Carolyn Conners, Eliza and Marcelle Benchmo performing in The Crossing by Jill Orr.
Photo: Naomi Herzog and Malcolme Cross.
Jill Orr
The Crossing
Mildura Wenthworth Arts Festival 2007
From conception to final curtain call, Jill Orr’s evocative performance The Crossing belongs to Mildura’s Lock Island. It was while researching for a painting show and exploring the 15 hecture bushland of Lock Island that Orr had visions of a mad missionary beating himself with a bible, a lost Malay immigrant crying in terror and a ghostly tree spirit nymph. Some would have taken these imaginings and put them where sleep could cure them but Orr decided to make art.
“The whole story for The Crossing came to me – the overlapping histories of this place, the scar tree on the island, the missionaries that arrived there is the 1800s. There is a part of Mildura’s history that we can easily find in the history books but I wanted to scratch a little deeper, seek out some of the unspoken histories of the characters who have been here,” said Orr.
Lock Island was formed when the Murray River channel was dug separating lock and weir in 1927. For many thousands of years prior and to this day, Lock Island and the surrounding area has been sacred for Traditional Owners who passed through and crossed the river at this point between the river red gums. The Latji Latji people’s occupation of this land has been dated to approximately 40,000 years ago based on the discovery of middens, burials and campsites.
Whilst living on stations, such as the Yelta Mission on the south bank of the Murray River opposite Wentworth, many people experienced forced confinement, the imposition of strict religious observance, separation and removal of their children and a systematic breakdown of traditional values through banning of language and cultural practice.
“The relationship between the missionary men and women and the Koorie people was historically fraught. The Crossing unveils other fraught relationships; that of the missionary man with his own beliefs; of the district nurses, who helped with so many births in the Koorie community. The arrival of the nurses was historically too late to assist in the near decimation of the Koori population by smallpox,” Orr explained.
Difficult internal narratives are overtly present in the work, as the audience walks across the bridge to Lock Island to see two nurses and children dressed in eighteenth century costumes arrive at twilight by boat. The boat is not a wooden row boat but rather an aluminium dingy, suggesting that this performance will refer to historic events while keeping one foot firmly in the present. The nurses singing joins the echo of cicadas across the still, warm evening air as they begin to wash out blood soaked bandages.
Into this softly lit scene bursts a missionary tearing at his robes and pounding his body with a bible. As if not to let the audience suffer this madness to long, we are moved around the island by torch light to a clearing where Tony Yap emerges performing a Butoh-inspired rendition of a man lost, desperately crying for help. Between each performance are minutes of silent reflection on the tranquility and scale of the bush surrounding Lock Island and the Murray River.
Jill Orr has worked as a performance artist and painter since the late 1970s primarily using her body as the site for creating provocative imagery. In 2003 Jill’s practice shifted toward collaboration when she began work on the multi-projection video installation From the Sea, devised with Gudijimara Traditional Owners, 40 young dance students and a number of creative collaborators.
“I had reached a point where I needed to go outside myself. I don’t feel like I have too many things inside me that I need to work out anymore. That’s where working in collaboration with many different people has been useful to my process,” says Orr. “In beginning The Crossing I told a friend about these dreams I has been having and she put me in touch with (Mildura Wentworth Festival Director) Helen Healy who arranged for me to meet Raeleen Berriman from the NSW TAFE Koori Unit. As an outsider, I need to begin with these connections, I need permission and a desire to work together.”
Orr ended up working with Berriman’s students, who created artworks placed around the island and Peter Peterson who directed and performed with a number of his students from the Victorian College of Koori Education. “A lot of work was put in to establishing those key relationships. I needed completely open communication with the collaborators on the project.” Open communication was what Orr felt she had until a few weeks out from the performance when she discovered that a language barrier had prevented a key performer from reading the storyline that she had provided early in the work’s conception. “I suddenly thought, oh no what if they don’t know that there is a mad missionary character in there?”
“Working in this way forces you to let go. You learn to go through the process of creating work without getting too phased by little mistakes,” said Orr. “As the director of a work where the audience moves over 1 kilometre or more, there’s no way that I could be in all places at once, so I learnt to let each incarnation of the performance happen in an organic way. The structure of the work needed to be flexible enough to accommodate nightly differences.”
Other performers were chosen for their ability to develop characters using unique performance styles and improvisation methods. At times in the performance Jill deftly contrasts the highly-trained dance styles of the professional Butoh and contemporary dancers with the traditional Koori performers, here we get to see the difference and similarity of the ancient occupants of this place and the recent arrivals.
In an unapologetic act, an Elder dispatches the mad interlopers that have found there way to the Koorie children by slitting their throats. Then the final scene of The Crossing is upon us. We move to a small, moonlit beach where the traditional dances are performed for for a final time backed only by the sound of didgeridoo and clap sticks. It is a subtle and solemn ending reminding us of the vast history of this place.
“Under the dynamic of an audience and light, things happen. And it’s that ‘bang’, that thing happening – that’s communication”
– Jill Orr
This article has been revised for publishing on this blog. First published in Groundwork Magazine, Issue 5, 2007. With thanks to Jill Orr.