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WOMB: HAZ FORRESTER, 
 CHARLOTTE Forrester, 
 Georgette Brown (PHOTO: THOMAS LAMBERT)
WOMB: HAZ FORRESTER, CHARLOTTE Forrester, Georgette Brown (PHOTO: THOMAS LAMBERT)

Pop CultureMarch 8, 2018

Snakes and siblings: Wellington indie-folk family band Womb

WOMB: HAZ FORRESTER, 
 CHARLOTTE Forrester, 
 Georgette Brown (PHOTO: THOMAS LAMBERT)
WOMB: HAZ FORRESTER, CHARLOTTE Forrester, Georgette Brown (PHOTO: THOMAS LAMBERT)

Erena Shingade talks to Womb, a Wellington indie-folk sibling trio whose new album was released this month.

When I first heard Wellington’s Womb back in 2016, I listened to the self-titled album ritualistically for months. Charlotte Forrester’s ethereal voice became my private, secret music of nights and dawns, colouring the interface between sleep and waking. Her music came to represent the dipping in and out of self-awareness: the feeling of being borne along by the strange visions of the mind.

The spectral layering of voices which characterises Womb is so evocative of a particular mood and time that it seems wrong to listen to the music at work, in the middle of the day, or among acquaintances. There’s something hallowed about the music, something which makes me want to listen quietly and privately, among soft furnishings. As Charlotte Forrester herself described one of the videos from that first album, Womb’s music is “a magic but untouchable world”.

Womb’s new album, Like Splitting the Head from the Body, is still a magic world, but a different one. Gone are the folky guitar pickings, the exacting consonance; welcomed in are synths, electronic vocal manipulation, and some of the dissonance present in Womb’s live performances. The characteristic vocal layering still marks the music, but the warm, floating space of the first album, the eerie zone of amniotic fluid that Forrester had previously aspired to create, is brought down to earth. It’s less of a dreamscape which makes me want to wallow in my bed looking up at the stars.

But the new album retains something of the bedroom-demo vibe of the debut. Having recorded the outlines of the songs with Rohan Evans at the Wine Cellar in Auckland, Womb then spent months layering the tracks. As Charlotte says, the DIY ethos is part of “the magic of making the album – being able to add bits, to keep on fleshing out a song until it sounds totally different.”

WOMB, LIVE (PHOTO: JOHN DIMERY)

But the biggest change is certainly the addition of Charlotte’s siblings, Haz Forrester and Georgette Brown. Together, the three of them give the band’s name a new sense of authenticity. Forrester is still the main songwriter, but each sibling now incorporates something of their own style: Haz’s interests in electronic sound manipulation, for example, comes through in the single ‘Feeling Like Helium’. Each having their own individual musical interests means that the three feel no need to stay in one genre. “[We] have the room to explore whatever comes up,” Georgette tells me. The music for the new album “just organically happened when we all started doing it together”.

Each of the three have other artistic influences which filter back into the band. Georgette is a full-time visual artist; Haz studies environmental science; Charlotte and Haz do sound pieces for Georgette’s art and give poetic explanations for their music based on the literature they read. According to Charlotte, the first few tracks of the album came about after she spent a week sick in bed and read her way through a stack of books on queer ecology. Those 2016 songs represent “the idea that humans and nature are part of a kind of mesh. It’s like you’re not the same thing as nature – you’re different but you’re made of the same substance.”

Haz expands on this with his science background when he describes the title track of the new album, Like Splitting the Head from the Body as referring to “the boundaries between humans and nature, humans and other humans…The lonely sensation of being forever in a closed body, but the potential in understanding that the body is not just a contained entity.”

Georgette tells me that Like Splitting the Head from the Body came about from a family legend. While they were living in a forest in Australia called Narnia (previously a commune, then home to their family, a horse, some sheep, a few WWOOFers, and a handful of troubled teenagers), a snake appeared on the deck where the children were playing. With the swiftness and power of a matriarch, their mother Keziah took up an axe and struck the snake, splitting the head from the body.

WOMB, A LONG TIME AGO (PHOTO: SUPPLIED)

Womb crosses artistic disciplines freely. The band’s logo, drawn by Georgette, manages to evoke new-age spirituality, medieval typography, and Greek mythology all at once. In marrying what they see as the personal and the conceptual, the band take influence from musicians like Björk whose idiosyncratic image is the result of her collaborations across musical genres as well as with diverse fashion designers, artists, photographers and music video directors. Keeping with this vision of interdisciplinary collaboration, Womb’s ideal show line-up would include spoken word artists and actors like Ana Scotney and Gerard Crewdson as well as local bands such as Alexa Casino, Girls Pissing On Girls Pissing, Huge Mutant, and i.rokyo.

