This year’s Adelaide Fringe was different. The iconic arts festival where thousands of performances compete for attention, the presentation ‘We Belong’ did something rare – it made audiences stay back in silence, then speak. Not just about poetry, but about memory, erasure, caste, Country, and the uneasy inheritance of language.
When the spoken word performance ‘We Belong’ won the 2026 Award for Excellence in Poetry, it marked a milestone for an India-Australia collaboration. But for its director Tess Joseph, the recognition pointed to something deeper: that poetry, when held with care, can carry histories across continents – and still feel intimate.
Bringing together Australian First Nations poet Dakota Feirer and Indian Dalit poet Aleena Sabu, ‘We Belong’ creates a live dialogue between two marginalised histories – without collapsing their differences. The show is created by Kommune, a Mumbai-based creator collective.
How the idea took root
For Tess, the project began not as a production, but as a feeling.
“I start my days with poetry,” she tells Indian Link. “It’s something my Amma began with me, and it has stayed like a quiet ritual, a way of listening to the world before all the talking begins.”
That instinct sharpened a few years ago while moderating a panel with First Nations poet Kirli Saunders. What she heard echoed something she already knew from Dalit and Adivasi writing – particularly from Aleena and poets like Jacinta Kerketta.
Different lands, but a shared pulse of land, identity, memory, and resistance.
“That’s when the idea first began to take shape: what would it mean to bring these voices together in conversation?”
By the time she arrived at Adelaide Fringe in 2025, the idea had found direction.
When funding opened up, ‘We Belong’ became the proposal she had to write.
“It began as a concept, but I trusted that if we brought the right artists together, something truthful would emerge. And it did.”
English language, a bridge and burden
At the heart of ‘We Belong’ lies a central tension: English as both bridge and burden.
Tess deliberately places Aleena’s ‘My English’ alongside Dakota’s ‘English is my foster home’, forcing the audience into discomfort from the outset.
“English as access, but also as violence, as inheritance, but it not being the language that runs in our veins,” she explains.
Rather than smoothing this contradiction, the performance leans into it.
“We made deliberate choices to rupture English. Aleena’s ancestral Malayalam chant enters the second segment of the show as an invocation before comprehension. Its meaning is offered after it is sung.”
Through oral traditions – whale songlines, Pulaya cosmology, grandmother memory – the work reclaims spaces that existed long before English.
“So English becomes the bridge, but never the root.”
A stellar performance built across distance
In November 2025, the team began meeting weekly on Zoom, building trust, exchanging stories, and slowly shaping the work.
“The structure emerged like a journey, not a framework,” Tess says.
The narrative moves from language to myth and origin, then into lineage and water, before arriving in the present – where borders, visas, and bureaucracy complicate belonging.
Then came the challenge: the team met in person just one day before the actual show.
“We had one day. Four runs in my hotel room and one on stage rehearsal only. Jet lag wasn’t on the call sheet!”
Yet when the performance finally came together, something clicked.
“I still remember the first time we performed the duet in person. Suddenly – it landed! It was relief but also felt like ‘an arrival’.”
When two worlds meet
For Dakota Feirer, the show’s tone was set by “a provocation of solidarity across oceans”.
At its core was a question: “if two of our ancestors met, what would they say to one another?”
The answer unfolds through a dialogue that connects, but does not collapse, Dalit and First Nations experiences.
“’We Belong’ is also one of a kind in terms of a storytelling exchange between Dalit peoples and First Nations Australian peoples,” Dakota says.
“The specificities are different, but the realities often mirror each other,” Aleena adds. “We did not merge experiences, we allowed them to stand alongside one another in conversation.”
Dakota found that exchange equally powerful.
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“By not hanging up her Dalit identity before entering the room, Aleena forces everyone else to undress,” he says about his co-performer.
What emerges is not just comparison, but connection.
“What ‘We Belong’ ultimately offers to the world is a pause… that we are all bound by a shared human experience,” Dakota explains.
When ‘We Belong’ won at Adelaide Fringe, Tess redirected the credit.
“The award is an honour for all of us, but this award belongs to Aleena and Dakota. Their words… that is what won.”
For her, the recognition validates spoken word as something far more than performance.
“It is a living, breathing art form – it can hold the past and speak to the present and our future.”
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