The world première in Perth of a new work from a Broome-based performance company was an event of considerable note. Twenty-one years of productions made in West Arnhem Land and then in Broome turns conventional wisdoms upside down in Australian terms. Many people still hold that sophisticated cultural work is made in cities and that regional or remote places yield up worthy or folksy work that belongs in a different register. Marrugeku and their new work rout these prejudices. They have been doing it all along, too, drawing in collaborators from everywhere to build an impressive body of work.

In Cut the Sky we have another Kimberley story, the genre well known if you have followed the development of Aboriginal theatre and music from the west of the continent since the 1980s. It is a particular mode of expression grown from the historical details of a town such as Broome, where Aboriginal land was settled by not only colonial arrivals but also by regional neighbours with a variety of reasons for being there. This is the fertile context that created Bran Nue Dae (1990), the rich seam of performance driven by names such as Chi and Albert and Pigram, and Mary Geddarrdyu. Marrugeku reach further into global arts to find collaborators: from other colonised societies as well as from the centres of European distinction and innovation. In this case, their collaborators are from West Africa, India, and Belgium.