The Struggle of Writing an Acknowledgement of Country
The glamour of being an Artistic Director lies in how quickly you can oscillate between essential tasks. One minute you’re on the floor - pushing the form, sweating, spotting, joining in and the next, you’re deep in website design.
The whiplash is almost worse than catching a back-sault to two high.
What’s amusing is how these little moments line up. Right now, we’re rehearsing Of the Land on Which We Meet before taking it on the road, and at the same time, I’m deciding if our new website should have an Acknowledgement of Country.
Serendipity.
The complexity of the land acknowledgement is perhaps immeasurable. It’s a relatively new concept, around since the 1970s, and often attributed to starting in Perth.
Who would’ve guessed Australia would lead the world in something like that?
As with all new things, the rules are still forming. People are experimenting, searching for more connected ways of doing it. That’s what we explore in the show. In circus, it feels more possible, the brutality, clumsiness, trust, and hope of the form embody the idea beautifully. Plus, we spend over an hour figuring it out. But how the fuck is anyone meant to do that in two, maybe three sentences?
A few years ago, arts companies realised that pop-up acknowledgements, the kind you have to click away, carried the wrong connotation. Now, we’ve moved to the scroll down. I laugh, because I’m far quicker at scrolling than clicking that little X. Still, the semantics of it all are part of the battle. Regardless of the format, most of us aren’t reading those words.
Is it a signal of our virtue? When you think about this particular example (an acknowledgement on a website) it seems even more deranged. We’re talking about a string of code stored on servers sitting on unknown Country, seas away, viewable by people who could be in outer space for all we know. This imitation of ceremony.
I’ve always preferred the version of an acknowledgement that’s an oral agreement - an opportunity to state your intentions if they aren’t already clear.
But I’m definitely a culprit of the classic performer’s acknowledgement - the one that references Country as a stage where performance has taken place forever, and the honour it is to continue that tradition. It’s also the same Country where people have been fucking and shitting since the beginning of time - but perhaps that’s too on the nose to be an honour.
Yet the act itself - the educating, the normalising, the keeping of language and knowledge alive - is essential, even if it currently exists in the clumsy form of Anglo text and made-up spellings.
I probably should’ve warned you at the start that I don’t intend to answer the question. This isn’t the hill I wish to die on. At Na Djinang, we acknowledge the Country we’re on most days as a shared task within the ensemble. Some days it feels powerful and essential; other days it’s just a thing we do.