The trio have had strong support from the local Wellington music scene right from the beginning. After growing up in Narnia and then in Champaign, a town in Illinois, USA, they moved to Wellington as teenagers. Although they began by making music together at home, Haz and Charlotte credit the community that surrounds their label, Sonorous Circle, with supporting them to play their first gigs. Label co-owners Dick White, Thomas Lambert, and Sean Kelly were there when they were starting out, and have become like family, Charlotte says. In fact, no matter where she travels in the world, it always affirms the kinship she feels to Wellington. “Most of my favourite musicians are from here…condensed into the incredibly small landscape of Te Whanganui-a-Tara.”

Being siblings has helped the development of their music too. The shared histories, mutual understanding, and sense of trust allow them to take risks. Only two years ago, Haz and Charlotte asked Georgette to learn the drums for them, and more recently she began to do backing vocals as well. Perhaps the unselfconscious air of their performances is down to the feeling of having no judgement in rehearsals. “I don’t know if I could feel comfortable in the same way when I jam with other people as I do with Georgette and Hazzy,” Charlotte says. “I just feel like they get what I’m trying to say immediately…[when we’re] crafting sound together.”

And what does Keziah, their mother, make of it all? Sometimes, when they walk past her room late at night in their Aro Valley home, they can hear Womb tracks playing softly. And sometimes she’ll come to their gigs and record them, just so she can replay the set at home again that night, alone, smiling.


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Dandara is a Nintendo Switch game with a (rare) black female protagonist.
Dandara is a Nintendo Switch game with a (rare) black female protagonist.

Pop CultureMarch 7, 2018

How video game Dandara uses capoeira to tell the story of Brazil’s beginnings

Dandara is a Nintendo Switch game with a (rare) black female protagonist.
Dandara is a Nintendo Switch game with a (rare) black female protagonist.

Tof Eklund goes deep on the historical context and significance of Dandara, a newly released Metroidvania-style game about the famous-in-Brazil folk hero.

I was certain, from the first screenshot I saw of Dandara, that there were layers to the world and narrative of Brazilian studio Long Hat House’s jump-warping Metroidvania. Reviewers seemed not to care, noting that they didn’t get the story, ignoring the game’s repeated references to the importance of recovering a forgotten past, and focusing entirely on whether they loved or hated the game’s unique movement mechanics. That may be because I was looking at reviews by white, western, English-speaking reviewers.

In Brazil, the context of Dandara is unmissable: the historical Dandara was a descendant of escaped slaves, a master of capoeira, and the last Queen of the Quilombo dos Palmares, wife of the universally-known King Zumi dos Palmares. Palmares was a independent community of escaped slaves that withstood all attacks for almost a century and grew from a starting community of a few dozen to a population somewhere between ten and thirty thousand.

I found one review that made passing mention of the historical Dandara as the leader of a slave revolt but dismissed that history as unrelated to the game. Even that review didn’t bother to comment on the significance of Dandara’s protagonist being a black (preto) woman with voluminous, powerful hair. Positive representations of black women in games are still extremely rare, let alone black, female protagonists with natural hair. Even if there was no meaningful story to the game, that would still be worth noting.

But that’s just the beginning. The history of Dandara and Palmares is also a guide to both the significance of the game’s surreal setting, but also to its strategy. There are large gaps and conflicts in the historical Dandara’s story, and it may be that some of her deeds have been absorbed into the more complete and coherent history of her husband, the King, Zumbi dos Palmares. The Palmares was defended in no small part by the palm trees it was named for: the quilombos were concealed and protected by the jungle and it’s rough terrain that favoured guerilla tactics and made it difficult to bring European cannons to bear.

Much like in the land wars here in New Zealand two centuries later, the Palmarinos (aided by native allies and runaway soldiers) turned their enemies’ war machine against itself. The mostly Angolan Palmarionos further developed their ancestral war-dancing into what is now known as capoeira, a martial art based on constant movement, evasion, and waiting for your opportunity to strike.

That is the primary game mechanic of Dandara. Dandara is capoeira. You move swiftly and decisively, almost instantaneously leaping from wall to wall. Your enemies target where you are, and as soon as they commit, you are no longer there, like the ginga, the fundamental zig-zag step of capoeira that threw off the aim of enemies with (single shot) firearms. It is always best to bring a gun to a gun fight, but a master of capoeira, like Dandara, could leap in and inflict disabling strikes with a machete or straight razor while foes were reloading or off caught off balance.

