Trauma of the Boxing Day tsunami inspires long-overdue Sydney Festival debut

Indonesian-Australian choreographer and dancer Murtala remembers the “Boxing Day Tsunami” in 2004 as a moment of reckoning. He was completing his final year of dance studies at university in Java when terrible news came: a devastating tsunami had struck his hometown of Banda Aceh in northwest Indonesia. More than 225,000 people were dead.

Murtala immediately led a band of university students to Aceh as volunteers. Where his family lived, about 80,000 people had perished. Dozens were missing, including his little brother. Roads, power, water and telecommunications were cut off. He volunteered as a body-recoverer, locating and pulling corpses from the mud.

“I’m not really a religious person, but still, we believe every person should be buried quickly,” he says. “And when I picked up people’s bodies, I’d hope someone would pick up my younger brother.”

Now on the cusp of his Sydney Festival debut with the tsunami-inspired dance piece Gelumbang Raya, Murtala remains philosophical. “It’s like being an artist,” he says. “In a big event like a tsunami, you just need to do something, whatever your part.”

For months, he recovered bodies seven days a week, eight hours a day. Initially, the team strived to uphold cultural and religious practices: “We’d pick up a body and pray.”

But the sheer number became overwhelming. Soon, he says, “we were just counting ‘One, two, three, [throw]!’ ... because they were beginning to rot”.

In the aftermath, Murtala’s brother was miraculously found alive, and the body-recovery work wound down – the team knew it was time when “we couldn’t smell bodies any more”. But thousands of children – “tsunami orphans” – languished in displacement camps.

Murtala turned to what he knew best: dancing. Acehnese music and dance were repressed for decades under the Suharto government, but now the same traditions could help children – homeless, many disabled and missing one parent or both – navigate tsunami trauma.

“We used it as a therapeutic alternative,” Murtala says. His dance lessons were so successful that international aid groups came calling, and within a few years, his initiative supported almost 8000 children. Today, dozens have gone on to study Acehnese arts professionally, inspired by that first encounter in a time of need.

“A mother came to me and said, ‘You know Murtala, if my son’s father was still alive, he would be so proud because our son is dancing,’” he says.

Through the program, Murtala met his future wife, Alfira O’Sullivan, a Perth-born Indonesian-Irish dancer and community leader. She fell in love with Murtala’s humanitarian and artistic energy: “After seeing all that, how do you not marry the man?” she says.

Their partnership became artistic as well as romantic, and O’Sullivan also makes her Sydney Festival debut with Jejak & Bisik as part of a double bill, Sisa-Sisa (meaning “remains or “remnants”), alongside Murtala’s piece. Her work explores her experience as a mother and female dancer, partially inspired by a dramatic misdiagnosed miscarriage experienced in Java.

Financial corruption associated with aid relief eventually disillusioned Murtala: as heartbreaking, he says, “as a second tsunami”. But his main stage career continued to soar. Before he’d turned 30, he was a prominent choreographer and performer, university lecturer and arts council leader.

Migrating to Australia ultimately became necessary for their children, but at a huge personal cost. Unrecognised and misunderstood by the Australian arts scene, he worked for years cleaning, delivering newspapers and Uber driving.

Compared to the breadth of the Asian arts industry, O’Sullivan says that Australia was “years behind” and plagued by systemic racism at the decision-making levels, depriving Australian audiences of her and Murtala’s community-minded skills.

Their festival debut signifies eagerly anticipated recognition, backed by a “dream team” of creative support. “It’s like they’re finally sayin, it’s your time,” Alfira says.

Murtala will perform in Gelumbang Raya and Alfira O’Sullivan in Jejak & Bisik in the Sydney Festival double-bill Sisa-Sisa at Bankstown Arts Centre on January 23 and 24.

Be the first to know when major news happens. Sign up for breaking news alerts on email or turn on notifications in the app.