Keywords

Ilbijerri Theatre Company is Australia’s longest established First NationsFootnote 1 theatre company, with a thirty-plus-year legacy of producing highly successful productions that showcase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander narratives to broad critical acclaim. Since 2005, Ilbijerri has produced and toured works that provide education and messaging around key health issues facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities, with the majority of these being led by award-winning playwright and theatre maker Kamarra Bell-Wykes (co-author). Since their inception, these works have been commissioned and funded by the state of Victoria’s Department of Health, with additional funding and support from various other government and philanthropic sources depending on the health concerns being addressed. The works have specifically (although not exclusively) targeted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander audiences in diverse settings, such as prisons, rehabilitation centres, schools, health services, and communities throughout Victoria and nationally. Chopped Liver (2006–2009; 2017), Body Armour (2010–2013) and Viral – Are You the Cure? (2018/2019)—also known as the Hepatitis C Trilogy—all deal with hepatitis C transmission, management, and treatment; North West of Nowhere (2014–2016) addresses sexual health and healthy relationships; and Scar Trees (2019) addresses family violence.Footnote 2 A subsequent work, Goodbye Aunty Flo (2023–), written and directed by Nazaree Dickerson, addresses menopause for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and falls outside the scope of our study. The works were supported by a reference group of health professionals from organisations such as the Victorian Department of Health, the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO) and Hepatitis C Victoria, who provided information and advice on the content of the plays, with local Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations (ACCHOs) being on hand at performances to provide health advice to attendees. These works have to date reached over 26,000 audience members and won numerous awards, including an Indigenous Community Justice Award (2008), a Victorian Public Healthcare Award (2008), and a Creative Partnerships Australia Arts and Health Award (2013). The performances have left lasting impacts in communities, with anecdotal reports of audience members still talking about them years later.

The purpose of this book is to document and honour the legacy of this extremely valuable body of work, which has been somewhat quietly achieving outcomes for Ilbijerri and communities across the country in the background of the company’s more high-profile mainstage productions. While there has been some recognition, documentation, and evaluation of works over the years, we undertook a comprehensive study drawing previous resources together and conducting additional research of our own to investigate the approaches used and outcomes achieved. Importantly, this draws on the unique perspective of co-author Kamarra, who has been instrumental in realising the plays through her various roles, first as writer and later as dramaturg, facilitator, and director. We believe that an examination of the creative processes involved in making these works, their cultural, aesthetic, and educational qualities, and their impacts on communities and audiences will provide important insights into theatre for health promotion and education globally, as articulated through a unique First Nations Australian perspective.

The original study also had another important focus. While the health education performances have been extremely engaging for audiences and have provided health information in effective and dynamic ways (as will be revealed in subsequent chapters), the works discussed here were largely created and toured using a more conventional approach— researched and written by a commissioned playwright, rehearsed by a team of professional actors, and then toured into communities. Performances were followed by an audience question-and-answer (Q&A) and yarning circle,Footnote 3 and then the touring party moved on. On some occasions, there was a certain degree of community engagement through workshopping ideas for the performances, as will be discussed later. Ultimately, the performances adopted a “fly in-fly out” approach to health education and messaging through theatre. Based on her longstanding experience of leading these works and the findings from this study, Kamarra recently identified a need to explore a more community-engaged, participatory approach that would build capacity in communities and generate lasting health and wellbeing outcomes. This led to the development of The Score, a work focused on sexual health, respectful relationships, and sexually transmissible infections (STIs) for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people that involves engaging community members from the ground up, from the seed of the project to the creation, performance, and touring of the work. At the time of writing, The Score is still being developed and refined (in collaboration with co-author Sarah), but our study of previous approaches to the health education works discussed in this book provided the foundational ‘looking back’ that was necessary for developing The Score.

Before we introduce further details about the methods and content of our study, we must first acknowledge our positionality as authors and collaborators. As identified by scholars such as Thorner et al. (2018) and Syron (2021), this is crucial to engaging in ethical, respectful, and relationally grounded cross-cultural practice and research. Given the prominence of yarning throughout all aspects of this project, we present certain passages in this volume as verbatim text, recorded during research discussions and interviews and transcribed later. In some cases, we have edited these for sense or to eliminate unnecessary words or conversational tangents. This approach is now gaining traction in scholarly research as a legitimate form of knowledge generation and reporting that recognises the strong oral traditions within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and privileges First Nations’ ways of knowing, being, and doing (see Barlo et al. 2021; Thorner et al. 2018; Woodland et al. 2023). Positionality, in an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander yarning context, usually follows the dramaturgy of ‘who are you, and where are you from?’ And in cases where there is a project or cross-cultural collaboration being introduced, ‘how did we get here?’

