Introduction

This paper draws on the three “weather” symposia we convened in the past 18 months. The first in 2024 at the WA Museum Boola Bardip titled, Art, Fire and Flood: A Symposium on Extreme Weather and the Creative Arts featured presentations by Josephine Wilson (School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Murdoch University), Cass Lynch (Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University), Renée Newman (The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, (WAAPA), Edith Cowan University), Trevor Ryan and Jo Pollitt and Helena Grehan (WAAPA). The second, Contested Weather: Sites of Performance, Politics & Engagement (2025) featured a keynote presentation by Dr Rachael Swain, together with responses from invited panellists Sam Fox and Olivia Slater (WAAPA) and Annette Carmichael (Annette Carmichael Projects). The third Underwater Weather: Creative Responses for Deepening Human-Environment Connection (October 2025) featured a Keynote presentation by Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, and responses from invited interdisciplinary panellists Kathryn McMahon, Marry Rapp (WAAPA) and artist Natalie Davey. These symposia aimed to extend the existing work we have been doing on the relationships between weather and creative practice, particularly looking at the role performance and the arts can play in providing both a generative and insistent space in which “slow listening” (Grehan, Reference Grehan2020) as a practice of ethical attunement, can be activated by individuals and communities to help navigate the complexities of the current context, particularly as it pertains to the uncertain weathers we are experiencing more and more frequently. We believe that weather and bodies are entangled and we follow Pollitt’s argument that “all bodies including human, earth, water, animal and plant bodies, are weather bodies” (Pollitt et al., Reference Pollitt, Blaise and Rooney2021, p. 2). Our aim with these symposia is to learn from this entanglement and to enhance our education about and attunement to this rapidly changing context of uncertainty.

The symposia followed the “Responsive Roundtables” format developed by The Ediths a feminist anticolonial reading and research group formed in 2020 by Mindy Blaise, Jo Pollitt, Jane Merewether and Vanessa Wintoneak. This format invited scholars from various disciplines to respond to a reading (article, video, concept etc.) in relation to their own practice. These responsive practices developed by The Ediths worked to ground and support transdisciplinary research while acknowledging the instability that accompanies it. We used the Responsive Roundtable model to ensure that the experience of participants and audiences at each symposium was productive, relational and educative. Our hope was that people might learn by sharing approaches to, and understandings of the potential for the creative arts to help us think productively about the current context and to use each event to, as the Common Worlds Research Collective notes “radically reimagine and relearn our place and agency in the world” (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020, p. 2). It was this approach that helped to inform our planning and hosting of the symposia.

For example, in the second symposium, Contested Weather, each of the respondents was sent a short video of the work Cut The Sky by Australian Indigenous Intercultural performance company, Marrugeku and a chapter written by Marrugeku’s co-director Racheal Swain, from her book Dance in Contested Land (Reference Swain2020), to help the respondents shape their responses to Swain’s Keynote presentation in relation to their own work and practice. A roundtable discussion followed along with an open forum for questions and discussion, with the intention of allowing presenters and audience members to dialogue across difference(s) and think together about the topics and ideas generated during the symposium.

