No.1 Neighbour: Art in Papua New Guinea 1956-2016

44 №1 NEIGHBOUR KASTOM Julia Mage’au Gray is a dancer, choreographer, tattooist, photographer and filmmaker, who explores her Papuan and, specifically, Mekeo heritage in an urban context. Gray’s production company Sunameke brings together Pacific Island artists based in Australia and New Zealand to engage in performances, workshops and research projects. Central to her practice is her reflection that dance and art are not separate concepts in Melanesian culture. CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE IMPETUS FOR YOUR VIDEO WORK BEST FOOT FORWARD ? Best foot forward 2011 was part of the Sunameke group’s performance work Who born you? The show explored our connection to our Papuan mothers and grandmothers and involved film, original music and movement drawn from all over the Pacific. With Best foot forward , we wanted to talk about how we need to be able to survive in two different worlds. When you live in Australia, you could easily just forget about Papua New Guinea — not worry about your actions or how you behave — but we can’t, because we have family who we are connected to. You’ve got your grass skirt and your heels and you are constantly trying to make the balance, because you can’t have one without the other. I call it code switching. For me, my sister and most of the women in our group (Sunameke), we are not language speakers, so we are always trying to read what is going on through body language and the dynamics of a situation, then changing the way we behave. We do it to fit in. BILAS, OR DRESS, PLAYS QUITE AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN THIS WORK. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF BILAS IN YOUR PRACTICE? With us, it’s all about how you look. What you wear tells everyone around you who you are — your wealth and your family connections — so I think I have automatically taken on using the language of our pakai, our traditional dress. The performance for APT8, A’inaisa 2015 was about our dress and wanting to share what we have with our children. What we are seeing in Papua New Guinea and the rest of the world is that people fear their bodies and cover up. Back home, we didn’t have that [growing up]. We were really practical about our exposed bodies — they weren’t constantly sexualised. A’inaisa was about putting our daughters and sons out there proudly in their traditional dress, without tops, and reworking our necklaces to cover and keep safe what is now considered taboo. ‘Aleki’, the song we sing, is a lament from the Solomons. We are lamenting the changes we have to make. A’inaisa is about finding a new beginning. SPEAKING OF NEW BEGINNINGS, TATTOO HAS EMERGED AS A MAJOR ASPECT OF YOUR PRACTICE. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT HOW TATTOO INFORMS YOUR RECENT SOLO WORK? Tattoo is part of our traditional dress. Our marks — Revareva, Poapoa, Aloalo — are intrinsic to who we are. 1 Tattoo on a woman speaks of strength. Today, women don’t have tattoos and Papua New Guinea is male dominated; women are at the very bottom. Reviving our tattoos is a step in recreating balance. For as long as I can remember, we have drawn the marks on our bodies to dance. Having marks on our bodies is a visual reminder to our men that respect needs to come back. The solo work Reveal 2015, presented during APT8, comments on this. The footage I dance in front of engages with outside perspectives imposed upon us, including the idea of being afraid of your undressed body. It’s a comment on seeing our women, and how they were then — amazing with their fully visible, all-over body tattoos — and our younger women who are more and more behaving like men to be strong. 1 Revareva, Poapoa and Aloalo are the language names given to the range of marks tattooed on women’s bodies by the Mekeo, Motu and Hula people in Papua New Guinea’s Central Province. JULIA MAGE'AU GRAY INTERVIEW BY RUTH M c DOUGALL