COLLECTIVE DREAMING
As Australia’s first Indigenous dance company celebrates 30 years, the key players at Bangarra Dance Theatre reflect on their unique use of contemporary movement to tell traditional stories.
When Australia’s Bangarra Dance Theatre was formed in 1989, it was comprised of creatives who possessed both talent and big dreams. As Australia’s first Indigenous dance theatre company celebrates 30 years, the key players reflect on their unique use of contemporary movement to tell traditional stories. By Jane Albert. Styled by Philippa Moroney and Stephen Page. Photographed by Levon Baird.
Last August, Bangarra Dance Theatre directors Stephen Page and Frances Rings journeyed to the remote Western Australian region of the Kimberley. It is an area significant to them both, as it was here their dear friend and former colleague Ningali Lawford-Wolf was born and grew up, before moving to Sydney where she became a much-loved stage and screen actress and regular Bangarra collaborator. “While I was there I was thinking about the first time I went to the Kimberley, as an 18-year-old with Ningali beside me,” Rings recalls. “We shared a swag, she was taking me to her Country, and her mother wove me a traditional hair belt as a gift, because she was thankful we’d been looking after her daughter in this big crazy corporate city where they’d allowed their Kimberley girl to go and study.”
On this most recent trip Rings, Page and the 17 Bangarra dancers were in the Kimberley to hold workshops with the community and local kids, gathering stories and inspiration for the company’s 2020 major work celebrating the area’s unique cultural spirit and connection to land.
You can imagine their shock and distress when, just days after leaving, they received the devastating news that Lawford-Wolf had died. The 52-year-old had been performing in Edinburgh as part of the Sydney Theatre Company’s acclaimed production The Secret River, an adaptation of Kate Grenville’s award-winning, confronting novel about first contact, when she suffered a severe asthma attack that led to her death.
As Page and Rings travelled with Lawford-Wolf’s family to Edinburgh to escort her body home, the developing work began to take on new meaning. “Ningali’s passing put everything in perspective. At nights, if I’m at home and I have five minutes of silence and thinking, I do get sad, but there she was doing something she loved – carrying stories,” Page says. “The new work was always going to be guided by Country [but] the legacy of Ningali’s spirit is so inspiring.” The Secret River, like the films she had starred in, including Rabbit-Proof Fence and Bran Nue Dae, enabled her to do what she loved best: share stories of her land and culture with non-Indigenous Australia and the world. “Ningali loved to tell stories; she was a conduit between two worlds.”
Page could well be talking about Bangarra itself. This unique company does just that: breathing life into the myriad narratives of Indigenous Australia – stories of historical figures such as Woollarawarre Bennelong; inventor, writer and philosopher David
“I was lucky because I had my brothers with me. We travelled as a pack of little dingoes and everyone knew we were the Pages”
Unaipon, who is featured on our $50 note; the young Eora woman Patyegarang, who befriended Lieutenant William Dawes; ancient stories from the Dreaming; blunt stories that lay bare today’s challenges of substance abuse and violence; and beautiful, evocative stories that depict this country’s vast terrains, so fundamentally connected with Indigenous identity.
This year marks 30 years since the nation’s only Indigenous dance theatre company was founded in
1989. In fact, its roots go further back, to the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre (AIDT), an organisation that grew out of years of campaigning by cultural Elders, activists and artists in the 1960s and 70s determined to have their voices and culture acknowledged and celebrated. AIDT formally began in 1976 under Carole Johnson, an African-American contemporary dancer, arts activist and graduate of
New York’s prestigious Juilliard School; and in 1988 a training college was established for younger students: the National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA). Highly respected today, its graduates include singer Christine Anu, former Bangarra dancer Elma Kris and Rings, who taught there for many years. In 1989 Johnson set up Australia’s first Indigenous dance theatre company. It was named Bangarra, Wiradjuri for ‘to make fire’. In 1991 the spark of that fire was handed to a cocky young political agitator and prodigiously talented dancer and emerging choreographer, Stephen Page.
Page came in triplicate, with his gifted younger brother and dancer Russell, and older brother and composer David, who would develop an uncanny ability for creating soundscapes that fused traditional sounds and voices with electronic contemporary beats. “We’d all come to the school, this smorgasbord of black identity which you all navigate differently,” Page says. “I was lucky because I had my brothers with me. We travelled as a pack of little dingoes and everyone knew we were the Pages.”
The company was run on the smell of the proverbial rag, and everybody was expected to pitch in, no matter what the consequences. “David was driving the bus, then creating music. Russell had to dance with a fractured hand,” says Rings, while Page adds: “We’d all sew costumes, Fran was a fashionista, pinching bits of clothing from everywhere,
Ningali was there, we were all together … it was like our own blackfella Woodstock.”
From the moment Page had the reins at Bangarra he dreamt big. His first production in 1992 was Praying Mantis Dreaming, the story of a young Aboriginal girl and her journey from her traditional homelands to the city. The score was composed by David and choreographed at Bangarra’s new home at an inner-city Police Citizens Youth Club. The audacious work announced there was a new voice that demanded to be heard. Page never looked back.
