Deaf Indigenous Dance Group taking the North by storm

Established in 1997 by Patricia Morris-Banjo and her late friend Priscilla, the Deaf Indigenous Dance Group was created to celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Patricia, a member of the Stolen Generations, had been dancing since she was a young girl, the only First Nations person and one of two deaf people in her jazz and ballet classes. She also regularly attended the Laura Quinkan Dance Festival where she was able to maintain contact with her extended birth family. 

Patricia and Priscilla envisioned a group that provided a safe and community-oriented space for people who live with the isolation deafness can sometimes bring. Although members are from different communities, they share a common language – Auslan, or Australian sign language. With the Deaf Indigenous Dance Group, members can communicate freely and express their culture without boundaries.  

The group usually practises on a wooden stage, feeling the rhythm of drums and the tapping of sticks through the floor. Some members have residual hearing, but for the most part they respond to vibrations received through the floor or the ground. During performances, an experienced dancer will take the lead and provide visual cues for the other dancers to follow. 

2021 was a big year for the group, as they made their debut at the biennial Laura Quinkan Dance Festival. The Festival, which has been running since the early 1980s, is one of the most significant festivals for the sharing of cultural dance by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from across north Queensland and further afield. The Deaf Indigenous Dance Group were also one of the headline acts during celebrations for NAIDOC Week in Cairns. 

Throughout the year, award-winning news and documentary photographer Sean Davey and his wife Aishah Kenton, also a photographer, followed the group as they rehearsed and performed in Cairns and further afield. One of the most interesting aspects of this collection is the portraits to which group members added their own embellishments. Aishah, building on an idea first conceived during her studies, gave each member of the group a portrait of themselves and asked them to write and draw anything they wanted to communicate about themselves on the prints. The result is an astonishing suite of mixed media portraits capturing the spirit and energy of each individual Deaf Indigenous Dance Group member. Each one is an act of self-expression and yet also a collaboration between the photographers and their subjects.

These will be displayed, alongside Davey's candid black and white photographs, in State Library of Queensland's exhibition Extraordinary Stories from early July for approximately six months. You can also explore the entire collection here.