Yijala Yala: Big hART Creative Producing Cultural Livelihoods in the Pilbara

Yijala Yala: Big hART Creative Producing Cultural Livelihoods in the Pilbara Book Section

Communities, Performance and Practice: Enacting Communities

  • Author(s): Schaefer, Kerrie
  • Secondary Author(s): Schaefer, Kerrie
  • Published: 2022
  • Publisher: Springer International Publishing
  • ISBN: 978-3-030-95757-5

Abstract: This chapter presents the second of four case studies exploring contemporary practices of community performance. Big hART’s practical methodology engages a multilayered approach holding in tension individual experiences of exclusion, assets-based community development, the creation of ‘exquisite’ art and national policy change. These dimensions animate Big hART’s dynamic and iterative practice. The chapter examines the final creative development process for Hipbone Sticking Out before the performance premiered at a mainstage theatre in Canberra, the capital city of Australia, in July 2013. Hipbone was produced as part of the Yijala Yala project based in Roebourne, a town of approximately 1000, mostly Indigenous inhabitants in north-western Western Australia. The chapter focuses on the articulation of big hART’s cultural rights-based approach within what anthropologist, Mary Edmunds, refers to as “the hard demands of an overwhelming Pilbara development trajectory [in which] both government and resource companies are essential players in determining what the extent, and the limits, of [Indigenous] self-determination might be” (2012, p. 51). The case study provides detailed examples of a way of working that enables individuals and communities that have experienced social exclusion to stake a claim in mainstream spaces, to call for a response to systematic injustice and to create vital cultural livelihoods.

Cite this document

Suggested Citation
Schaefer, Kerrie, 2022, Yijala Yala: Big hART Creative Producing Cultural Livelihoods in the Pilbara, Book Section, viewed 10 February 2025, https://www.nintione.com.au/?p=29901.

Endnote Mendeley Zotero Export Google Scholar

Share this page

Search again