From Elcho, an affair to remember

Internet wonder the Chooky Dancers take on Romeo and Juliet.

WHEN Nigel Jamieson flew to the remote community of Elcho Island to work on a cross-cultural theatre experiment with those unlikely cyberspace superstars, the Chooky Dancers, he discovered a problem with rehearsal venues: there weren't any.

"We started [rehearsing] under a tree and that didn't go very well; it rained," deadpans the award-winning director.

Jamieson, a man of turbo-charged charm and energy, has worked on complex projects before, including the 2000 Sydney Olympics opening ceremony. Yet he says there were times when he feared his latest show, Ngurrumilmarrmeriyu (Wrong Skin), an exuberant, multimedia collaboration with the Chooky Dancers, their manager Joshua Bond and Yolngu elders from Elcho, might never happen.

"The things that have been a challenge for this project are the things that have been a challenge for indigenous people every day of their lives," he says philosophically. He explains that during the long, on-off gestation of this production, the performers contended with language barriers, chronic hunger and a tragic, unexpected death.

The Chooky Dancers are the artless amateurs from Elcho Island -- a traditional community about 550km east of Darwin -- who became a YouTube sensation in 2007 after a three-minute clip of them performing Zorba the Greek, Yolngu style, was uploaded on to the site.

The dancers were decked out in loin cloths and white body paint and the clip, filmed on an outdoor basketball court, has attracted more than 1.5 million views and international media coverage.

When Jamieson first saw the YouTube video, he was orchestrating the opening night ceremony of last year's Sydney Festival, and he wasted no time booking the dancers, affectionately known as the Chookies. "They came down to Sydney, performed in front of 40,000 and just lifted the roof," he recalls.

Aware that Paul Grabowsky, director of this year'sAdelaide Festival, was keen to give prominence to indigenous works, Jamieson secured a commission to collaborate with the Chooky Dancers again. During the past 18 months he has made four trips to Elcho to develop Wrong Skin, a Romeo and Juliet-style story with an indigenous twist, told largely through movement.

Wrong Skin centres on a lovestruck teenage couple who break traditional marriage laws to pursue their romance: a theme that resonates powerfully on Elcho, where promised marriages are still common.

The production, which opens at the Adelaide Festival on Thursday before touring nationally, is an unpredictable stir-fry of tragedy and comedy, modern technology and ancient art.

It embraces a battery of video screens, hip-hop, traditional indigenous dance and music, Bollywood and Hollywood musicals. It even pays homage to Elcho Islanders' love of fried chicken.

Nevertheless, progress was agonisingly slow at first. Overcrowded households, sleepless nights and inflated food prices on Elcho meant some of the Chookies would be late for rehearsals or turn up hungry and tired. "I'm not used to people turning up at rehearsals who haven't eaten for 24 hours," says Jamieson, still sounding a little perplexed.

The spectre of premature death haunts many indigenous communities and it bore down on the dancers when their first manager, now simply referred to as Frank, died suddenly last year. Rehearsals were suspended so mourning rituals could be carried out. "It was a great loss and these [the performers] are all his family. Obviously they were going through a terrible time," Jamieson says.

Wrong Skin is dedicated to Frank, who posted the Zorba clip on to YouTube: his son, Lionel Garawirrtja, 23, plays the male lead. "All this is for him," whispers Garawirrtja, a spokesman for the Chooky Dancers, who speaks next to no English, and who looks dimly on his peers who hook up with lovers of the "wrong skin".

Through a translator, Garawirrtja explains that among the Yolngu, some people opt for promised marriages, while others choose their own partners.

"When people go with wrong skin, it can be the cause of some really major fights and dysfunctions within the community," he says. "For myself, I'll stand within my culture and stick to my law, which decides who is the right skin for me." As this young man talks he looks sideways, avoiding eye contact, yet he speaks about his culture with a fierce, even angry conviction.

Jamieson says Wrong Skin illustrates how young people in remote communities "walk a tightrope between two cultures". Arranged marriage, he says, "is strictly adhered to today [on Elcho]. It's the very foundation of Yolngu society and culture."

On the other hand, there is the modern, sensual ambience of the island's Friday night disco, "where you've got a celebration of a completely different kind of skin and you've got sexual freedom, and you rebel against your parents, and it's all about personal desire and skin in that sense. . . that's why we've explored this particular story."

Garawirrtja and Jamieson spoke to The Australian after the cast of Wrong Skin relocated from Elcho to the NSW south coast to rehearse at the Bundanon artists' retreat, a legacy of painter Arthur Boyd. This isolated retreat is wreathed by dense scrub that seems to pulsate in the heat: on this late summer day, a wombat has escaped the stifling humidity by digging a 60cm-deep tunnel just outside the kitchen.

In the rehearsal studio, seven male dancers, their torsos slick with sweat, switch from traditional, shuffling movements to saucy shoulder shakes and quick, chopping hand gestures that seem instantly recognisable from Bollywood blockbusters.

Minutes later, a sunny, languid routine set to Singin' in the Rain segues, with the flick of an opening umbrella, into hip-hop, then back into traditional dance.

The effect of this genre-hopping is at once seamless and startling; and the Chookies, who have an obvious rapport, seem to be having a ball. At one point, the entire room erupts in cheers and wild applause as the dancers master a chorus-line formation requiring split-second timing.

"Yes! yes! yes!" Jamieson booms ecstatically, like a Super League coach whose team has just pulled off an 11th hour victory.

He is deeply impressed with the progress the Chookies -- since joined by indigenous actresses Frances Djulibing Gaykamangu and Rarriwuy Garrawurra -- have made at Bundanon.

He says: "We've had a few weeks, you know, with good food in everyone's tummies, good, quiet country bed at night, peace around us, some room to work in, and they have been absolutely, bloody fantastic. . . I cannot believe how far we've come.

"I get chills just to see them, their focus and their energy, it's joyous to be around."

They may be YouTube celebrities, but the Chooky Dancers can't afford computers of their own. Most speak Yolngu Matha as a first language and, before they hammed their way to international fame, had never travelled beyond Darwin or Gove.

Yet since their spectacular internet debut they have performed at the Sydney Festival, Melbourne's Comedy Festival and on Australia's Got Talent.

They went to Broome to film their role in Rachel Perkins's upbeat film Bran Nue Dae and are a household name throughout remote indigenous communities, where children endlessly replay the YouTube video on their mobile phones.

Frank's widow, Margaret Garawirrtja, is at Bundanon helping to translate. She says her husband would have been proud of what the Chookies have achieved.

Wrong Skin is at Her Majesty's Theatre, Adelaide, March 11-14; Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, March 18-28; Darwin Festival, August 27-28; Sydney Opera House, September 6-18.