ABSTRACT
In June 1998, a theatrical dance performance played to packed audiences at the theatre of the University of Papua New Guinea. Dancing Flames was written, choreographed and directed by Stella Inimgba, a lecturer in performance arts. It tells the story of a group of people taken into captivity by blackbirders, the labour recruiters who took Melanesians to work in Australian sugar cane plantations in the late nineteenth century. In the play, they are placed in different plantations where they are enslaved, mistreated and alienated from each other. They eventually kill a 'master' who has raped his enslaved women and shot any who resisted him.
