Established by the City of Melbourne as the Indigenous Arts Festival, with a first outing in 2012, YIRRAMBOI has been led since January 2016 by director Jacob Boehme, who brought the change in name. The festival’s staff of seven are employees of the City of Melbourne, which is also the major sponsor of the event. Further funding is received through Creative Victoria and federal government funding for indigenous languages and arts programmes.

Mission: indigenous leadership, indigenous ideas, indigenous processes

Jacob Boehme didn’t found the Melbourne Indigenous Arts Festival himself, but his sense of how best to “showcase Indigenous arts in the city, to inspire participation and to develop the next generation” is transforming it into not just a showcase of art but “a philosophy, a driver”, particularly for cultural change. Feeling that the festival he inherited operated to an outdated model, he immediately changed the name to YIRRAMBOI, “in the local languages”, and constructed a set of “key principles” around leadership and process.

Indigenous leadership – Boehme’s own heritage includes Narangga and Kaurna people – is vital, “so that we can practice and endorse indigenous authority and decision-making over every part of this business, and so that we are in charge of how we represent, what we present, and to whom”. Another principle focuses on “visibility and dialogue, because perceptions of indigenous arts could be better: we’re relegated to the spiritual story tellers using lots of dots and digeridoos and we’re more than that”. Making that more visible requires attention to “new working ideas, in terms of process: we have over 60,000 years here of performance-making and methodologies, but because our main stages and galleries are programmed by non-indigenous people, the content and the form is compromised to feed a certain paradigm or a certain narrative”. Boehme also prioritises “international collaboration and exchange”.

All of this work leads towards a single goal: “to provide space, and to facilitate that equitably”. Boehme resists describing this work as innovative, preferring to “think of everything we do in terms of integrity and honesty. As long as it has integrity and honesty then I think that’s worth fighting for.”

Structural change

From leadership to communication around the programme, Boehme’s focus with YIRRAMBOI has been to dismantle hierarchy. Within the festival programme, that’s visible in the choices he’s made to prioritise “interdisciplinary experimental work”, in an attempt to challenge “perceptions of who we are, what we do, what we look like, what our stories are going to be”. But behind the scenes the same impulse plays out in three notable ways:

1: The elders council

Indigenous authority is now central to the festival thanks to a council of elders established by Boehme. “My staff consult with them constantly, so everything goes through a cultural lens before it goes through an arts administration lens.”

2: Streams of activity

A visit to the YIRRAMBOI website offers, not a list of main events with subsidiary participatory activities, talks, etc, but five “streams that you enter through. In our culture there is no such thing really as visual art or dance or theatre or music – they’re all elements of storytelling. Everything is interconnected and that’s the way we put those streams together, so that you can tap into and through as much as you want of your free will.”

3: Spaces for development

As conceived by Boehme, these spaces are two-fold: within the festival programme, it’s possible to see work in development alongside finished work, because “the making process is just as important as product”. This creates opportunities for Boehme to keep YIRRAMBOI active between festivals, and facilitate opportunities for artists beyond once every two years.

This also becomes a potential site for development of dialogue between artists and audiences, further supported by a “critical discourse model, which is for artists and audiences to develop language around what they’ve just experienced. In terms of culturally informed dialogue and critical perspectives I think that’s going to make a huge impact, not only for non-indigenous people in the way they perceive, but within. I’ve seen a couple of bad habits in the language indigenous artists have used to describe themselves in marketing copy: it’s tired and perpetuates myths.”

Challenges

Boehme admits that implementing these changes, and putting “our voice front and centre at every decision” has been “a daily fight, because of fear: that unproven fear of losing power and authority and control”. He acknowledges that Melbourne council “have been very brave, because I’ve come in like a tornado and said: it’s happening like this and you’re going to have to trust me, because otherwise everything remains the same. We’re at the perfect point where we can be taking some risks because there’s nothing left to lose.”

He recognises that the barriers arising from fear are “not only within the non-indigenous world, but within the indigenous art sector as well. We’ve lost so much cultural knowledge that any scraps remaining are held on tight.” He is particularly resistant to a “cultural tourism” that avoids talking about colonisation, or inherited trauma. So while “People expect the traditional elements, we just want to smash perceptions.”

“We’ve lost so much cultural knowledge that any scraps remaining are held on tight.”

What next?

As the festival builds, Boehme hopes it will become a “stomping ground, the meeting place for first nations from all over the world. A destination that people make pilgrimage to, to look at, to share cultures, to share art, to dream the future.” His sense of “mob” (first nation peoples) is global: artists at this year’s festival hail from the USA, New Zealand, the Pacific islands, PNG, Taiwan, Canada, Wales, Scotland, and Zimbabwe. And he’s already in conversation with institutions in those countries about “reciprocal hosting. That has been another mission: while the world builds walls and bans people, we need to leave the gates open, we need to force our gates open so you and I can meet.” Finding “allies and accomplices” is important to him: “This industry is so built around strategic relationships and partnerships that we need people of like mind, people that want to achieve the same visions, or if not the same, similar.”

But the social changes Boehme is trying to initiate through YIRRAMBOI are about “more than just indigenous shows on a stage. I would like to see a republic, a treaty between our country, our government and the commonwealth. That would ensure that the question of an equitable share of power and authority was on the table.”