In this paper we focus on the Contested Weather symposium to discuss the specific work that was sent to respondents. The paper includes joint responses to the symposium by Grehan and Pollitt and these are interspersed with the invited responses by Fox and Slater. Our aim was not to homogenise the different ways in which the Keynote presentation engaged us, but rather to highlight through interspersing these different pieces of writing, just how generative Swain’s presentation and Cut The Sky was, for the different participants in the event. Grehan and Pollitt focus primarily on Cut The Sky as an example of work that illustrates the ways in which performance can help render embodied and kinaesthetic affective responses in audiences. Activating conversations, feeling, and action in the world that allow audiences to think differently about complex or wicked problems such as the climate emergency. Slater, informed by her Noongar & Yamatji knowledges, focuses on Country as ancestor and audience, and ontological incommensurability. Fox reads weather through the discipline of speculative fiction, and in direct material relationship to politics, dance and cultures of resistance. Collectively these responses illuminate what Swain argues are, “Dramaturgies of consequence” (Reference Swain2020), that emerge from working and thinking with the choreopolitical platform of Marrugeku’s practice, and how this is felt in the bodies and the actions of audiences. Indeed, Swain has long been committed to drawing attention to political issues through her practice. This is not done in any straightforward, literal or didactic way. Instead she, along with Dalisa Pigram and her collaborators at Marrugeku, create layered and sophisticated work that alludes to key issues (recent themes include: climate change, the plight of refugees and asylums seekers, the exploitation of workers, etc.) through nuanced vocabularies of movement, image and sound. This process invites audiences into each work and its themes in ways that open the possibilities of thinking and feeling anew, or differently to topics they may already know about but have not considered imagistically or imaginatively. In doing so they create productive and at times provocative spaces in which audiences can, and are often challenged to, open themselves up to these key issues.

Fox: Marrugeku’s Cut The Sky and Swain’s scholarly work, Dance In Contested Land, both distinctly speak to the politics of weather and to dance as a political artform. There are links between weather and dance that are not just incidental (to which I will return). Weather is a planetary system. Of all the sciences, meteorology is perhaps the one that most strikingly confounds borders. Winds, swells, storms and temperature systems are tracked moving across the globe. And now the weather is as political as things can be. In the Capitalocene, weather impels non-Indigenous human knowledge systems to finally catch up and attend to the entanglement of biomes, systems, experiences and, indeed, conflicts. What might this mean in practice?

In one example, we must understand that weather is now tied directly to genocide. As Wainwright attests, though it may seem like the political and economic elite have not had a plan for climate change, we are now seeing a very distinct plan unfold: authoritarianism and resource wars (Reference Wainwright2025, n.p.). Weather is now inextricable from the political climate we find ourselves in. Therefore, when we see fires and floods in the lands designated as Australia, we must apprehend the relationship between these events and the political climate. We must note that it is this political climate – what Naomi Klein names “eco-authoritarianism,” in which political elites harness “ecological fears… to rationalize violent security crackdowns against those deemed lesser humans” (Reference Klein2023, p. 116) – that is allowing the attempt at total genocide in Gaza to be enacted.

We must understand the fracking of the Kimberley and the Burrup Hub projectFootnote ¹ in terms of resource hoarding and the economics that maintain the interests of an international elite in the era of climate change; but we must also recognise these “projects” as acts of ongoing colonial violence against Country and First Peoples. This violence against Country is an erasure of biological and geological diversity that can’t occur without the attempted erasure of First Peoples” identities. This week, Marrugeku contributor and Elder Uncle Patrick Dodson once again named the erasure of First People’s identities as a genocide being enacted through the continual removal of children, mass incarceration and deaths in Custody (cited in Collard, Reference Collard2025, n.p.). This political climate requires political responses from all sectors, indeed all people, and I thank Marrugeku, Swain and Dalisa Pigram for the company’s leadership in the field of dance.

My own response to this climate and to Swain’s modelling of political dance research is to say, per decolonial scholar Ruth De Souza, “there is no defending a settlement,” (personal communication, October 3, 2024); there is no equivocating about genocide, and alliances must be made to transfer power and self-governance to First Peoples and colonised peoples, particularly here and in Palestine.

Slater: In this specific Australian colonial context, Swain, Pigram and Marrugeku’s performed research speaks clearly of the risks to community and culture when climate and country are in crisis. The enmeshment of people, place and performance then, from Indigenous Australian cultural perspectives in colonised Australia, can be understood theoretically as a fundamentally ontological incommensurability, resulting in creative works that incorporate country as kin. : There is little need to separate mind from body, or culture and nature, as we are intrinsically connected in significant and empowering ways. Swain similarly states that,

