Dream of the Aboriginal

Le Reve D'Aborigène Festival (Airvault, France)

The Dream(time) of the Aboriginal Festival

In this festival of global natural instruments, from didgeridoos to drums, sitars to mouth harps, a certain vibration penetrates the air. In this twentieth century, imagine a secular, celebratory space-time where no alcohol is served, a rule made in respect to native and indigenous populations around the world - particularly the Australian aboriginals - for whom the problems of alcoholism and drug addiction have led to traumatic forms of community fragmentation and cultural death. Imagine a space opened for collective, sense-oriented (and therefore empathetic) participation to the sensible sound waves emitted by earth-made instruments, crafted and played by human fingers, mouths, breaths, minds, and bodies.  This festival ritual space is founded for a different kind of universal intoxication: bodies falling into the trance of music, dance, and present participatory love, our shared senses and histories the only reference point for our individual material existence and experience.

A reunion with Virgile's family after his three years traveling across the globe (his father achieved a similar feat) manifested in a campground pool and parking lot outside the festival border (as reserved by the father). Together, a son, his lover, sister, her lover, their child, his grandfather, stepmother, birthday-blooming half-uncle, and his friends, boarded a wood-refurbished caravan to the festival entrance where a queue of festival-goers, a straight-lined sea of hippies, waited on the grass and concrete. 

Inside a truck-turned-wooden-house-on-wheels

The festival is on a gorgeous forested area in the plains.

(In my moleskin notebook, I pen an unedited poem:

now world

babies forests

didgeridoo dreams

of the aboriginal

fabricating a reality

in this time in this 

moment a future of 

des crises et les souvenirs avant

if hippies are supposedly with nature

then it is through the body the manifest real

that is actualized through

the enlivened senses

and yet this is a world

qui doit, qui a besoin

de changer

soi-meme)

You are welcome to play rocks and sticks

An unbelievable array of wooden didgeridoos

(... trying to recreate ancient

moments of trance

community forced

connections through 

altered states of 

consciousness

senses awoken

a stage a scene a screen

a didgeridoo a darbuka a guitar

and the body in motion

festivals to make appear

again like in a dream 

fragments of experience experienced

again natural instruments 

of a universal language 

to move our bodies with our 

eyes and ears open

senses awoken)

(...

if art dies it

will be the moments 

of possible shared

connections

applause of the artist

who devotes her 

time for the 

composition and care

of a beautiful 

salad of sounds

that expel moments of truth

that respire, like a breath

going in the direction of a circle

returning like a dream

if art dies it 

will be music and human life itself

viva la musica, viva la vida)

The festival ends, but people linger until the setting of the next night's sun.