A CHAT WITH... STEPHEN PAGE
Stephen Page is the former artistic director of Bangarra Dance Theatre, a Sydneybased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance theatre group. The 57-year-old dancer, film director and choreographer, of the Yugambeh tribe in South-East Queensland, choreographed dozens of fearless works for Bangarra, including his work, SandSong: Stories from the Great Sandy Desert, which tells the story about past displacement. It will be staged during the Auckland Arts Festival – Bangarra’s first performance in New Zealand since 2005. Page talks to Sarah Catherall about celebrating the spirit of Indigenous Australian stories.
What inspired this dance work?
In 2019, Ningali Lawford-Wolf (an Aboriginal actor who acted in films such as Rabbit-Proof Fence) passed away. She was our great friend, and an amazing storyteller and performer. She wanted to gift her story to Bangarra, about the politics in the Great Sandy Desert between the 1920s-1960s, when Aboriginal people were removed off their land and onto pastoral stations. They were forced into hard labour, usually for no wages and only minimal rations. The work is about their inspirational survival. We wanted to celebrate her country, and its care for knowledge and language and traditional song and dance. It’s quite a dense show, vast like the landscape. It was created in consultation with Wangkatjungka/Walmajarri elders from the Kimberley and Great Sandy Desert regions, drawing on the stories and memories of the past. SandSong pays respect to her and the great community of the Great Sandy Desert.
What is unique about Bangarra Dance Theatre?
There was no full-time company globally in the world that had started its own dance language before we launched 34 years ago. We are one of the biggest employers of first peoples in Australia, with 17 full-time dancers. We’ve survived for 34 years and in that time 120 first peoples dancers have been through, all of Aboriginal or Torres Strait descent. It’s a very distinctive company. There’s a fragility about it too. You’ve got artists who carry ancestral trauma in some degree. They’re all aged 20-34. Some come from stolen backgrounds. We get to tell our story through this amazing storytelling forum of dance theatre.
How has the perception of Indigenous Australian dance theatre changed in your career?
It has always been challenging. You’ve got to be a voice for the mob in the mainstream. But we’re passionate about the sustainability of our stories, and making sure that our voice
Dancers Rika Hamaguchi and Baden Hitchcock pose with Stephen Page during a media preview of Bangarra Dance Theatre’s new production SandSong at Sydney Opera House in Sydney, Australia.
is from our perspective, and our process is full of cultural values. We don’t just choreograph – that’s a Western term. We invest in stories. It’s through the medium of dance theatre that Bangarra is able to celebrate the spirit of our stories. Sure, we need to sell tickets, which will sustain the economy of our company.
Politically, the black voice and we as storytellers in Australia, it’s always been constantly there. We have had some of the biggest massacres in the Western World. It suffers, it suffers. For us to exist, is to carry the trauma of our ancestors and to show their resilience, to empower them.
You were the ninth of 12 children in a working class family in Brisbane. What was your childhood like and how did your parents, Roy and Doreen, connect you with your culture?
My mum and dad were displaced, they were removed, they were stolen, they were forbidden. Mum’s great-gran was a survivor of a massacre. My mother carried that resilience quietly. She had 12 kids with my father to look after.
Dad would make sure that we connected with our culture. He would take us to Beaudesert in the Gold Coast hinterland, where he would speak of lore and spirits.
Mum had a connection with her salt water culture. She’d get together with others because
that was all we had. We were always around our family and it was broken. My six sisters are aged between 63-72 and they’re great-grandmothers. There are 143 grandchildren.
When did you begin to dance?
I did backyard dancing. We were working class. We didn’t have much, and no electricity, my brothers and sisters and I would embrace dancing and pop culture. My parents grew up with early blues, my sisters with The Beatles and Elvis. My father was an amazing handyman. He was really quite creative. He’d go to the tip when no-one was there, he found our first TV there and our radio and fixed it up.
What are the challenges of being Indigenous Australian today?
You’re born into challenges. We’re born into trauma, and conflict. We’re constantly changing in the political landscape. We’re constantly changing because we’re first peoples. We’ve got six politicians in Parliament for the first time. Māori have probably progressed more than us, but we have a great black political voice which is strong. I’m an optimistic person. I like to think there’s a strong need for change in the next generation. We’re constantly in the middle of this ongoing fight. We’d love a treaty, a sovereignty. We feed this black lens constantly and we’re constantly throwing it back in this Western supremacist landscape.
BOOK: SandSong: Stories from the Great Sandy Desert features in the Auckland Arts Festival from March 15. For ticket info Visit aaf.co.nz