interesting to note that our Associate Producers initiative has been cited in the media and various national forums as cutting edge fundraising, so look out for more of this kind of thing in the future…)

Normally a creative development period of a new Australian work - always a time of great fluidity, risk and fragility for the artists involved; a space for experimentation and exploration - is a strictly closed process. The I Am Eora gathering was very different, with the whole creative team excited to share the first stages of their journey with the community it celebrates. I Am Eora is as much a philosophy as a show. It invites audiences, whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous, to contemplate Sydney’s contemporary identity through the spiritual legacy of three of Sydney’s Aboriginal heroes – the historical figures of Bennelong (the Interpreter) Pemulwuy (the resistance warrior) and Barangaroo (the nurturer). In order to be truly Eora (“of this place”), each of us must decide which of these spirits we most deeply identify with. Me? I think I’m probably Bennelong, but I aspire to be Pemulwuy and Barangaroo.