Johanna Searles, Education Producer – Education and Young People at Queensland Theatre in conversation with Isaac Drandic, director of Dear Brother and Head of First Nations Theatre at Queensland Theatre during the rehearsal process of new First Nations Theatre production, Dear Brother.
Hello Isaac. I really appreciate you taking some time out of rehearsal to chat Dear Brother! Our young artists and educators would love to hear about your journey as an incredible First Nations theatre-maker and storyteller and as a national leader and advocate, as well as some insights into the development process of new First Nations Theatre production, Dear Brother. Can you please share some of this with us?
My name is Isaac Drandic, I'm the Director of Dear Brother. I started out as an actor when I was quite young, transitioned into directing maybe 13 or 14 years ago now, and started to work in this space – the creating theatre space. I spent a lot of time in Melbourne before moving up to Cairns, where I'm now based. When I first started with Queensland Theatre, I was the resident dramaturg at the company and part of my role was to build a bridge between Cairns and Far North Queensland and Queensland Theatre. Then, I moved into another position at the company - Associate Artist and my role continued to be about supporting artistic development and programming and that part of the job. Currently, I've moved into another position as Associate Artistic Director - First Nations, so I look after all the First Nations programming, development and strategy at the company.
I've been on Dear Brother with Tibian Wiles and Leonard Donohue, who are both Far North Queensland Aboriginal men, Murries, for the last couple of years.
Queensland Theatre developed a relationship with BlakDance, who's the co-producer on this work a couple of years ago. There seems to be a bit of movement in the state with dancers and dance companies expanding on their practise to include a lot of text in the work, so I came on board and started to support Tibian and Lenny in the process of making a new work. They had some ideas and a theme about positive Aboriginal manhood, positive masculinity or medicinal masculinity. I really wanted to show another side to young Aboriginal men that wasn't necessarily part of the more popular, and broad image, which is obviously being controlled by non-Aboriginal people, but they were really keen to show another side of themselves and more broadly, the role that young Aboriginal men play in their communities and their families. So, I came on board and started to work with them as a mentor and we were able to take some of their early concepts and develop that into a fully fledged script and well now, we're looking at the stage production of it.
What does directing First Nations work look like from your practice and how is this being realised in Dear Brother?
Directing First Nations work - I've been doing it for so long now that it has become quite natural to me. I'm also a Noongar man, and I think I have a deep understanding of where playwrights are coming from when they're wanting to communicate ideas and stories that reflect their lives and the Indigenous experience in Australia. So, having personal experience of what that feels like, looks like is hugely beneficial to the job.
And, in terms of the process as a director, I'm really a facilitator for ideas - I facilitate the writing process with the writers; I facilitate the design process with the designers. It's really a collaborative approach that I take to a work, and I think it's that collaborative approach that reflects the values and the power structures that Aboriginal people would have lived by traditionally. That there was never really a top dog - there was a community of elders and people who had knowledge and wisdom. And so, my approach as a director is never to be the loudest voice in the room. If anything, I'm probably the one that does the most listening in the room, and I think that it’s my job to be able to take on board and really hear the creatives, the writers, the actors, the designers. Because everybody's got amazing ideas and everybody's absolutely brilliant at their jobs, but it's a matter of being a bit of a filter for all of those ideas. To make sure that all of those concepts and thoughts and dreams are all part of the one show, as opposed to having bits and pieces of this and bits of ideas of that. Generally, it takes a lead or a main filter to filter through all of those ideas so that it becomes a cohesive storytelling expression.
How is dance and movement also being utilised to realise the story on the floor?
I’ve been working with dance and text for a little while now, and I usually put dance and movement into most of the plays that I do. But it’s really with this one where the actors are also dancers, and so we've got these multidisciplinary skills between Lenny and Tibian, but also Benjin whose another actor in the work. What we're able to do with this work is take dance and text and this idea of a fusion of those two forms of communication to be able to tell the story. Dance in this work is able to speak to us in a way that text can't. And vice versa, text is able to speak to us in a way that dance cannot. It's really drawing once again from Aboriginal cultural storytelling practises where we involved dance, song and storytelling, and painting as forms of cultural expression and as forms of communicating with each other. What we have is the opportunity to be able to bring those storytelling practises to this particular work because of the skills that we actually have in the room.
