Baba
A Performance by Lucas Croall
About 350 million years ago, before continental drift, Scotland was joined to America and Greenland. It lay closer to the equator – hot, humid, subject to droughts and flooding. It is in this setting that we find some of the earliest fossil records of ecosystems on land, in Stonehaven, just south of Aberdeen. The specific tartan I wear today originates from this same area in Scotland as we know it now.
In 1980 my grandparents, along with my mother, her sister and brother, immigrated from Glasgow to Australia. I am the first member of the family to be born there. My identity, as with most children of immigrants, feels connected to the place of my family’s origin and to the place I was raised.
The ink drawings I have made in the residency take a piece of the tartan I wear today, and patterns from stitching in traditional clothes of Gorna Lipnista, to suggest a dialogue between two cultures. These patterns I chose were used on traditional wedding clothes of this region, to symbolise both the love of my grandparents and love in my future.
People all over the world use dance & ritual to express their connection to place. When we go to a new land, and establish our ecosystem, we simultaneously embrace the new world we find ourselves in and express the parts of ourselves that we bring from our place of origin. This creates a chord of dissonance, but a chord nonetheless. And so I would like to do a horo for you now, with some Scottish flavour.
/dance/
So I ask you to Raise a glass to my Gran, the living matriarch of my family. This toast is said in my family household, as it is everywhere in Scotland. A toast to her success in a new world, and to my future success in whatever place I may find myself:
Here’s to us
Who is like us?
Very few
And they’re all dead’
Scotland forever
