Perth Festival: Buŋgul ★★★★

pic: Toni Wilkinson

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupiŋu, Erkki Veltheim and Michael Hohnen

Skinnyfish Music and Perth Festival

Directed by Don Wininba Ganambarr and Nigel Jamieson

Perth Concert Hall

7 - 9 Feb, 2020

Gurrumul Yunipiŋu, the blind, clear-sighted songwriter and musician with an unforgettable voice, died in 2017, leaving behind a saddened nation.

He left us a final gift, an album of songs that combined his own musical heritage and that of the western world, Djarimirri (Child of the Rainbow).

His kinsmen from the Yolŋu country of East Arnhem Land, and his collaborators on the album, the producer Michael Hohnen and the musical director Erkki Velthiem, have brought that album to the stage in an ecstatic union of music, dance, setting, technological wizardry and imagery called Buŋgul, and the result is simply a revelation.

The live performance, directed by Don Wininba Ganambarr and Nigel Jamieson and delivered by traditional voices and instruments and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra under Velthiem’s baton, seamlessly dovetailed with Yunipiŋu’s recorded vocals, reveals the music's full beauty and power.

Add to that some extraordinary visuals, the work of cinematographer Paul Shakeshaft and artists of Yolŋu country, designed by Mic Gruchy and played over Jack Nash’s landscape of a set, all lit by the magnificent illuminations of Mark Howett and you have an overwhelming environment for the music, and the dancers of the Yolŋu.

The performance begins with Bäru, the Wagnarian songline of the crocodile, with the dancers lying in a circle of sand, being painted for ceremony around a smoking mound that, seen from above in a projected image, is sharply reminiscent of JMW Turner’s explosive suns.

The live dance is mirrored in Shakeshaft’s films of the same dancers in Country, and the vivid colours and lushness of bush and seas makes their deep attachment to it axiomatic.

The music continues, reaching phenomenal heights in tracks like the pulsating title track, with its passages of exuberant tintinnabulation (John Adams comes to mind) and the glorious glissando of Gapu (Tuna Swimming), Shakeshaft’s camera skimming along the surface of the water, sometimes diving beneath, sometimes leaping above.

In my mind’s eye I could see Peter Gabriel with these songs and this setting. It was a perfect fit.  

The sun sets, red and glowing, in Djäpana. Octopuses glide through the water, the sails of the traders from Sulawesi appear on the horizon as they have for half a millennia, all caught in sights and sounds and the rhythm of the dance.

Finally, dark clouds gather in Wulminda, and the image of them pulls slowly back to reveal the face of Gurrumul in Guy Maestri’s Archibald Award-winning portrait, and his sightless eyes miss nothing.

If I have a reservation about Buŋgul, it’s simply that it has an embarrassment of riches. There’s occasionally a redundancy of sensation, in particular between the live and filmed dancers, which robbed a little from each, especially as these traditional dances are full of nuance and deep meaning rather than spectacle and variety.

Surround that with the wonderful imagery, the lighting, the orchestra, and you often didn’t quite know where to look.

But if that’s its problem, all but the greatest productions would love to have it.