A Noongar dance, captured in motion and raised as sculpture: two figures, two cultures, one spirit at the city's threshold.

Concept | History | Theme

The Form of Dance, the statement artwork proposed for One The Esplanade, begins exactly as its title promises: with a dance. On the Booneenoro shoreline nearby, dancer Melinda Eades performed choreography created by Karla Hart, and motion capture traced the paths of her body through the air. Those traces became the seed of the sculptural form: two figures entwined, hovering over each other, hands extended in a gesture of helping and sharing. It is dance held still, raised at the threshold of the building as a place of welcome.

The ground here carries deep history. This is Whadjuk Noongar country, a place of coming together and celebration, as elder Barry McGuire describes it, and the site of a corroboree, a kening ceremony dance, led by Yagan in 1833. The artist team regards that event as both an exhibition and a declaration, of culture, law and presence. A parallel inspiration comes from the bush arches that colonial settlers later raised on these streets for proclamation and jubilee celebrations, gateways woven from native vegetation, thresholds for moving through. The sculpture gathers both lineages into a single open form: an archway, a meeting, a passage.

For Yondee Shane Hansen, whose cultural knowledge shapes the work, the two entwined figures represent woman and man as one spirit, and the friendship of two cultures coming together in goodwill. Their lean toward the ground acknowledges mother earth; their meeting hands evoke the rubbing of fire sticks, and fire in turn means warmth, healing, cleansing and welcome, the centre of the yarning circle. At the heart of the sculpture, an aperture in the shape of a raindrop honours water, the element that cleanses the land and nurtures growth, and Derbal Yerrigan itself, the river regarded in language as feminine, a source of nurture and new life.

That feminine reading of the river guided the whole process. In conversation with Uncle Farley Garlett about the site's histories beyond its well known male leaders, the team chose to find the sculpture's form through a female dancer and choreographer, and to honour the strong Noongar women, elders, rising leaders and dancers, whose resurgence Karla Hart describes with pride. The work stands among the city's statues of men as something different: a celebration of the matriarchal, in ceremony and in dance.

The making joins ancient knowledge with future focussed technology: songlines and stories carried through digital data processing, experimental form finding, advanced fabrication and contemporary materials. Within reach of the hand, the sculpture's legs carry engraved and embossed textural markings inspired by the body paint of kening ceremony, pattern banding and carving that invite touch. After dark the work enters another register. Ground plane projections designed by Yondee Shane Hansen animate the surrounding pavement with imagery of river, water, fire and energy, changing with the Noongar seasons and marking significant dates, while concealed speakers, triggered by presence, offer ambient natural sound and Noongar song at whisper volume, an intimate voice rather than a broadcast.

The ambition reached past the object itself. The team proposed commissioning a contemporary dance work for youth performers, created for this place in response to the sculpture, to be performed on site at times of significance for Noongar people. The artwork that began as a dance would return to dance, again and again: a place of coming together and celebration, renewed.

The Form of Dance remains unbuilt. The proposal stands as a record of a collaboration and a way of working: culture leading form, dance leading design, and a city threshold imagined as a place of welcome..

Process (The Form of Dance)

The artist team engaged with Karla Hart and Melinda Eades who lead the narratives, stories, songs and choreography relating to the Derbal Yerrigan. Karla's focus was to pay respects and tribute to the strong female elders in her community.

We filmed Melinda dancing along the river, and used computer vision to track her movements and translate dance traditional dance and choreography into a digital space. This was an interative process whereby we could test and explore many outcomes based on what 'nodes' and sequences we pushed through the algorithm. By tracking movements, we generated a series of 'dancing gesture lines' which was basically a wireframe network that we then added volume to it to create the sculpture.

// replace the below video with the video inside the project folder - called "The Form of Dance_Final"

Collaborators

Yondee Shane Hansen painter Noongar artist, Yondee Shane Hansen was born in Dumbleyung, south of Perth. His bush name, Yondee, means Black Goanna. He spent his early years around Dumbleyung and Narrogin and grew up around the Swan River near Guildford. The story of his early life and attraction to painting strongly informs his identity now as a contemporary Aboriginal artist.An experienced and accomplished artist, Yondee Shane Hansen has developed ways of working with sand and ochres to depict the stories and legends of his people. He also paints detailed figurative works based on mission life, hunting and animals. His works are abstract in their presentation but narrative in their content. As a child, Yondee learnt his grandfather’s ground paintings and wishes to continue these and feels the translation of them to sand paintings does them justice and brings them to new audiences.

Karla Hart dancer, choreographer, singer Karla Hart has an extensive background on radio, as an actress, playwright and producer, as a Noongar cultural dancer and choreographer, singer and speaker, MC, workshop facilitator for dance, Noongar language and performance and as a major event curator. Her film credits include over 70 full length episodes on television. Karla learnt traditional dance from Noongar elders. She also studied Aboriginal Theatre at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts before completing a Bachelor Arts in Contemporary Performance at Edith Cowan University. She has worked at almost every remote community in WA, running dance and performance workshops at schools. She regularly supports and encourages youth, commissioning new Noongar performance pieces and events, and facilitates workshops across the state.

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