Kamarra::

I am descendant of the Yuggera and Butchulla people of southeast Queensland; and then on my father’s side, we have a mix of different types of colonial or settler blood. The term that I’ve learned more recently, and how I now think about myself, is a member of the Aboriginal diaspora. I was born in Naarm (Melbourne), Kulin Country but I was moved to Mparntwe (Alice Springs), Arrernte Country by the time I was three months old, and then spent most of my primary school years moving every six months or so to different Aboriginal communities or to cities, kind of following my Mum around (who was the acclaimed Aboriginal linguist Jeanie Bell) or going to my Dad, who also lived a bit ‘off-grid.’ So I had a pretty transient childhood, but Melbourne seems to be the place where I have always come back to—predominantly because of the arts, because it’s where there’s always been more of a stable foundation, even though my mother’s family are all up in Queensland and from Cherbourg and K’gari (Fraser Island). I didn’t really get to put my roots down in those places as much as I would have liked, and I suppose I have a sense of that that gap sometimes of feeling like I’ve lived off Country for a good part of my life.

I have started to embrace the fact that my transient lifestyle growing up has given me an opportunity to really observe and experience and be a part of a lot of different MobsFootnote 4 in a lot of different environments. This has given me an open perspective on what lived experience can be. But also combined with the fact that growing up, I also ran the streets quite a bit, and got into quite a bit of trouble, and knocked around with a lot of different Mobs that were doing the ‘wrong thing’, and people living with addiction, and struggling with addictions myself, and being a young single parent. But through my Mum, I was also exposed to a lot of political movements as a kid as well. I think all these things have contributed to the kind of perspective I have, which I think very much is about having a lot of compassion for the underdog, and for people who feel excluded from society or feel like they have fallen between the cracks, or they don’t really belong. This has really helped me to work in spaces and speak to people and create work that really speaks to the truth of people’s various lived experiences. I think it’s one of the reasons why I’m a good artist, and why I work well in community. Because I meet people where they are, and I think that those kind of voices of the downtrodden are the most interesting. I think witnessing my mother’s language work in prisons and visiting family in jail also planted a seed in me. Seeing so many of our community inside and how grateful they were for something, for anything, for knowledge, to know someone actually gave a shit. You’ve haven’t experienced theatre until you watch it with a prison audience. There’s nothing like it.

When I first got asked to write Chopped Liver, it was a bit of a shock to my system because I had hep C and I hadn’t told anyone. But I would have to say that my lived experience was absolutely an essential part of me being able to write the first play with as much heart and truth in it because the play became about the emotional truth of living with hep C more than anything, and that came from my own experiences. When I wrote Chopped Liver, I was young myself, and I don’t think I fully understood the journey was about to embark on or how significant writing that work really was in terms of my own journey of hep C awareness. After spending seven years in the Northern Territory and getting my education degree at Bachelor institute, studying, and living with Mob from all over Australia, I returned to Melbourne and Ilbijerri to build their education program bringing with me new skills, knowledge and determination, not realising this was just another step in this ongoing social impact journey—that I was only realising how significant this work actually was.

It wasn’t until I started directing the works that I really had license to take creative ownership over the works as well. That started to shift my thinking about them as a writer. I have always been taught the culture at certain companies where you only have power while you’re writing the script, and then you hand it over, and that’s it, you don’t get any voice anymore. But once I started directing them, I was like, “Okay, I’m driving the ship now.” Writing and performance have always been a magical escape for me. A place where reality is transformed, and experience transported. Where you get to see the world through someone else’s eyes and express the things you can’t usually verbalise. To be honest creative expression has probably saved my life more than once; given me something to hold onto when there was nothing else. That’s what I want to share with Mob.