The push for a distinction between mind and body has deep roots in the history of Science, as Goenpul Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson stated: “The primitive is the body, while the white intellectual is the mind. Here the body stands in relation to the mind as the cover stands in relation to the journal” (Reference Moreton-Robinson and Moreton-Robinson2004, p. 80). I posit that this ontological incommensurability creates a schism between what is considered “real” knowledge across the global North, that which can be tangibly collected, tested, replicated and experienced, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander epistemologies, and understandings of embodied meaning, our literal bodies of knowledge, our pedagogical practices and beyond. Nyikina Warrwa Professor Anne Poelina notes that “an Indigenous concept of love of place is incompatible with a colonial worldview” (Reference Poelina, Perdrisat, Wooltorton and Mulligan2023, p. 1491). This schism also exists when writing, developing and presenting works for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander creatives, the very nature of our many varied creative practices are bounded and bolstered by our relational obligations, our care for Country and community, the desire to do things the right way and ensure our cultures and our creativity endures. Henriksen, Creely and Mehta describe this enmeshment as “mutual nourishment in a creative practice” (Reference Henriksen, Creely and Mehta2021, p. 469)

Grehan and Pollitt: Cut The Sky is described as a “riveting pre-apocalyptic odyssey of dance theatre, song and storytelling [that] questions the inevitability of climate collapse” (Yirramboi, 2025). The work premiered at the Perth Festival in 2015 subsequently touring the Kimberley and major festivals in Australia, The Pacific, Europe and North America. In the decade since, the scale and devastation wreaked by climate change has increased dramatically and a work that was, as the Programme notes suggest, “prescient” at the outset, resonates even more powerfully in the present.

Created by Dalisa Pigram, Rachael Swain and Patrick Dodson, Cut The Sky began with a research laboratory titled Listening to Country facilitated by Swain and Pigram in 2013 (Marrugeku, 2026). At the time there were explorations underway for a proposed huge offshore gas hub close to Broome, Marrugeku’s home. This caused significant tension amongst the local communities with the desire to protect Country pitted against the need for employment in the context of the lobbying and pressure exerted at all levels by a multinational corporation. As Swain and Pigram point out in the programme for the 2025 version of the work: “Taking the local lens to amplify and connect issues of international significance, the high stakes debates challenged us to capture the conceptual collisions summoned by the gas itself – simultaneously as mineral resource/ancestor/stories of the land” (Pigram and Swain, Reference Pigram and Swain2025).

In its most recent iteration Cut The Sky was performed as part of the Yirramboi Festival in Melbourne on 9 and 10 May 2025. It was described as “five songs for the future.” These were presented as five scenes titled: “Disaster,” “History Repeats,” “Deeply Cut Wounds,” “The Sun,” and “Dreaming the Future”(Marrugeku, 2026a, 2026b). It is set in a post-fracked Kimberley. The scenes included original songs, dance, projection, vocals, poetry and spoken word. The visual effects were stunning with scrim projections of the Great Sandy Desert via drone footage, painterly images of a burning landscape rendered through lighting and projection, dark and smoky scenes, a searing giant sun, and at times a merging of human and animal in the bodies of the performers. The dance work was powerful and relentless with performers shifting between poetic movement sequences, frantic running and jostling including repeated circling of a replica of a fracking wellhead that, apart from some old protest signs, corrugated iron sheets and tattered tents, was the main prop on stage (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Cut the Sky, 2024, Marrugeku. Image Credit: Prudence Upton.

Slater: The story is one that has been told for many years, a story of survival in a colonised place, of an old Country with the remains of countless generations of ancestors buried and nourishing her, while countless generations are born atop her. The story is one that has been told for many years, and new chapters continue to be written.

The dramaturgical structure, as I see it, is a non-linear performance in the round, using movement, music and words for gentle direction, whereby as Swain notes future dystopias already manifest in the present and the past … Koori/Goori scholar Mykaela Sauders points out: “Time forever back and time forever onward lives in the land. All times are compressed and nested inside Country like sedimentary layers, and so it is inside people too” (2022, 116). As my Elders and kin remind me, often, Ancestors and Country watch over us, Ancestors and Country have our back. Our communities and our children are doing the same, holding us accountable for how we move in the world, good ways. There are no easy answers to be found here, no quick fixes, no equation where data + analysis = findings. This is pedagogy, praxis and performance as living, growing, entity, a local-and-a global resistance story in the round, given form, given breath by Marrugeku.

