Lenny Donahue and Tibian Wyles forged their friendship after meeting at Brisbane’s Aboriginal Centre for Performing Arts in 2012.
It along with the essence of brotherhood come to life in the play they have co-written, Dear Brother.
“Something Leonard and I have taken on over the years we’ve been working together … is that brotherhood gives us a safe space to talk about what’s going on in our lives, or to vent, or to just sit in a room and say nothing,” Wyles, a Girramay and Kalkadoon man, told AAP.
“Because of the company there we know it’s a safe space for us.
“We tried to take that feeling of brotherhood and place it in the show and I think that does come clearly through the show, within the characters and within the storylines.”
The coming of age tale grapples with themes of mental health, masculinity, culture and connection to Country through dance.
For both Wyles and Donohue, where words may fail, movement and dance prevail.
“We try to physicalise a mental state … we use the physicality of our brothers or other people around us to affect us, to help us heal,” Wyles said.
“That’s what I like about the show, that a lot of these topics we don’t fully touch on them but we allude to them and we use physical movement rather than text, which works for me way better than what words can do, because you can feel through movement.”
As well as drawing on their own experience of brotherhood the men have delved deep into 65,000 years of culture and storytelling.
“We fused the theatre world and our world, which is the cultural and blackfulla way,” Wyles said.
“The main thing I want an audience to take away is more understanding of us as blackfullas … the intergenerational trauma is real, that lives through us, through our DNA and we talk about that throughout the play.”
Both dancers and actors themselves, the two men star in the play.
Donohue, a Djabuganjdji man, said it’s a ‘”dream come true” performing in the show he has conceptualised and written alongside his friend and collaborator.
“It’s all about having fun as well as being out on stage,” he said.
“Actually getting to perform with your brothers is something pretty remarkable and deadly.”
Donohue said he hopes audiences are able to connect with the story but most importantly, young Indigenous people might be inspired to follow their own dream.
“It’s showing young Indigenous mob that if you have a goal, if you have a dream, stick to it and don’t let anything waver, you just focus on that and things will work out in the end,” he said.
Dear Brother is being performed at Queensland Theatre’s Bille Brown theatre until September 28.