How has song emerged in the creative process?
I think of the whole production as one big song. It's a song cycle - there's no real point where it looks like it's the start or the end of a scene. It's one continuous flow of story and we're doing that through dance, through text and through song. Sometimes song transition us from one moment to another moment, or sometimes dance transitions us from one moment to another moment, or sometimes text transitions us from one moment to another moment. But song really does play a healing: self-soothing, self-healing story element to the work.
In a play reading of Dear Brother that I was a part of there was a reference to the Song Man – is this reference still a part of the work and can you please talk to us about its significance in First Nations culture?
Yes it is. And it's mentioned by who we call at the moment, the character Uncle Max. This character represents all men. So, we've got a character called Uncle Joe and Uncle Max, then we've got Grandfather and Dad and an Old Man spirit figure at the beginning that also makes appearances throughout the show. They're written as separate characters, but they're actually all part of the same entity. And when he (Uncle Max) mentions that Jazz is a Song Man because he's a singer - the Song Man is a really important role in culture and in communities - he plants that seed. Which is what this older, wiser character is doing: planting the seed with these characters - right from the very beginning - and he continues to plant these little seeds, these little ideas, thoughts that just pop into your head, ideas that seemingly come from nowhere - but it's this old man, it's this entity that's actually been shaping the path; opening up the pathway for each of these young boys, so that they can transition into men eventually. And so, referring to Jazz as a Song Man in that moment is doing exactly that: he's planting a seed for the young boy to go, ‘Okay, this is actually my real calling, not basketball. My real calling is music and culture and to be the Song Man that I was always meant to become’.
Is there anything else in relation to this incredible new First Nations production that you'd like to talk to young artists about? What are the things you feel young people should be absorbing from Dear Brother.
There's an amazing story that's emerging through the movement and through the dance right from the very beginning. Dance is usually an abstract form - this it is still abstract because it's the form of dance, but this is accessible. It's accessible if you keep an eye out and you really follow the story of the dance, because there's very clear storytelling that’s happening in it. Right from the beginning with the Spirit Man planting these seeds - he's got a dance where he plants these seeds and then we watch these seeds grow and it's these entities - these formless beings that have been shot down from the stars - which we see in the opening sequence. This is all unscripted. We see these entities and they start to move, but they start to realise - they find their form. They start to realise that they're in these vessels that are their bodies. And from there we see them come through a process of understanding their bodies. And then we see the moment that they're given the rules, and we see the moment that they're given Lore. And then the dance style changes, and we see we see animals, and we see more recognisable Aboriginal traditional dance movement. So, the movement story and the dance story really evolves throughout the work and is just as important to the overall narrative as the text is in this work. So that's one to keep an eye out for I think for young people. There's a lot of knowledge in here that only we as black fellas know - and we're sharing that. They might not be aware of it, but they're seeing a Dreamtime story come to life, because this work is about boys to men basically. I'm basing it off traditional initiation processes. When boys grow up, they have to go through certain ceremonies, certain initiations along the way. The whole structure of this work and watching the boys grow, come up against challenges, overcome those challenges and eventually come into themselves and into their own manhood - that's all based on a process that young boys would have gone through pre-colonisation.
Could you please talk to design or any of the other elements in the production and how some of those key ideas have emerged?
It's still emerging. What we’ve got in the room here, what we’ve started with is a pretty straight forward, simple set and we've got these poles that are a connection to country and sky. We believe we come from the stars and so there’s this relationship between sky, star and country and the work and that's suggested through the set through these poles that could be thought of as totem poles, could be thought of as the forest, or country, or city – they can be interpreted in multiple ways.
We’re only using a handful of props in this. It's raw storytelling, it's all about the body and the space and the text. It's really simple storytelling but drawn from our own cultural storytelling practices.
Curriculum Connections:
QCAA - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Perspectives on Aboriginal lore, Totems and Knowledge keepers: Aboriginal lore | Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (qcaa.qld.edu.au)