Grehan and Pollitt: The work featured six performers with Edwin Lee Mulligan as the “storyteller” alongside an ensemble of five Indigenous and non-Indigenous movement artists who took on both individual character roles and the collective of the “community.” These highly skilled performers set the tone and driving pace and the liveness of the work. Through deeply embodied choreographic scenes marked by a rigorous energetic state of attention and physicalised tone, each solo and unison ensemble sequence worked to make visible and deepen the story in visceral and affecting ways. The movement and transformational power of weather is immediate and ever present in this work and audiences are implicated in thinking about our responsibility for the shifting weather on Country, of vulnerable bodies, human and non-human, and of the impacts of dense colonial weather, which has altered and scarred the landscape with farming and the extraction industries, damaging all “weather bodies” (Neimanis & Walkjer, Reference Neimanis and Walker2014; Pollitt et al., Reference Pollitt, Blaise and Rooney2021) and contributing to states of extreme weather which are represented in the work by thick smoke and haze which often literally occlude spectators” visibility. Importantly, Cut The Sky begins with movement setting the story as embodied and felt for a full five minutes into the show before a single word is spoken and like the storyteller, we are left “wondering what this weather pattern is” (Cut The Sky video, 2025). It is through bodies of sound, light and performance that are always in relation that draws us into an expansive, unsettling and collective atmospheric weather.

Solo sequences, such as the one in Figure 2, carry the weight of overlapping stories of many bodies with choreography that amplifies markers of the extreme climate times at work through syncopated, tossed and erratically folding limbs. Here the depth of practice, unapologetic connection to physical imagination and feeling sense of foreboding in these unsettled bodies ignites kinaesthetic response in audience bodies. These are bodies weathered in real time with the wearing of dust, hi visibility jackets, rustling plastic costumes, time, frustration, exhaustion and rain.

Figure 2.

Marrugeku, cut the Sky. Image Credit: Prudence Upton.

Slater: On watching the Cut The Sky trailer I am immediately drawn to Inuk creative Tanya Tagaq’s song Teeth Agape (Reference Tagaq2022), and her repetition of the words “Touch my children and my teeth welcome your windpipe, touch my children and my teeth welcome your windpipe”… I recognized the song and the intent behind the song, and how she speaks literally as mother, as more broadly as Inuk, as protector of her children, her community and her homelands. She is, fangs bared, fighting for all she holds sacred. Marrugeku with their work Cut The Sky, are doing the same, performing the complexity of resistance through dance, song, spoken word, music, costume and set.

Grehan and Pollitt: The experience of watching the performance positioned the spectator’s body, in a state of tense and acute engagement. There was no literal story through which audiences might experience a convenient beginning, middle and end (nor would we expect this) instead there was a feeling of immersion in the scenes, perhaps projecting what might be ahead, what we may lose and what we may need to do to survive. There are scenes that present images of what the future might look like, alongside a lament for the failure to listen to the past, to pay attention to Aboriginal knowledge holders and their prophetic stories about caring for and learning to read the land, about the destruction of Country, and the importance of kin and responsibility.

Slater: I was drawn to the costuming of each performer, a mishmash of the ever-present Western Australian hi-vis stripes of an on-site uniform, industrial debris and woven layers, and a face mask emblazoned with the extinction rebellion logo. The image of a kangaroo in human form in Cut The Sky reminded me of the 1990s comic and movie Tank Girl (Talalay, Reference Talalay1995), a post-climate crisis work where water is so scarce people bathe in dust. These elements leapt out at me as reflections of the deeply complex and location specific nature of the work, while also having considerable global resonance, from Tanya Tagaq to Tank Girl. But with my Noongar Yamatji tinted worldview, I want to explore the nature of performance, praxis and pedagogy, from an ontological perspective that is unique to this place, a colonised Australia.

