US activist Carole Johnson recalls role in Aboriginal dance

Jane Albert, The Australian, November 17, 2016

It became known simply as “Jenny’s kitchen”, a meeting place for filmmakers, artists, photo­graphers and political agitators who would gather in Sydney in the early 1970s to debate ideas that ultimately would find expression in a new art form: contemporary indigenous dance.

Jenny was Jenny Isaacs, indigenous officer of the then Australian Council for the Arts. It was in her Glebe home that a young woman by the name of Carole Johnson first gleaned the idea for what would become Australia’s most significant indigenous cultural and dance education program, and later the prestigious Bangarra Dance Theatre.

When Johnson, an African-American contemporary dancer and arts activist, first set foot in Australia in 1972, she had scant knowledge of the Australian political scene and its indigenous history. She was shocked and inspired by what she found.

“It was very much like America because of the language and also because of the racial situation,” she recalls.

“There is a tremendous amount of racism Australia doesn’t recognise. There was and there is still. It’s not overt and it’s not too bad, although I had much less trouble than the Aboriginal people. But it was exciting to meet up with Aboriginal people and they were very much identifying (together) as black.”

Johnson, who now divides her time between Sydney and New York, grew up in Philadelphia, learning classical ballet with Sydney Gibson King and later British choreographer Antony Tudor at the Philadelphia Ballet Guild. She was introduced to modern dance during high school and in 1960 ­entered the Juilliard School in New York.

Three years later she joined the Eleo Pomare Dance Company as a dancer and advocate for African-American dance. It was this company that would take her to Australia, where they were invited to perform at the 1972 Adelaide Festival of the Arts.

Johnson came to Australia from Africa, where she had been on a New York State Council fellowship helping unearth and ­reconstruct the seemingly forgotten traditional dance of Ghana and, to a lesser extent, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

She arrived in Adelaide fired up by the success they’d had in ­Africa in empowering the indigenous people by reacquainting them with a lost culture.

What she found here were the beginnings of a powerful indigenous self-­determination movement fast gaining momentum. The celebrations and hope that had ­accom­panied the 1967 referendum were swiftly turning to ­disillusionment as ­realisation dawned that the longed-for equality wasn’t eventuating.

Inspired by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, local activists were finding their voice — in 1970 the Aboriginal Medical Service was formed, the Aboriginal flag flew for the first time in 1971 — so by the time Johnson and her fellow dancers arrived in 1972, armed with new ideas and hope, plenty of people were ready to listen.

Johnson didn’t intend to stay but after meeting Isaacs and her cohort she felt she had something to offer.

An Australian Council for the Arts grant enabled her to work with Aboriginal groups, sharing what she’d learned in ­Africa and earlier. At the same time the newly erected tent embassy in Canberra was attracting attention and groups in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane were rallying ahead of a national march about land rights. But the connection between art and politics had yet to be made.

“There were lots of meetings to try to keep the embassy there, lots of political activity, it was very, very exciting,” she says. “But there was no thinking about the arts. The thing that was unique about us was that Eleo was about social comment and the Aboriginal people had never really thought about dance as a political tool for changing thought.

“That was their introduction to contemporary dance, in terms of what it could do.”

In April 1972 Johnson held her first dance workshop in the Redfern community and was buoyed by the turnout.

When the tent ­embassy was destroyed (it was later rebuilt), local leaders Paul Coe, Gary Foley and Len Watson asked Johnson to create a work expressing their rights: The Challenge — Embassy Dance was born.

“We looked at the confusion, the anger, about what was happening with the stealing of the land, and we worked out a dance that was performed in front of the tent embassy.

“It was the first time people had seen their people dance; and the first time dance had been used in a functional way, in a contemporary way, with purpose. Contemporary indigenous dance — I think it starts there.”

Across the next three years Johnson continually returned to Australia to oversee the workshops and organising teachers and workshops with David Gulpilil and Wayne Nicol, among others.

In 1975 Johnson returned and, in conjunction with theatre-maker and activist Bob Maza and actor Brian Syron, oversaw the move into new premises in Redfern. A performing arts workshop followed, culminating in Jack Davis’s first produced work, The Biter Bit, and the award-winning documentary Sunrise Awakening.

“People said, ‘We want to be professional actors and dancers.’ But you can’t do that in a six-week workshop, you have to have further training,” Johnson says. “By this time I was committed so I said I’d do the dance part.”

A funded preliminary term was so successful that by 1976 they had the support of the Department of Education, and with it the inaugural one-year course offered under the newly named Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Scheme and its performance arm, Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre, was born.

Cheryl Stone, Michael Leslie, Lillian Crombie — names that are so familiar today — were all there supporting this grassroots organisation that grew into the National Aboriginal Islander Skills ­Deve­lopment Association in 1988, an ­association that has evolved into a highly respected training ­institute.

Run today by Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre alumnus and former Sydney Dance Company performer Kim Walker, it is celebrating 40 years of nurturing and teaching. Graduates ­include Christine Anu and Bangarra’s Elma Kris and Frances Rings.

Johnson would go on to found Bangarra in 1989, before handing over to Stone and Rob Bryant, who in 1991 passed the reins to NAISDA graduate Stephen Page, who continues to run the organisation. In 1999 Johnson was inducted into the Australian Dance Awards’ Hall of Fame. In 2003 she received an Australian government centenary medal in recognition of her “key role in helping Australians discover the richness of indigenous dance”.

Did she ever dream that the organisation she founded back in 1976 would still be so strong today? “Yeah,” she says with a nonchalant shrug of her shoulders. “It was built to last and we kept telling the students, ‘You’ve got to build it for your children.’ And they did.”

If she is proud of all she has achieved she doesn’t show it, perhaps because she feels there is still such a long road ahead. “It’s getting there. But I see it as Australians recognising ‘this is the dance’.

“The foundation of Australia’s modern dance is not Bodenwieser, it’s not German or American or ballet. The dance technique that should be coming out of this country has to come from the Aboriginal people,” she says, pointing out the various cultural forms bubbling away in America’s cultural melting pot: flamenco, martial arts, Bollywood and African dance. “I see indigenous contemporary dance doing the same thing in Australia. I see it as inevitable. But I don’t know how many years that will take.”

NAISDA’s 40th anniversary celebration, Circle of Cultures, runs until November 24 at Carriageworks, Sydney, and includes a photography exhibition, cultural dances, main-stage production From Sand to Stage directed by Frances Rings, and Vicki van Hout’s re-creation of Embassy.