Since then Bangarra has honed its signature style, one that uses contemporary movement to tell traditional and urban stories. The company has worked with dozens of communities from around Australia, nurtured relationships with cultural Elders who ensure the works’ integrity; established the careers of more than 100 dancers, choreographers, designers and composers; and presented 57 productions. In addition to his choreography, Page would direct Awakenings, the Indigenous section of the Sydney Olympic Games opening ceremony; collaborate on Rites with the Australian Ballet, and numerous films and theatre productions, including The Sapphires, Bran Nue Dae and The Secret River, before directing a feature film on the Bangarra dancers, Spear, that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015.
Three decades on and the company is in demand from New York to Shanghai, while invitations for 2021 are being considered for a season at Paris’s prestigious Théâtre National de Chaillot. Today Bangarra is housed in uber-stylish, albeit temporary digs in Sydney’s Barangaroo while their permanent home in nearby Walsh Bay receives a makeover.
The glamorous international tours are a welcome – and necessary – progression. But the definition of success goes far deeper than that for the company itself. Bangarra has recently returned from its biggest national tour to date, a triple bill of works including Rings’s celebrated 2004 work Unaipon; Stamping Ground by acclaimed Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián, the only non-Indigenous choreographer to have had a work performed by the company; and To make fire, a new work by Page and Elma Kris featuring the voice of Lawford-Wolf.
Having re-joined the company full-time after a 14-year absence, Rings is struck by the reputation Bangarra now commands with the broader public. “The way we’ve been received, the respect the company has, it holds a special space,” she says proudly. “People want to connect, they see things like the Uluru Statement from the Heart on the news and they want to understand, they want something that gives them a door into being a part of it, whether it’s by buying a ticket or bringing friends to the show. It’s really important to people to feel they can connect with the Indigenous people and Indigenous cultures of this country. And Bangarra provides that opportunity.”
And it goes yet deeper. For Bangarra’s leaders, true success is connecting with their own, through dance, from communities in regional and remote Australia to urban Indigenous Australians. Page points to the Rekindling education program, launched six years ago by three former dancers, that runs workshops for schoolchildren and communities and supplies comprehensive resources for teachers.
“We have many families out there in the rural communities who are suffering. There’s no clean water in three central desert communities,” says Page. “So we’re wondering: ‘Are we just up ourselves and worried about the mainstream? What can we do to help?’ And to take your little story to communities … you think that medicine doesn’t really work, but it really does connect. So our future is about making sure we sustain, in a trusted, honest respectful way, these cultural values that work through all these different initiatives.”
For all Bangarra’s success there has been deep, personal tragedy too. Page – and the broader Bangarra family – lost both brothers when first Russell and later David, died, in 2002 and 2016 respectively. No-one would have begrudged Page for a second had he decided he’d had enough. When news broke earlier this year that he was appointing Rings as associate artistic director, the first in the company’s history, many assumed Page was preparing the company for life without its esteemed leader.
Quite the opposite. Page seems revitalised by the return of his friend and former colleague, herself an award-winning choreographer. He is also relishing the support of the company’s long-standing designer and Murri man Jacob Nash and points out Bangarra isn’t your typical Western arts company and needn’t follow the typical arts company model of a sole leader.
“It’s hard to pop up a story every year, but what’s great is we have David’s legacy. You can go into the Bangarra creative pantry now and David laid down the soundscape for so many different, diverse themes. People ask me every year: ‘How do you know what every work is going to be?’ and I don’t know! We’re at a space of 30 years but we’ve been here 65,000, so for Fran to come back this year, and with Jake [Nash], it’s like family coming home. I can only thrive as a clan.”
To celebrate its 30th birthday, Bangarra is presenting Knowledge Ground, an immersive multimedia exhibition celebrating various productions and milestones from its past. The Holden Torana that featured in the 2000 Olympic Arts Festival work Skin will be flipped on its side, providing the backdrop to screen Spear; the veranda from a mission house will be recreated to show footage from the company’s rural and regional trips, while costumes and set designs will also be displayed alongside never-before-seen backstage images shot by Nash over the past seven years. “It’s a gift to pay respect to the spirit of 65,000 years that’s made us exist for 30, paying respect to our heritage past, present and future,” says Page.
Next year Bangarra’s male dancers will embark on workshops within youth detention centres, while the females will work with young girls living in remote Ernabella, South Australia. “There’s no clean water there, either,” says Page. “We’re trying to work out how to stay present in the contemporary world.” Rings adds they are “getting feedback, learning how we can do things better, what communities we haven’t connected with”.
Page says it’s crucial the company step outside the mainstream, return to its roots and the people it represents. “I don’t always have the ideas. It’s when I break away from it, when we go to regional centres, connect with community … we’re still growing. What does the next 30 years look like? We’ve only just scratched the surface.” Knowledge Ground is on at Sydney’s Carriageworks December 4–14.
“It’s a gift to pay respect to the spirit of 65,000 years that’s made us exist for 30, paying respect to our heritage past, present and future”