It was a unique moment today, killing time between rehearsals and reading the latest issue of Dance Australia while dozing on the sofas at ADT, and in its pages mostly notable for being the Who Weekly, New Idea, and Girlfriend of ballet and contemporary dance in Australia was the unequivocal and damning repudiation of the Australian Government’s treatment of Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks, and subsequently the concise and absolute moral standing I’m more accustomed to seeing in intelligent and responsible blogs than in a magazine.
All this was for Honour Bound, choreographed by Gary Stewart and directed by Nigel Jamieson. I’ve reprinted it (as usual without permission) here because Dance Australia doesn’t have a web presence and otherwise the article will go mostly unnoticed outside of the quite specific magazine readership, and also because it’s surprising and gratifying to see such a moral and political stand being taken by a publication I usually consider a bland waste of trees.
It is also especially pertinent on a day when slimy despot G. W. Bush, his insipid, sycophantic cohorts, and various spineless cretins, self-serving nepotists and other miscellaneous scum have managed to pass an ‘anti-terrorism’ bill that spuriously legalises what is nothing other than torture and gross violation of human rights. One of the best political blogs in Australia, The Road to Surfdom gives a rundown on how this bill eliminates the idea of rape as torture, and No Quarter illustrates why the blandly named water-boarding is one of the most viciously effective forms of torture ever devised.
By then he has allegedly graduated from Al Qaeda training camps and fought alongside the Taliban, but at issue here isn’t whether David is bad, mad or simply misunderstood. Every was has its justifications on every side; what is crucial for the restoration of order is the victorious power’s respect for the rule of law. In Guantanamo and elsewhere, the US government has made open mockery of its own decreed standards of decency. The 700 detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison have been denied their entitlement to a fair trial, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and humane treatment in incarceration. As Alfred W McCoy put it in Melbourne Magazine The Monthly in June this year, “whatever Hicks might have been before he reached Guantanamo, his four-year stint of brutal beatings, endless solitary confinement and mock trials has transformed him into an unlikely symbol for the sanctity of human rights”.
A Cry for Justice
Jacqueline Pascoe went backstage at the Sydney Opera House to watch the development of ‘Honour Bound’, a dance-theatre work about the jailing at Guantanamo Bay of Australian David Hicks.
“Show me your hands! Palms! Now your elbows! Teeth! Left ear! Right ear! Now bend over! I said bend over, faster, Paul!”
The voice from the dark auditorium barked out the and other demeaning commands in a harsh, impatient tone, and the dancers in the steel cage followed the orders in a submissive manner of those who know worse things routinely happen to any who hesitate. They were in a place where the locked gates are crowned by the words Honour bound to defend freedom, but they had none to defend.
In fact, these harrowing sessions took up only a few minutes each week, and the normal atmosphere in Honour Bound rehearsals was tremendously supportive and close. But all the participants were aware that they were making theatre with a terribly important message: this living hell was real, and there was someone trapped there for whom we should feel responsible.
In the late 1990s, Adelaide-born David Hicks was working in Japan as a racehorse trainer when his parents received a letter from him saying he was joining the Kosovo Liberation Army. Who David had befriended and how he came to get so involved isn’t publicly known, but that was pretty much the last his parents heard of him until the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) arrived on their doorstep to say David had been captured by the United States military in the war on terror.
By then he has allegedly graduated from Al Qaeda training camps and fought alongside the Taliban, but at issue here isn’t whether David is bad, mad or simply misunderstood. Every was has its justifications on every side; what is crucial for the restoration of order is the victorious power’s respect for the rule of law. In Guantanamo and elsewhere, the US government has made open mockery of its own decreed standards of decency. The 700 detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison have been denied their entitlement to a fair trial, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and humane treatment in incarceration. As Alfred W McCoy put it in Melbourne Magazine The Monthly in June this year, “whatever Hicks might have been before he reached Guantanamo, his four-year stint of brutal beatings, endless solitary confinement and mock trials has transformed him into an unlikely symbol for the sanctity of human rights”.
This, then, was the story Nigel Jamieson wanted to tell when he was commissioned to create a work for a co-production between the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre. Disturbed by Australia’s apparent abandonment of one of its own, Jamieson’s intention is to “help the audience emotionally explore what it would be like to be the parents in Terry and Bev’s predicament, to imagine what confinement in a place such as Guantanamo might mean”. To this end, he mustered an extraordinary team to create a production using dance, acrobatics, aerial work, film and multi-media to tell the Hicks’ story with economy and power. He was aided enormously by the choreography of Gary Stewart, the artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre.