Grehan and Pollitt: The future in this work is bleak. Mulligan’s poetic vignettes (see Figure 3) as the storyteller both frame and pierce the often-frenetic energy on stage and encourage the spectators to slow down, to listen closely to his softly spoken delivery and to reflect on the land in a more metaphysical way. Encouraging a stepping outside of the immediate concerns with the literal changes of land and its inhabitants.

Figure 3.

Cut the Sky. Image Credit: Prudence Upton.

Fox: Synchronous with a political reading of Cut The Sky, we might interpret the choreography as a work of speculative fiction. I do not suggest this lens because of the work’s aesthetics. Rather, speculative fiction is a discipline where change is imagined through a “writing against reality” (Davidson, Reference Davidson2007, p. 38), and in Cut The Sky I observe a profound dancing against constructed realities. Speculative Fiction has long been a literary discipline where art and politics have been explored in dynamic and mutually beneficial exchange.

In her writing about the works of Black speculative fiction author Octavia Butler, literary critic Walidah Imarisha argues that “whenever we are imagining a new world, we are doing speculative fiction” and “whenever we are organising, we are doing science fiction” (Reference Imarisha2015, p. 3). Here Imarisha alludes to the symbiotic relationship between political art and direct political action. In my research, I argue that these two practices should not be conflated: that political art is the imagining/dreaming of change, and political action is the doing of change. However, when political art is produced in close relation to direct political action, a powerful culture of resistance emerges and these two modes can become fantastically entangled. The dreaming and doing of a more just world can be in cyclonic relation.

In Cut The Sky, I observe a speculative imagining of resistance that is powerfully symbiotic with action, very much part of a building “(united) front.” Further, in the way Marrugeku works in the community, on Country and within the field, in reciprocal intercultural exchange with collaborators, and through the deep relationship to political movements that is evident in Swain and Pigram’s body of accompanying research, this particular practice of political dance is also clearly working in the domain of political organising and action.

In my research into cultures of resistance, speculative fiction and dance logic has helped me to understand the nature of social alliance and the choreographies of resistance that “united fronts” involve. Donna Haraway’s classic essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” (Reference Haraway1991, p. 149) speaks to the ways in which cyborgs (a cypher for human social movements) are the children of “militaristic capitalism.” This text foregrounds how movements born of oppressive social relations are inevitably threaded with inequality and trauma. The logic of dance has helped to understand the constant negotiation of these challenges within collective social bodies. Here, “dancers” are constantly finding temporary, plastic agreement. They find horizontal relationships that then tip into uneven ones and reposition themselves again. Movements are filled with movement.

Very much akin to major storm fronts, people‘s movements/fronts confound the easy separation of territories and disciplines. Energies cycle and build, often triggered by single issues (the “eye” of the storm) but, as people organise collectively and think intersectionally, their cyclonic attention widens the scope of understanding. The north-west of so-called-Australia has played host to some of the most globally significant “united fronts” in response to colonialism: the Bunuba resistance led by Jandamara in 1894 (whose path the artists of Cut The Sky walked as part of their creative process) (Swain, Reference Swain2020, 124); the 1946 Pilbara Strike that involved the agreement of twenty-three language groups (Noakes, Reference Noakes1987, n.p.); an action that decimated the colonial pastoral industry at the time and to this day is understood to continue by some community members; and just over the border into the so-called Northern Territory, the Wave Hill Station walkoff of 1966 that led to the first land rights being won by First Nations people. In Cut The Sky, Pigram and Swain and their collaborators foreground the contemporary united (storm) fronts of resistance that are gathering energies across these lands.

Swain’s discourse frames the “seismic and cultural mind-shifts” required of political-cultural consciousness in the era of climate change (Reference Swain2020, p. 112). She draws our attention to the way First Nations’ onto-epistemologies counter Western divisions between life and non-life and, citing Manning, Swain gestures toward the cultural-political practice embedded within the dance of Cut The Sky; “to dream is to take response-ability seriously … to operate at the threshold where culture and Law overlap” (p. 114).

