By Vivian Hogg
NT, QLD | 19.06.2007

To review any single performance of Ngapartji Ngapartji would be akin to admiring a blossom without appreciating the plant organism, soil system or environment to which it is inter-dependant. The show’s tour to Australia’s largest Indigenous arts festival The Dreaming is the fifth performance season of Ngapartji Ngapartji, but marks only a mid-point for the seven year intergenerational arts project which is as ambitious as it is acclaimed.

Founded in the Pitjantjatjarra concept of Ngapartji Ngapartji - I give you something, you give me something - the touring component of the production invites audiences to engage in a process of reciprocity. By undertaking a 26-part online language course, theatre-goers gain access to non-English elements of the show while actively participating in the preservation of Pitjantjatjarra language and culture. In the sample-sized version on show at The Dreaming, audiences are first taken through some Pitjantjatjarra basics before enjoying extracts of the full-sale work.

The morning after their performance, the Ngapartji Ngapartji cast and crew are more subdued than usual. Having launched the tour in style with a special Alice Springs visit from Shadow Minister for the Arts Mr Peter Garrett, the company endured twelve hours in transit before becoming bogged only minutes from where they were to set up camp. Such travails seem par for the course for this logistically demanding project, which seeks to bridge the divide between central desert remote Indigenous communities and big-city big-ticket arts events.

According to Creative Director Alex Kelly challenge is in the nature of Ngapartji Ngapartji; “I wouldn’t ever feel comfortable taking this work into a mainstream context if we were compromising it. So how do you work with the deadlines and the boundaries of a mainstream arts presenter, whilst honouring the culture and the sorry business and the needs of that community and the artists? The exciting thing about this project is that there’s a process of education going on across that barrier.”

Although best known as a theatre piece, Ngapartji Ngapartji more comprehensively belongs to the world of process and community art, a field which has been trail-blazed in Australia by the project’s parent company BIG hART. Grounded in intergenerational workshops based on Arrente country in Mpartnwe (Alice Springs), Ngapartji Ngapartji works to document and maintain living Pitjantjatjarra language and culture. But even at this level the tensions of working across difference are echoed. “Young people use a contemporary form of Pitjantjatjarra while the elders use a classical form. How do we honour the young people’s contribution but also honour the expertise of the elders. It’s a really amazing process to be part of,” says Kelly.

If the theatre show is the flower, and the community process is the plant, the roots of Ngapartji Ngapartji is no less than the survival of Australian Indigenous culture(s). Although worn-out from travel and performance, Cultural Advisor Lorna Wilson and Pitjantjatjarra Elder Panjiti McKenzie were keen to talk about language. By Wilson’s reckoning, the situation is serious; “In Ngapartji Ngapartji everything is recorded. By recording our language, it is kept for archiving later on – it is kept for if the languages do die out.” According to Kelly, recent estimates predict the loss of all remaining Indigenous languages in 50 years if serious intervention is not undertaken. For Panjiti McKenzie, whose memory extends back to the underestimated and overlooked nuclear testing at Maralinga, this fact is no big surprise. Acting as translator, Wilson explains that McKenzie has been documenting stories and sacred traditions since she was young, “because they know on the lands, on Pitjantjatjarra lands, that one day our language and our culture may die out.”

A more mouthy organisation would probably be tempted to refer to this as a struggle against genocide by omission. New South Wales is currently the only state with an Indigenous languages policy, and according to Kelly a general national policy is sorely needed. However Ngapartji Ngaparjti is not putting all its eggs in the advocacy basket, in many ways the project is art as direct action. Lorna Wilson agrees, “It empowers us” she says, “Because Pitjantjatjarra is not taught in schools, or anywhere in education. So we put in on stage so people can see it.”

For more information visit the new wesbite: www.ngapartji.org.