Sarah::

I am a woman with Anglo-European settler ancestry from England, Ireland, Wales, and Germany. I was born in 1970s South Africa, where my Anglo-English mother and Anglo-Australian father lived at the time, very briefly witnessing the terrible injustices of the apartheid era before moving first to Bolivia and then to Australia. I think these early experiences of other cultures and power struggles contributed to my lifelong interest in pursuing ideals of social justice. From the age of five, I grew up on unceded Yuggera, Turrbul Country in Meanjin (Brisbane), which I still feel is my home. Currently, I live and work on the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri Woiwurrung Country of the Eastern Kulin Nations (south side of Melbourne), but I return to Brisbane to be with family and friends whenever I can. For nearly 30 years, my professional life has been focused on applied theatre and community engaged participatory arts as a practitioner and researcher. In my undergraduate drama degree at Queensland University of Technology, I was exposed to the potential for educational and community-based theatre and was hooked. On graduating, I formed an educational theatre company with some mates and went from there. A formative experience for me was joining Geese Theatre Company in the UK, which works in prisons, criminal justice settings, and criminalised communities. With Geese, I learned so much about performance, facilitation, and the potential for theatre to engender a sense of freedom in even the most oppressive environments.

I am ashamed to admit that my introduction to genuine cross-cultural artistic collaborations began long after my formal education: it was in Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre, where I began leading theatre projects in 2011 for my then doctoral study. Over time, more and more First Nations women from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand joined these projects—the then General Manager suggested this was because theatre offered an outlet to explore creativity and expressiveness in ways that other prison programs did not. With these women drastically overrepresented in the system, I began offering themes and stories to explore that would be relevant to them but would nevertheless welcome non-Indigenous actors as well. I began working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and knowledge holders—people such as author and memoirist Aunty Ruth Hegarty—who, along with the women in prison, became my teachers and mentors in navigating this space. Growing up in Australia in the 1980s, I had received zero formal education about the truths of colonial domination in Australia, and through the 1990s I confess I was too distracted by partying, travelling, and working overseas. It was only once I returned to Australia and began dealing with the facts directly through the criminal justice system that I started a lifelong project of learning, guided by an exceptional group of scholars, artists, and friends. This is a work in progress.

We, Kamarra and Sarah, have been in conversation and collaboration together to varying degrees since we met at a symposium on “performance challenging stigma” in 2016 hosted by the University of Melbourne. Kamarra was there to talk about her work on Chopped Liver, and Sarah was presenting on Daughters of the Floating Brothel, one of her prison theatre projects that interrogated the legacy of female incarceration in Australia. This sparked connections, and we talked briefly about our work and agreed to stay in touch, which we did sporadically over the next few years. In February 2020, just prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we reconnected in a café in Melbourne, where Sarah had just taken up a three-year research fellowship. At this meeting, Kamarra briefly outlined her ideas for shaping the next health education work—The Score—into a new participatory model. We both recognised an opportunity to collaborate, with Sarah’s experience in applied theatre and her newfound research time and resources from the University of Melbourne, which already had links to Kamarra and Ilbijerri through the Victorian College of the Arts theatre course. With this foundation, Sarah, Kamarra, and Ilbijerri’s then Social Impact Producer (Kim Bennett) and Assistant Producer (Lauren Sheree) began what would become a year of Zoom yarns about the project before we finally met in person in 2021. Through this process, we established the “looking back” part of the study (what is largely reported here) and began mapping out the development of the new model for The Score.

The health education works—and our investigation and reporting of them—operate at the “cultural interface” (M. Nakata 2007) between First Nations and non-Indigenous knowledges, institutions, and practices surrounding theatre, education, and wellbeing. This study therefore in part examines what it means to make work at the intersection between different cultural and political discourses, institutions, demands, and knowledges while privileging First Nations ways of knowing, being, and doing. Elsewhere, we have discussed the ethical tensions and opportunities in such work, framing our collaboration around the concept of “relational accountability” as introduced by Shawn Wilson (2008). Relationality in this case encompasses the

Interpersonal relationships enacted within the project (among, for example team members, community participants, partners, and stakeholders), and also the ‘inevitable’ relationships that exist at the structural level between Indigenous and settler in social, legal and political life. (Maddison and Nakata 2020; Woodland et al. 2023, 4)

To be relationally accountable in this context means attending to all the relationships within such projects—both structural and interpersonal—in ways that are ethically and culturally grounded. As a significant part of this, we two authors are engaged in an ongoing project of “two-way mentoring and learning” (Coff and Lampert 2019), which is built on mutual respect and trust but is also able to accommodate complexity and conflict.

