Cut The Sky Video

Cut the Sky is a 22-minute immersive dance video and sound installation that centres the viewer within the accelerated present of extreme weather events facing Kimberley communities in Northwest Australia. Camped in flimsy shelters, a temporary community attempt to comprehend and survive rolling weather catastrophes. Through its filmic, sonic and spatial design, featuring two panoramic curved screens (32 X 9), the 270-degree immersive installation encircles the viewer in stunning cinematography of choreography, weather and Country. The striking format reframes and amplifies Marrugeku’s unique gestural movement theatre that embodies complexities of the meeting of diverse Indigenous and settler experiences in colonial aftermaths. Up close and personal, the viewer is immersed in the dancer’s bodily transmission of the competing forces of climate justice: the delirium of extreme heat, the volatile power of greed, their collective endurance of a cyclone and the powerful search engine of a kaleidoscope of butterflies seeking water.

Choreographer Dalisa Pigram (Yawuru/Bardi/Malay/Filipina) and director Rachael Swain (Anglo-Pākehā) have reimagined pivotal scenes from Marrugeku’s 72 min live stage production into a circular screen-based work to capture the relational power of dance and Country, interspecies kin and changing weather patterns.