Performance, embodiment & decolonisation.
An interview with Blayne Welsh, written by Hannah Torregosa
What do you think of when you hear the word “theatre”? An ornate auditorium? Shakespeare? Bright lights?
Blayne Welsh is a First Nations Theatre maker who approaches the art of theatre and performance from a different light.
In this interview, Blayne explains how the worship of the written word upholds the oppression of First Nations people, in part, by omitting context, and how his art challenges this colonial cultural practice.
“My mob are the Wayilwan mob, northwestern New South Wales, part of the Ngiyambaa language group. My father was a member of the stolen generation, so I come from a positionality of disconnection and liminal spaces in between of both and none. And part of my journey back was discovering and engaging with theatre as a form, not just from the entertainment sense, but understanding culture, ritual, ceremony, and my primary practice is using verbatim performance, specifically the practice, related to Joe Salvatore's work over there at NYU, to reconnect with orality and oral traditions, Indigenous knowledge, systems, and engage theatre in ways similar [to how] the ancestors would have, but applied to more contemporary needs."
Verbatim Theatre is a form of theatre wherein performers replicate the original speech of real people as precisely as possible.
Whilst developing We Were Children, a Verbatim theatre piece with the survivors of the Kinchela Boys Home, one of the Stolen Generation institutions that housed Aboriginal boys between 1924 to 1970 at Carriageworks, Jacob Boehme, the Director of First Nations Programs at Carriageworks, asked him where he wanted the piece to be performed. Blayne says his initial thought had been “the biggest stage, all of the lights, biggest theatre company, I want a national tour, it's what the uncles deserve”. But after some time working on the piece, he realised that he was “not really overly fascinated in my project working in theatre spaces, where it becomes entertainment. I want my theatre work to be in, in schools and real locations where it has efficacy, and therefore becomes a little more like ritual.”
Whilst his love of theatre and fictional playwrighting remains, these non-fictional stories are worked with and performed “to create a genuine effect in the community rather than sort of an entertainment act, artifact that you, you visit, have some feels, break it all up with a bunch of applause, leave, and then forget about it over a martini.”
“As I'm going through, and as you're building that sort of relationship, and I'm spending a lot of time listening to a lot of really awful recounts and stories, really connecting to sort of that immediate, intergenerational trauma that my father and my uncles went through, I guess what really came to me was a felt sense of that idea, what I call the sense of the sacred.”
“This is sacred knowledge, and this needs to, and will be, for our descendants, so we understand how this affected the generation and sort of diverted the river.”
“In a sense, I feel like I kind of decolonised myself in that sort of process”
I asked Blayne why theatre specifically was his chosen mode of artistic expression, to which he responded:
“Because all of our Indigenous ancestors use some form of embodied practice to carry knowledge, to simulate culture, to reconcile social grievances when we're in a tribal setting and we have direct accountability, you know, dance and song were the systems that we use to pass down knowledge and many Indigenous ancestors from all over the world. So theatre, really to me, connects us. Connects us to the original knowledge-making systems, the Indigenous knowledge systems of our ancestors”.
In discussing our understandings of performance in different contexts and how performance often extends outside the bounds of theatre stages, regardless of whether or not we call it a ‘performance’ at all, Blayne brought up how Professor Richard Schechner gave us “the idea of performance studies, that yes, you can look at everything through a performance lens. In fact, we all look at things through lenses”.
“You'll perform a certain role when you're doing this interview. You'll perform very differently if you're just sitting at home with a friend. It is performance, culture's performance.”
“It's been rehearsed so long since people were children that you don't identify it as the performance. You identify, it's just the way things are done. But that ethnocentric, ‘just the way things are done’, is why nobody really wanted to listen to the knowledge our ancestors had here when people started rocking up the first time, you know?”
Blayne went on to discuss the dangers of removing the written word from its exact context. "Really, as Indigenous scholars, we're sort of translators", Blayne said, as once something goes into print, “you no longer have anyone to maintain the contextual relationships of that particular artefact”. So, well-intentioned studies about issues like alcohol are made, but are used to say “hey, look, they're all alcoholics.” Similarly, so-called “experts” have published misinformation that First Nations anthropologists, reading accounts that directly relate to their mob and lived experience, know is wrong.
“Go to the University of Berkeley, California, there, there's a wall you can stand by and First Nations remains are on the other side of it, but the local communities aren't allowed to access it. So if you're presented with some knowledge of plant or indigenous knowledge, you don't get to just take it, run off, repackage it with your name on it and make it this wonderful new thing.”
"My hope is, we can start building performance and artistic practices into all sorts of other spaces where they're useful, from drama and arts therapy through to conflict resolutions, just down to the idea of having, you know, having drama in school so that kids at the very least get the opportunity to have a go standing in front of a group of people and talking and develop those skills a little bit, because that's also the performance of a job interview. That's the performance of a presentation. That's the performance of a pitch, is those same processes. So my dream is that we be, it's more integrated into our society and we allow ourselves to free ourselves up a little bit when it comes to just being able to have a play".
I asked him how he’d like to see artistic and academic spaces and practices evolve or be reimagined in the future.
“I'd like to see more performative, embodied modes of working recognised as co-equal to textual and literative practices,” a shift made even more necessary by the rise of generative AI, which has sent a shockwave through academia and pedagogical communities by “effectively reducing the authority of text as it continues to get better.”
“Those whose knowledge is based in orality and couldn't write it still have knowledge, valuable knowledge”.
To conclude the interview, I asked if there was anything he’d like to say to First Nations people navigating theatre, academia, or any of the broader tensions between creative expression and institutional structures.
"Recognise that you are also a knowledge holder. And you might say, ‘Well, I'm not really a knowledge holder because I didn't really grow up in community or I didn't have this experience’. It's like, we're all experts on one in roughly 1 million blackfellas, and that's yourself. Your own positioning, your own background, your own journey is part of your knowledge making for yourself as a knowledge keeper and a knowledge holder. And there's no piece of paper that'll affirm that you're a knowledge keeper. You just are. And it's your lived experience in those spaces. And in those spaces, you're encountering things. If you find yourself encountering tensions, that's what we wanna hear in discourse."
In our Deconstructing Whiteness workshops, we interrogate white dominant culture and the ways that this culture upholds oppression. This includes cultural and organisational preference for the "written word" over other forms of knowledge. We also deliver Somatics for Leadership in collaboration with Little Bangka which explores how embodiment and nervous system regulation practices can improve our leadership and management.
To find out more about our anti-racism and social justice workshops, consulting, and HueLearning send us an email via our contact form.
We thank Blayne for his time, knowledge and insight and for sharing with us here at Hue.
Hear more from Blayne Welsh:
