Darwin Festival day 2 – Goose Lagoon and the gluteus maximus

Two of my favourite things in life are dancers and Magpie Geese.

Magpie Geese at Cooinda, Kakadu National Park

Geese are a favourite of mine because they taste great and are so plentiful across the Top End of this most beautiful country. The one sound that I most readily associate with Magpie Geese – apart from cracking bones and a pumping 12 gauge – is the sound of shotgun pellets, embedded in their flesh and discovered painfully against suspect teeth, as they hit a tin camping plate when you spit them out…ptingggg, ptingggg, ptingggg.

Goose Lagoon dancer...and Magpie Goose

And dancers? Well that romance has to do with lost limbs, broken bones and an appreciation of the necessity, utility and beauty of that most important muscle of mobility, the gluteus maximus. My friend the “glute” runs from a midpoint down the side of each thigh, up across each buttock and anchors somewhere in our lower back.

Basically they are what gives you “back”…

I’d already formed a fond appreciation for the glute during my time working with dancers and performers at The Darwin Entertainment Centre in the eighties and nineties. But it was the many hours of rehab that I spent after I was T-boned by a bitch from Queensland in a cheap four-wheel drive in Katherine in late June 1988 that gave me a real appreciation of the beauty of a good glute.

I was on a 500cc trailbike and you can imagine that was an unequal contest. She got the guilt and I got the pain, a few months in Royal Darwin Hospital and the dubious pleasure of leaving half a leg in the incinerator. That also meant that I spent quite a few months learning to walk again – and the glute is just about the quickest muscle to waste and the hardest to rebuild.

The last time I was backstage at Darwin’s Entertainment Centre was about twenty years or so ago. Back then I was doing front-of-house sound on an occasional basis – like all theatres that are built too big for a small town the DEC spent more time dark that alight and I would get a call every few weeks to come and do a show.

When the DEC opened sometime in the mid to late eighties – don’t ask me when, I can hardly remember what I was doing ten years back let alone a quarter of a century ago – I worked on the opening season and from faded memory we did a Gilbert & Sullivan show, complete with a rather drunken local chorale and the wonderful Tom Pauling QC – then the NT’s Solicitor -General and now our Administrator – sang the lead…

Over the next few years we did a lot of shows and it would be a pretty fair call to say that the crews favourites were the dance troupes that would wander north from time to time.

Anyway I digress at languorous length…

So…I was very pleased to be invited, in no uncertain terms (“Bob, you have got to see this show! It’s great and will run and run – and there is a technical rehearsal on tomorrow you’ve got to come to!”) when I was collared by Bec Allen, Goose Lagoon’s Creative Producer yesterday while we were standing around at the opening of Glenn Campbells Shrine – as sombre and daunting an exhibition of roadside memorials as you would ever want to see.

And I got the very distinct impression that when Bec commands, it is wise to follow.

That is how I wound up following her into the loading bay and the backstage of the Darwin Entertainment Centre at the 15 minute call for today’s technical rehearsal of Goose Lagoon. Once inside I met Gary Lang, the director and choreographer of Goose Lagoon.

Gary was busy and went off to front of house but I managed to spend a few minutes with Scott Wright, the puppeteer and puppet director of an essential element of Goose Lagoon, the remarkable creations that bring these ancient birds to life on the stage. I have an interview with Scott that I will transcribe and post here when I get the time – he has a remarkable story to tell.

Gary Lang is a Larrakia man and his forebears have lived with Magpie Geese in their country around what is now called Darwin for thousands of years. This performance is at once a blessing and an acknowledgment of the importance – economically, culturally and spiritually – of the Magpie Goose to Gary’s family and kin. Goose Lagoon is also a joyous tribute to the dogged resilience of culture in country that has been stolen from beneath the feet of his people.

Curtain call...

I cannot say anymore. If these few pictures can help to drag you through the door to see this most remarkable show then I have done my job.

Go and see it, it is one of the great shows of our time.