Grehan and Pollitt: Given the context within which the work was initially developed it is not surprising that the protest scenes that punctuate the work are so poignant. One of these includes the projection on the scrim of video of ABC news footage of the police attempting to protect oil trucks entering Noonkanbah in 1980 when there was a protest against drilling on sacred sites in that location. As Swain notes:

The dancers sit quietly in a semi-circle in front of the scrim, heads down, as the footage, accompanied by a voice over of then Western Australian State Liberal Minister for Education, Cultural Affairs and Recreation, Bill Grayden speaking to the Aboriginal communities in the area about their protests is played. While the actual voice of Bill Grayden is not used (voice over performed by Peter Docker), the language and tone used in the voice over, seems shocking to spectators in 2025 because it is simplistic and paternalistic. The voice says, slowly and deliberately: “I want to talk about Noonkanbah. It was wrong to stop the drilling. It was bad for the people of Noonkanbah. … We need to find oil. Oil is a mineral …” he goes on to explain how exploration rights work and the need to obey the law in this regard. He continues by saying: “we helped you get Noonkanbah because we want you to live there. We want you to be happy at Noonkanbah and that is why we want you to obey the law like everyone else. We are your friends” (2025).

This combination of media footage, the silence of the performers and the language and tone of the voice over, to the defiant response from co-director and performer Dalisa Pigram leading to ensemble protest, all happen quickly. This is one example of the shifts in rhythm, theme and movement that occur throughout the performance. These shifts create a sense of deep unsettlement in spectators. They may wonder how to feel. What to think? What has already been lost? Yet, by refusing to foreclose meaning and interpretation and instead sitting with this sense of being unsettled, spectators have the chance to engage deeply and profoundly with the questions Cut The Sky raises. As a result, they can return complexity to discussions and considerations about our climate futures, complexity that is sorely needed. There is no didacticism, no singular approach to storytelling, scoring or representing in this work, rather the performance engages spectators in a rollercoaster of images, provocations, thoughts, moods and ideas about consumption and its implications, about oppression and atomisation or disconnection from what is real and important, and in doing so it is a clarion call for us to step back, step outside and really consider what kind of people we want to be and in what kind of a world.

Fox: Like weather, dance is an artform that can traverse immense territory. It is at once created by particular bodies in a specific place and time while also being capable of evoking a multitude of others and elsewheres. Dance allows the inter-weaving of disparate political concerns and experiences to occur, and where, to quote Swain riffing off Birch, “the human (dancer) must in the same moment also accept [their] own part to play in the connectivity of these places and things and in the face of colonial histories” (Reference Swain2020, p. 113). In Cut The Sky we see movement made on Country in the deepest sense; beginning in Fitzroy Gorge, walking in the tracks of the resistance fighter Jandamarra, dance made under the guidance of Elders and in the community, through improvising and seeking “what the sand knows,” “markings made of turbulence,” the shapeshifting between human and animal life, and seeking between earth and sky for song-lines that have been lost (Reference Swain2020, p. 124). The machinery of fracking (the fracking wellhead) stands in the stage like a missile yet to detonate, or a flag-pole phallus of an opaque transnational corporation. It is ready to fire its water-cannon down into subterranean rock formations to where a gas basin, “equivalent to one fifteenth of the landmass of Australia, that is … about the size of Kenya or larger than Spain or Germany” is about to be disturbed” (Reference Swain2020, p. 108). This wellhead speaks to the literal destruction of Country’s underworlds; an extraction that amounts to what Deborah Bird Rose called a “double-death” (Reference Rose2012, p. 128). A death that is not only bodily, but spiritual. Matthew Chrulew expands upon this notion, describing double death as “an irreparable loss not only of the living but of the multiplicity of forms of life and of the capacity of evolutionary processes to regenerate life (cited in Bird Rose, Reference Rose2012, p. 128).

