Carriageworks has announced the world premiere of a new dance work by resident company Marrugeku that will be presented from 4 – 7 August 2021. Jurrungu Ngan-ga – meaning Straight Talk in Yawuru- reflects on the disproportion of Indigenous Australians in custody and first-hand descriptions of life inside Australia’s immigration detention centres.

The multimedia theatre production is inspired by perspectives on incarceration shared by Yawuru leader and Senator for Western Australia Patrick Dodson, one of six commissioners and the only non-lawyer who sat on the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. It draws on themes from the acclaimed autobiographical novel No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018) by Kurdish-Iranian journalist and filmmaker Behrouz Boochani. The novel, translated by Iranian Australian philosopher and activist Omid Tofighian from thousands of WhatsApp messages written by Boochani on a smuggled phone, is an account of Boochani’s perilous journey to Christmas Island and his subsequent incarceration in an Australian government immigration detention facility on Manus Island.

Image: Bhenji Ra, Emmanuel James Brown, Miranda Wheen, Zachary Lopez, Chandler Connell, Feras Shaheen, Issa el Assaad, Luke Currie-Richardson & Ses Bero in Jurrungu Ngan-ga, Marrugeku. 2021 Photo by Abby Murray.