Tongues of Stone : a Site Sensitive Performance

Abstract

As a site-sensitive dance-architecture event, Tongues of Stone sought to transform the Central Business District of Perth, Western Australia, into a network of stories experienced through movement, sound and design, drawing attention to forgotten histories and the traumatic residue of colonialisation through performative encounters. Led from the Murray Street underground to the Swan River, the mobile audiences pathway followed an itinerary of lost wetlands and disappeared lakes covered over by urban development and infrastructure. Listening to MP4 recordings on headsets, the soundscape contained traces of three different stories adapted from writings by Ovid, Carol Anne Duffy and Audrey Fernandez-Satar. This collage of interwoven stories obliquely referenced the diverse understandings and temporalities of the city as it is re-imagined through mytho-poetic invention. A woman who has lost her tongue struggles to communicate with her newly wed sister; another reads her body like the map of a city that is both foreign and familiar; a chorus of water-carriers remember and trace tributaries of ancient wetlands; and a girl-band plays their bodies like angry instruments against the concrete facades; a long red dress becomes a tongue and the ancient Wagyl of Nyungar Dreamtime. Tongues of Stone re-imagined Perth as a place of many stories streaming through its streets, laneways and civic sites. As a work of critical engagement with the city it sought to awaken perceptions to the echoes and resonances of subterannean fluids now buried by development, to promote a sense of engagement with urban space that is enchanting and de-familiarising encouraging ecological stewardship whilst empowering the presence of women in the city to transform behaviours and promote new ways of engaging citizenship in civic life.