By David McMicken and Tim Newth
Global Positioning - Radically Local

In early 2018 Tracks took up residence in the Live Darwin Hub on the Smith Street Mall. We called the residency Tracktivation as our main aim was to activate the city through dance, creating vibrant spaces that made people look at their city in new ways, harnessing unused potentials. Over the three months we became aware of the human ebb and flow through our city centre. Workers in and out of workplaces, and tourists coming off cruise ships often bewildered and always a little over heated. The ‘Tracktivators’ ran classes, created dance interventions, and were asked to create site specific works. It is from the experience of this residency and the company’s passion for exploring the relationship between people and place that Global Positioning was born.

Place Remembers What People Forget
Standing in the Mall with concrete under our feet and metal and glass structures flanking our sides, we have allowed ourselves to ponder what it might have been like before all of this. Why would we have come to this site? Could we see the water; would we have fresh caught fish in hand; would we be in the shade of a tree feeling the breeze of the ocean on our wet skin? What was the bodily sensation of being here in this place, and how can we be here in our bodies now? If we stand still, can we start to listen to this place and allow some of that memory to filter through?

Our Global Position
Global Positioning is loosely in three sections: an observation of tourist movement, a tour of three site specific works, and a final imagining of place influenced by the natural world.

In creating the site specific works, we saw global positioning both as a place on the map, as well as what personal and collective position we might take in thinking about our past, present and future.

Star, inspired by the history of the Star Picture Theatre, led us to think about Darwin’s history of race relations (see the photo in the background of the Global Positioning poster, also found on the wall of the Star Village). Jedda premiered there in January 1955, with two Indigenous people in the lead roles, at a time when race segregation still took place.

Bike explores a bike friendly city, something that is becoming a hallmark of forward thinking city designs around the world. This political act of ‘one less car on the road’ creates a way of physically connecting to your community, and fits current thinking and concerns of global warming. It also delights in the simplicity of being present in your body right now.

Pearl is set in the futuristic Charles Darwin Centre, a world class building and landmark in the CBD. Here we work with a reverse scenario as we travel up in the elevator to the experience of a pearl diver being lowered into the depths of the ocean, moving fluidly between past and future.

Place remembers what people forget, the blue river on the ground surface of the Mall leading to the fountain has led us to think about the water that flows below our concrete cities, thinking about both the physical and spiritual need we have for water in our lives. Thoughts of water have driven how the overall work has been designed.

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