We must understand that double-death is not something new. First Peoples have faced the apocalypse and a spiritual double death since colonisation began. And it is also important to note that there have always been some Wadjelas (non-Indigenous Australians) who could apprehend it. In 1849, Karl Marx wrote the aptly titled “Poverty of Philosophy” and referred to the capitalist destruction of social relations as “mors immortalis” (immortal death) (Reference Marx1955, p. 49). And so, in the horror of the fracking wellhead, we might read an un-ethical time where humans can have no true rest even in death.

However, in Cut The Sky, we see humans contending with this object of amplified violence and the oppressive systems it represents. We see choreographies of survival, interspecies kinship, political and intercultural negotiation. We hear language, stories and songs that speak to ways of being with the sun and the rain and being inhabited by country, reaching into a sense of place where the hegemonic powers of today and their efforts to control and extract are less than a blip in deep time.

In the dance of Marrugeku, we see and are seeing choreography of resistance. And importantly, we observe the potential for dance to blur the line between representation, action and being. In Dance in Contested Land, Swain quotes Yolngu Elder, M. Yunnipingu who states, “dance, for the Yolngu people, isn’t just a part of our cultural being. It’s what we are, what we hear and (what) we see. In dance, we see and we understand the world” (Reference Swain2020, p. 111). This is a profound challenge to a notion of dance that is representational: a show, a staging of something rather than doing and being itself. Uncle Yunnipingu speaks to dance that is ontological in ways that may have nothing to do with performing in front of an audience or representing a story or image, and there are moments when the dancers of Marrugeku slip into this deeper register of being. Further, Cut The Sky troubles the false post-modern binary between art and politics, evocation and argument, abstraction and empowered voice.

Slater: Quandamooka scholar Karen Martin (Martin & Mirraboopa, Reference Martin and Mirraboopa2003) back in 2003 writes: “We are part of the world as much as it is part of us, existing within a network of relations amongst Entities that are reciprocal and occur in certain contexts” (p. 209). What Cut The Sky illuminates so clearly is the imbricated, or stacked and overlapping nature of Country, coloniality, climate change and the commodification of culture, country and community. There is so much to unpack in this piece, and this statement. How do we, as Indigenous peoples define peoples, define success in our communities? Is it through language reclamation, or revitalisation? Is it through a good education? Is it being able to yarn out our stories to each other, together, at the same time and place, maybe even on Country? Or do we want, or need, a well-paying job to secure housing and financial stability? How then do we care for our Elders and save our sacred lands and sacred waterways? How do we care for Country if we have to leave it to make a living? I have no answers here, but this is an example of how deeply Country connects us … and how Country’s wounds are, ultimately, our wounds.

Temporality, trans-temporality, deep time, pre-colonial time and colonial time are all constructs designed to harness that which has always been and will always be, the spiral of time. Here time is considered as past, present AND future moving together as one, feeding each other, informing each other, and this is reflected into the dramaturgy of Cut The Sky the piece as a flow, with calculated repetition and morphing of bodies into non-human forms, moving between grace and chaos.

Grehan and Pollitt: In each of the weather symposia our focus was to thicken and deepen discussion through inviting respondents to each think through the provocations of the keynote speaker and share their own related work. By focusing on Cut The Sky we argue that contemporary performance, which foregrounds the body, is an exemplary practice which can ignite visceral and kinaesthetic responses in spectators for activating change. As our colleague Peter Eckersall says, “Performance makes visible what data cannot” (Reference Eckersall2024). What is made visible in Cut The Sky is feeling and this, we argue, is vital in generating a deliberate sensorial turn or return to the body, in order to help us better attune with increasing climate instability and other environmental weather bodies. Returning to practices that involve being in place physically allow us to attune to what is going on in and between bodies, as well as considering bodily relationships with both human and more than human others. Such a focus on thinking and feeling with and through our bodies, is, we argue, crucial in educating communities to reflect deeply on what really matters amidst all the chatter and in preparing to respond and adapt to these myriad evolving crises.