“It’s been really interesting”, said Stewart of their collaboration. “The way I treat the use of human emotions within the work is more restrained and a little bit cooler, more post-modern, I think, whereas Nigel’s definitely a humanist. He wants the audience to feel certain things at a certain point — and I guess I do, but I think I want them more to think certain things at a certain point, or have a visceral rush of something, rather than for their heart to become engaged. It’s sort of a different thing that I’m looking for, but it’s been good for me because we really complemented each other”.
The work, which premiered at the Opera House on August 1 and moved to the Malthouse on September 15, is a powerful mix of projected text and images, spoken word and fiercely vivid action. The six performers — David (DJ) Garner, Alexandra Harrison, David Mueller, Marnie Palomares, Brendan Shelper and Paul White — throw themselves fearlessly into Stewart’s demanding movement style to express the condition of human beings pushed beyond the limits of endurance. Clad in the notorious orange jump-suits, sometimes blindfolded with black hoods, occasionally naked, they twitch, quiver, explode into desperate action, throw themselves across the floor, climb the walls and hang in the air, suspended by ropes. A black-clad rigger, Finton Mahony, acts as counterweight outside the steel cage of the set, working hard enough to take a bow with the cast at the show’s end.
The narrative line of the work is carried by the projection (by video artist Scott Otto Anderson) and voiceovers, including the texts of the Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, David’s horrifying affidavit detailing his treatment at the hands of the US military, his haunting letters to his family, chilling Pentagon documents on permitted interrogation techniques, and specially filmed interviews with David’s father Terry and stepmother Bev.
Terry Hicks, who has campaigned tirelessly for a fair trial for his son, was Jamieson’s first point of contact. The interviews were filmed last year and the work was several weeks into rehearsal by the time Terry came to see it. “And suddenly”, says Stewart, “the moment he walked into the room his presence shifted my perspective on the work entirely. I’d been concerned with the micro-details of the structure of the dance piece that I’d been working on and worrying about how that would play out — suddenly all my myopic concerns as a choreographer seemed to pale into insignificance, and what became important was being an artist and representing his plight with integrity and truth and strength.” Fortunately, Terry Hicks loved the work and commented on how “theatre can express things in a way the news can’t”.
“When I made The Age of Unbeauty,” says Stewart, “I really went through a lot of soul-searching about the fact that I was making work that was based on the suffering of other people. Dramaturgically I was investigating the history of torture and incarceration and oppression, with the Pinochet regime in Chile, the Holocaust, the Inquisition, the plight of refugees around the world and within Australia, our treatment of refugees and their incarceration behind razor-wire. So I was really dealing with the suffering of other people in the making of this work, and that weighed on me sometimes; I felt the need to represent those ideas with as much weight and integrity as possible.
“It’s been the same for Nigel and I could really empathise with that necessity. It’s the kind of thing that keeps you awake at nights.”
Dancer Paul White found the work challenging on several fronts but enormously rewarding. “It’s intensely physical, which was a strain, but also dealing with the subject matter, physically going through the process of depicting the torture — it was quite an intrusive, invasive process. But it was also really gratifying: people were really moved by it; it seems to touch something in them that has them questioning who they are.”
White himself was challenged by the show’s agenda, realising in the process that his own lack of political engagement was in fact a kind of political statement, and not the one he wanted to make: “that’s what creates the climate in which this can happen.”
The work has inspired a desire for action in both cast and audience. “A lot of people have said I’m gonna come back and bring my sister or parents,” said White, “because it’s the sort of show that gets you involved enough to go away and do something.” Many have asked what the should do, and White gives them the answer Terry Hicks gave him when he asked the same question. “Do whatever you can, take responsibility for the way we impact on each other and how we need to look after each other, take a stand in whatever way you see fit, an most of all, write to John Howard asking that David be brought home for a fair trial.”
To sign a petition requesting the Australian Government to bring David Hicks home for a fair trial,go online to http://www.getup.org.au/campaign.asp?campaign_id=5.
Recently an online petition requesting the Australian Government to bring David Hicks home for a fair trial was presented with over 50,000 signatures, For updates on its results go to www.getup.org.au