For the purpose of looking back, in addition to yarning together over the past several years, we consulted several primary and secondary sources to form a picture of Ilbijerri’s health education works, with a particular interest in how we could learn from their successes, strengths, challenges, and tensions in moving forward with the new model. Specifically, we were interested in what the past could tell us about how we might “do” community engagement more meaningfully and how the previous works might inform how we measure “success” in the future. While these works have in some ways been framed in the past as health-focused educational performances, we aimed through this research to reframe our approach towards more holistic First Nations notions of wellbeing, which may include health outcomes directly related to programs but also encompass cultural resilience, empowerment, agency, and self-determination (see Gee et al. 2014).

Our primary research was conducted with support from Ilbijerri and approval from the University of Melbourne’s Human Research Ethics Committee (ethics ID 14332). It included interviews conducted over 2020–2021 with eight practitioners who had been involved in the works over the years, which took the form of reflective yarns between Sarah, Kamarra, and interviewees—recalling significant moments from tours, audience reception and engagement, and the strengths and challenges of the works in development, content, production, and touring. Interviewees were also asked for their input and ideas around the proposed new model. The strength of Kamarra’s involvement in these yarns was that she was able to reflect more deeply on her own experience as a lead creative while also prompting memories and inviting deeper reflection from interviewees around specific moments or experiences. The practitioners interviewed had been involved in a cross section of works in a variety of roles and all agreed to be named in the research:

  • Jesse Butler (Arrernte): performer in North West of Nowhere (2016) and Viral (2018–2019)

  • Nazaree Dickerson (Noongar and Burmese): performer in Chopped Liver (2017) and community facilitator for Scar Trees (2019)

  • Isaac Drandic (Noongar): performer in Chopped Liver (2006–2008)

  • Shannon Hood (Kurnai and Gunditjmara) performer in Viral (2019)

  • Mary Quinsacara (non-Indigenous): stage/tour manager for Viral (2018)

  • Melodie Reynolds-Diarra (Wongutha-Ngadju): performer in Chopped Liver (2006–2008)

  • Laila Thaker (Meriam Mir and Badulaig): performer in Viral (2018)

  • Peter Waples-Crowe (Ngarigo): health worker (VACCHO and Thorne Harbour Health), member of Ilbijerri’s Social Impact reference group, toured with Body Armour.

Sarah and Kamarra also engaged in a reflective research yarn in February 2021, from which some edited verbatim extracts are shared throughout the volume. Due to the challenges of staff turnover, organisational change, and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, gaining access to thorough documentation from Ilbijerri’s corporate archive for every performance was not possible; however, we were able to access the following documents and data to inform the research:

  • Annual reports from 2006–2019.

  • Ilbijerri’s website, which contains production histories for all performances (Ilbijerri Theatre Company n.d.).

  • Survey data for the Viral 2018 and 2019 tours and the Scar Trees 2019 tour. These data were gathered from audiences through the Culture CountsFootnote 5 survey platform.

  • Tour debriefs, notes, and reports for the Viral 2018 and 2019 tours.

  • Audience feedback in the hard copy guest book from the Viral 2018 tour and written on the set of Viral in 2018 and 2019.

In addition to these sources from Ilbijerri, we also consulted the evaluation report on the impact of the 2008 tour of Chopped Liver prepared by consulting firm Effective Change (Keating 2009) and Blayne Welsh’s (2018) excellent scholarly analysis of the Hepatitis C Trilogy for the journal Australasian Drama Studies, written from his insider perspective as a performer in Viral. The data for this research were analysed using the qualitative data analysis software tool NVivo, which supports researchers in identifying key themes and patterns across different sources. These themes were then developed further through iterative research yarns and writing between we two authors.

In the next chapter, we provide a description and synopsis of each of the health education works in turn to ground the reader in the work under investigation. This is followed in Chap. 3 by a contextual review of contemporary First Nations dramaturgies in Australia, their relationship to community wellbeing, and a discussion of theatre for health education in Indigenous and global majority contexts. From Chap. 4 onwards, the book discusses each of the three most prominent themes in our data in turn. These themes are (1) the presence of culturally led, culturally safe practices both in creative development and performance; (2) the notion of these performances as “gripping dramatic yarns” that integrate strong dramaturgy and performance aesthetics with health education and messaging; and (3) the creation of stigma-free spaces for healing, empowerment, and self-determination through the works. These themes have been somewhat artificially separated from each other, with the acknowledgement that they normally interact in holistic ways within programs such as these. Nevertheless, by identifying them separately and exploring a range of subthemes within them, we aim to paint a holistic picture of these works as a powerful body of culturally led, community-engaged performance practice that has much to teach us about arts-led approaches to health and wellbeing in First Nations communities and beyond.