In the Dandara, your primary attack is short ranged and has to charge before each use – but you can charge it while evading, biding your time. If you try to go toe-to-toe with even rank-and-file Eldarian soldiers, you will die. The common Metroidvania strategy of “just keep shooting, jump to avoid their attacks” is a recipe for failure here. Don’t stay close – or far. Don’t keep the foe in your crosshairs. Move, move, move, go wherever they won’t expect you to be, go wherever you want them to go, wait for an opening, then get as close as you can, strike and evade again.

Dandara is a hard game, the campsites where you can raise your flag (heal and recover energy) few and far between. It’s a much faster-paced game than I usually go for, and I can understand why some reviewers found it frustrating, but once I got used to thinking about fighting in Dandara as capoeira, I got better at it. Likewise, I started thinking about exploring as more like a series of guerrilla raids, and treating my store of healing items like supplies for a journey, better make sure you have enough to get back to camp again (where they will be replenished). This led to far fewer instances of becoming overextended and then having to go try to recover my ghost for the Salt I needed to upgrade my Essence capacity.

Ghost? Salt? Essence? Yeah, Dandara‘s still surreal, and so are some of the people you help and rescue in game, including npcs that sometimes look basically human and sometimes have elongated limbs that appear to have been made out of yellow play-doh, or consist of giant heads attached to the wall opposite the one their glowing hands are stuck to. It feels like a metaphor to me: most of the friendly characters live in the Village of the Artists, which looks like a funhouse mirror version of an urban neighborhood.

Afro-Brazilians still face discrimination, and the odd, varied appearances of the artists makes sense in terms of Brazilian racial identity, which includes pretos like Dandara: dark-skinned people with obvious African heritage; but also pardos with medium skin tone who are generally assumed to have African, Indiginous, and European heritage. Both pretos and pardos face significant discrimination, even though when put together, they constitute an outright majority of the population. After brancos (whites), the pardo population is the single largest demographic in the country. There is an Afro-Brazilian movement, small but growing, that wants to unite pretos, pardos, and brancos who are prepared to own their African heritage. From that perspective, the artists appear to be pardos and brancos who need Dandara, the preto, the negro, to achieve their own liberation.

The Eldarian soldiers patrolling the streets of as the artists hide in their cramped dwellings has a contemporary relevance, as increasing violence by narco gangs has led to the decision to deploy the military in Rio de Janero, where they are encircling and isolating the city’s favelas (slums), and residents living in fear of both gangs and solders. Augustus, an early-game boss in Dandara, syncretizes historical and contemporary concerns. Responsible for the occupation of the village, he appears as a huge, long face with a pronounced cleft chin and a general’s cap, says that he is bringing order, and expresses his sorrow at Dandara’s opposition. Indeed, in the 1670s, the colonial government offered Palmares peace and recognition on condition that escaped slaves (not born in Palmares) would be returned to their “owners.” It is said that Dandara led opposition to this devil’s deal.

One version of the legend of Dandara claims that she was pregnant at the final battle for Palmares, her capoeira danced to the rhythm of the quickening in her belly as she cut a swath through Domingos Jorge Vehlo’s soldiers. I can’t find that version again now, and but it swims in my memory, like a vision. Pregnant or not, Dandara’s story always ends the same way: facing capture, she killed herself rather than be enslaved. Many accounts say that she was surrounded and threw herself off a cliff. Here history comes full circle, as the story of the videogame Dandara begins with her emergence from the Womb of Creation. Perhaps she is the historical Dandara’s daughter, gestated over a descent three centuries long, come to complete her mother’s war for liberation.

You don’t have to know the history of the Quilombo dos Palmares to enjoy Dandara, and I’m sure some players will master the game’s strategy without giving a moment’s thought to its protagonist, but the game is richer, more meaningful, if you treat its origins and context as relevant. Long Hat House clearly didn’t set out to tell the world Dandara’s story: so much of it has been lost they would have been making it up anyway.

What they have done is create a game that is true to Dandara’s spirit and legacy… and, to the unenlightened, a perfectly decent metroidvania. Dandara is best played with a light touch, with awareness, not obsession, and with the flick of a finger on a touchscreen rather than a deathgrip on a controller (this seems to be the common element in whether reviewers love or hate Dandara’s controls: it really is best on Switch or iPad). Don’t mistake that lightness for triviality: its lightness is capoeira, the bearing of a heavy heart as if it were a feather.


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