To Dance, To Sing

Headdresses from the Gallery Collection

22 Mar –
8 Jun 2025


For many thousands of years, the islands stretching between Cape York Peninsula and Papua New Guinea have been home to the Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait Island) people. Longstanding interactions with neighbours and forebears from Melanesian, Pacific, Malay and Australian Aboriginal peoples have coalesced into a vibrant cultural heritage that is celebrated in the arts.

Traditional designs, patterns and stories were taught to Zenadth Kes people by the Ancestors and are reinforced and replicated through ritual, dance, song, rock engravings and paintings, and on domestic and ritual objects. Spiritual connections to the land, sea, sky and seasons infuse these ritual and creative expressions, and to this day are propelled by Ancestral guidance.

Dance performance and dance paraphernalia continue to be the most powerful visual expressions of Zenadth Kes Indigenous culture. They combine choreography, theatre and visual art in graceful cohesion, and play an important and central role in ceremonial life, reflecting and reaffirming the benign relationship with the supernatural that was formed when creation began.

Dance masks and headdresses are unique in the each of the five island clusters of the Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula, with varied styles, materiality, complexity, purpose, and meaning.

Performing with these objects and singing the songs that accompany them during dance is a way of honouring and embodying land, sea and sky. Dance and song also call up the ancestral spirit realm where the people who have gone before are a felt presence.

The works in this exhibition include examples of finely crafted masks and headdresses, linocut prints and drawings depicting ceremonial events. 

To dance, to sing gathers works by significant artists including Dr Ken Thaiday Snr, Obery Sambo, Allson Edrick Tabuai, Alick Tipoti, Joel Sam, Toby Cedar, as well as others.

Dr Ken Thaiday Snr is an artist of international stature and having re-invigorated Torres Strait Islander identity through the Loza Dance Troupe that he formed in Cairns around forty years ago, Dr Thaiday Snr remains an inspirational figure. He is especially recognised for creating sculptural headdresses and hand-held dance machines with ingenious innovations devised to control special kinetic effects.

All the artists selected for To dance, to sing have adapted the original purpose of ritual and ceremonial objects, such as masks and headdresses, for museum display, and this adaptability reflects the Zenadth Kes willingness to absorb other cultural influences – including the colonial experience of contact with Western cultures – in a dynamic expression of old and new. Dance and song too, mirror the fusion of contemporary and traditional worlds, as headdresses and dance machines fashioned in modern times are worn and displayed with prowess and pride to the timeless pulse of the warup (hourglass shaped drum) and kulap (bean-seed rattle or shaker).

Importantly, alongside the aesthetic expression of dance, inter-Island performances are a major form of competition. In the narratives of song, the superhuman feats of great warriors are recounted. Contemporary Torres Strait Island artists have been known to confess their desire for challenge, perhaps suggesting that the construction and design skills they renew and invent are, after all, guided by fearless warrior spirits.

Of his own dance tradition and motivation, Dr Ken Thaiday Snr recounted:

When I was a young fellow on Darnley Island … my first experiences were fishing and … I saw my father teaching many people dancing.

My father knew a lot of different dancing, the dancing where you jump on people, climb on top of people, stand on your hands. I remember seeing one particular dance where dancers did handstands on the back of other dancers, just like gymnastics … nobody did dancing like that, only my father.

Dancing is very important to me because of my father … Every Torres Strait Islander is like this. We learnt from our grandfathers and our forefathers.

By passing down dance, songs and stories about the land, the animals, ancestral spirits and traditions from generation to generation, these artists support, celebrate, and strengthen the wellbeing and resilience of their communities and forge a path forward toward reconciliation for all.

 

 

 

IMAGE:

Segar PASSI
Meriam Mir
A young Murray Island man in a mask  1990
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
38.5 x 49.5 cm
Cairns Art Gallery Collection
Gift of David Everist, 2019

The Cairns Art Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which we work and live. We pay our respects to Elders past and present. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this website may contain images, names or voices of deceased persons in photographs, film or text.