Nature versus nurture is a debate that has raged for decades. How many elements of our existence are controlled and how many are handed down involuntarily?
Dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist Nadia Milford never meant to elucidate such philosophical topics when she set out to uncover great-grandmother Amira (Princess) Nadia Abillama of Lebanon’s experiences, but she found several truths that demanded response.
“I always knew I was going to write this story,” Milford affirms. “I was named after her, and always felt this tie. When I was a kid, I saw her as my Guardian Angel, because she died the year that I was born. She was a fairy tale and I always wanted to know more about her fascinating story. It needed a lot of research and I needed to be ready. When lines started falling out into my journal, I knew it was time.”
Amira Nadia Abillama migrated from the extravagance of Lebanese palaces to a humble Queenslander in Dalby due to increasingly difficult conditions surrounding World War I, including famine and violence. Unfortunately, much of her story was lost to time, but Milford was determined to find a way to reunite and uncover the truths of her bloodline.
“It was hard not having access to Lebanon, and assimilation really works,” she laments. “A lot of ties were cut, particularly to family. I started with family and had conversations with Lebanese Australian historians and researchers. Anne Monsour was really helpful, she has written a book called ‘Not Quite White’. That led me to Lebanese history and their colonisation, all the way back to when my great-grandmother was born, it was in the middle of the great famine where they cut off supplies and there was cannibalism. 80 per cent of the population died, it was crazy times.”
“I attacked it from all ends. But the family stories were where I took my efforts the most, because that was the heart of this work. Ultimately, it's a story about family, resilience and love. Also intergenerational trauma and Western versus Eastern philosophies and feminist theory. It was broad research, and I had to resolve myself that, in this version, I won't know the full truth. Maybe that's lost to history.”
Some things are lost but some things are also gained, as Milford’s dive led to intense self immersion.
“The biggest surprise was that I started writing a work about my great-grandmother and it slowly started becoming about me,” Milford laughs. “But it felt true to the work and the discovery process. I learned how much our ancestors live within us and through us. I carry her pain inside me.”
“As I learnt her story, I felt like I already knew it. Uncovering her pain uncovered my own pain. In the Western world, we have hyper-individualism and this idea that we are the sum of ourselves and our own experiences. But what isn’t acknowledged is how much our ancestors and our histories live within us and affect the way that we experience our world. When I listen to what she had to go through, I understand. I'm angry for her.”
“That's impacted the way I see the world and experience things and my mental health. That can be attributed to this residual pain. She didn't have the opportunity to deal with those things, her method of survival was to forget and move on. But the consequence is that pain doesn't go away, it stays there.”
“A lot of young people in our generation have that, and it's our responsibility to work on healing it or resolving it so you don't pass it on. We can hold both love and pain inside of us and that's okay, but love is stronger than pain. We can empower ourselves by recognising and choosing to move forward with love. I learned, how do I heal myself? I wanted to learn how to deal with that, and take that extra step before finishing the work.”
Milford’s work often explores the connections between body, people, and place, altering perspectives and uniting people through shared experiences and conscious dialogue. As ‘The Last Princess Of Lebanon’ formed, Milford found herself reflecting on the global scene, and how some things sadly remain unchanged through time. While reflecting honestly, Milford desires to leave the audience not where they are, but with hope for tomorrow.
“The name Nadia means hope, and being in a pretty dark place, globally in particular, I want people to leave my show with a call to action and something to move forward with. Ultimately, the show has a universal theme and it's a piece of history that will speak to the truth in my story, and her story will speak to the conflict that we currently have at hand. She came here because Lebanon was becoming less safe for her, and that's always going to be an issue if we don't have peace in the world.”
The show is set against a captivating soundscape of traditional Lebanese music performed by Samira El Koussa, contemporary sound design by Anna Whitaker, sets by Penny Challen and direction from Leah Shelton. It merges the specificity of words where required with the power of the unspoken expressed through dance.
“It's a theatre show, but I am a dancer. Writing has always been part of my practice, and I've used the dancing as opposed to the writing. I felt this story required the specificity of words and storytelling in this way. But there's places where there's a specificity of words and then there's places where movement can say a thousand words. So it's a theatre piece with sections dripped in dance.”
“I play multiple characters from the lively child to the sassy teenager, the contemplative adult to the sassy store worker. And a fairy godmother who's hyper-physical, this lip-syncing diva queen, and the narration of fairy tale on top. It’s theatre with moments of reprieve through movement that add to the dreamscape of the work. The dreamscape is reflected in the projection, the set design and the costumes, as it crosses through time, through my lifetime and her lifetime. It melds and bridges between these characters.”
“I never play my great-grandmother. I never wanted to speak her words, because she’s this untouchable, ethereal thing. It never felt right to speak for her. I like the ambiguity of never knowing if I’m playing her or me. I play the space between when I move. The movement speaks to the ambiguity of the nature of that story. How can I tell her story if I'm not her? I can only tell her story through me, channeling her through me. The way contemporary dance sits, you can be everything at once when you move. I love that part of the medium.”
‘The Last Princess Of Lebanon’ plays Queensland Multicultural Centre as part of BEMAC Presents on 23-24 May.
