In a time when multiculturalism was feared or treated with suspicion, a group of rebel artists banded together to fight the currents of misunderstanding and showcase the beauty of diversity.
Thus began BEMAC, and almost 40 years later, they are still driven by the conviction that art as a universal translator can bring disparate communities together, breakdown barriers and embrace the depth of potential within diversity."It began a very long time ago," BEMAC producer Eyal Chipkiewicz shares. "It'll be 40 years very soon. It really started as an act of agency by a group of artists who, at the time in the '80s, had nowhere to perform.
"If you had a sitar in your hands or an oud, bars would tell you that they were closed before letting you play. And so this group of radical musicians created a space to perform.
"It started very informally, and then it continued in a way that was very connected, not just to the grassroots, but to the exercise of performing cultural music, rather than the industry."
For the last ten years, BEMAC has been managing the QLD Multicultural Centre in Kangaroo Point, a 220-seat theatre where BEMAC run the majority of their programmes from.
BEMAC are passionate about showcasing the work of multicultural artists who are largely missed by institutional radar, but have the potential to cross into the mainstream. "Beyond exposure, it's about elevating artists to a stage that respects their work, that considers them contemporary, relevant artists," shares Eyal.
"So many migrants and a lot of first and second generation Australians, who still identify with their family heritage, are often relegated to this diminished version of the arts that happens in community that doesn't need to be paid and doesn't build audiences, because it has the assumption that it has a captive ethnic audience.
"So for [BEMAC], the fundamental means of driving this recognition is to elevate artists. We're encouraging original work. We're inviting artists to explore what it means to be creating work that is informed by distant heritage and a common Australian reality, and see what comes out of it."
BEMAC's 2023 season began with Joe Geia's performance of 'From Rations To Wages', an incredible historical walkthrough highlighting the contributions of Joe's own patriarchs and other figures who shaped history.
"The third step in Joe's chronology is treaty, and that's the age that we are in now, the age where it becomes a possibility that there is an official, widespread recognition of the rights and the oppression that has been put on the Indigenous people of Australia," Eyal says.
"Joe Geia was the opening of the new season of BEMAC, the new energy of BEMAC in the most meaningful way possible. He's been teaching us big lessons so humbly and so powerfully."
Jon Vea Vea, another incredible Aboriginal artist, musician and poet, will be bringing his touching show 'Rekindle The Campfires' to BEMAC this season.
An advocate for cultural understanding, healing and reconciliation, Vea Vea was an easy choice to represent BEMAC's values of bridging gaps and flourishing in exchange.
"The idea that diversity is just a detail is something that we're really trying to challenge, and put front and centre that diversity is a feature of our society, it's not a little detail," Eyal says.
"If you look around you, it's who we are. We're starting the season with Jon Vea Vea and bringing in all the meaning that he contributes, in that, he is telling us that there's a perspective, not just a life spent or a worldview, but a historical perspective that's being glossed over at best, but definitely not taken very seriously.
"We agree 100 per cent with him that it would make a huge difference if we took a moment to visit all the other points of view of those involved in this really tragic but optimistic, from Jon Vea Vea's point of view, story."
Amidst a programme packed full of incredible performers, BEMAC are showcasing the incredible Arrernte and Jamaican multidisciplinary artist Aurora Liddle-Christie aka SOLCHLD.
Her live show melds music and poetry into storytelling in a performance so stunningly raw it must be experienced to be understood. "Her interrogation of what it means to be alive is so deep," shares Chipkiewicz.
"It runs so deep that she gets everybody's minds blank listening to her for as long as she's performing. It's like a guided meditation that nobody's expecting, and it's so powerful.
"You're sitting there and you can feel a hundred brains around the room all tuned to exactly the same thing, there's no noise. It's a very unusual experience to link so deeply into something that is common to everybody. This idea of music as a universal language, she is the case, the book cover for music as a universal language in monograph."
BEMAC strongly believe in promoting a profound and rich artistic relationship between cultures, and have positioned themselves to facilitate a flourishing exchange of art, values and ways to live life.
"This trajectory of multiculturalism that created the arts are so homogeneous at almost every level. Thirty, forty years ago when BEMAC came to be, they would have been one hundred per cent homogenous.
"The way this cultural hegemony operated was to create these pockets where different things could happen. It was either the world music stage or the cultural stage, it was the ultimate othering exercise. They just bundled everything into there, everything that isn't in the Grammy categories, just throw it there.
"Instead of creating this bond between everybody that was 'othered' to fight that, there was this tension between the Indigenous who felt so profoundly disrespected by the gesture, and the migrants at the time who were tossed around like puppies, and had this conflict of being grateful for a country that gave them haven and quality of life, but at the same time, were treated like debris.
"Over the last 30, 40 years, that's caused a gap in collaboration, and a gap in fraternity. For BEMAC, we focus on Indigenous artists, because we think that gap is absolutely unnecessary and it's so fertile.
"We, I say this as a migrant, we understand the othering, and there's a very positive spirit of of reframing that othering by working together with Indigenous artists and that's why BEMAC is featuring it.
"We're not forgetting the culturally diverse. In the programme, there's music from as many cultural backgrounds as people involved in there. We're not putting that aside, but featuring Indigenous artists is really an invitation that we want to see become fertile cooperation."
BEMAC's 2023 programme
Fri 20 Oct - Rekindle The Campfires: Jon Via Via and the CobbleStone BandSat 28 Oct - SOLCHLD: Growing Back
Fri 3 Nov - gosti i gosti
Thu 9 Nov - Zannah & Cameron
Fri 10 Nov - Afrekete: A Tale Of Moving Gods
Thu 16 Nov - From Home To Here: A Musical Journey feat. Parminder Singh & Rozana Azar
Fri 1 Dec - Granted by Nudo Dance Company
