It is never an easy job to choose a few favourites from among the productions one was fortunate to have seen in any one year, but what follows is my attempt to do just that. I have arranged my five favourites chronologically according to the month in which I saw each production.
As a result of a generous birthday gift that lasted over the whole (almost) of 2025, I also saw throughout the year a number of Royal Ballet productions via that company’s streaming platform. A presentation of Enigma Variations, filmed in 2019, was exceptionally engrossing. But I have restricted my five favourites to productions from Australian companies.
All In from Dance Makers Collective
All In was the first production I had had the opportunity to see from Dance Makers Collective, an organisation based in Western Sydney working with and between dance theatre, contemporary dance and social dance, and with the aim of building dance communities. The All In production featured Indigenous-focused dance, Western-style contemporary dance, Spanish-Flamenco and an Indian-focused section. It culminated in a finale in which the audience rose from their seats and joined the dancers on the floor. Young and old, experienced and not so experienced, all were present moving together.
So, apart from the thrill of watching a beautifully performed, diverse selection of dance styles, All In showed us is that dance is for everyone and that it exists beyond what might be called a mainstage show.
Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery has often shown dance as an adjunct to exhibitions on show in the gallery. Essor (the translation from an Indigenous language is ‘Thank you’) was created in response to Some Lads, a series of portraits by renowned Australian photographer, Tracey Moffatt. It was a solo work created and danced by Indigenous performer Yolanda Lowatta who was then working with Australian Dance Party. Lowatta’s dancing was exceptionally fluid and also highly intricate. It also was stylistically diverse and represented, to my mind, the different movement styles of the artists in the photographs, who were Indigenous artists whose work Lowatta admired.
Essor was danced to a soundscape by Indigenous multi-artist Bindimu. It contained sounds of water; the playing of Indigenous instruments; sounds from nature, including bird calls; human voices; and a range of other audio items. Just as Lowatta’s choreography referenced different dance styles, Bindimu’s soundscape took us, potentially, from venue to venue where dance might have been seen.
The film Cranko was shown in Canberra as part of the 2025 German Film Festival. Directed and written by Joachim Lang, it followed the career of South African-born dancer and choreographer John Cranko who directed Stuttgart Ballet from 1961 until 1973. It was a completely engrossing ‘biopic’ showing the personality and activities of man whose life was devoted to dance. There was also some spectacular dancing from current members of Stuttgart Ballet, especially from Elisa Badenes.
I really enjoyed the way this film held one’s attention from beginning to end. The strength of its impact encouraged me to look further into the circumstances of Cranko’s death, which occurred on board a plane returning to Stuttgart after company engagements in the United States.
Natalie Weir’s 4seasons was shown as part of a Queensland Ballet triple bill called Lister/Weir/Horsman. In typical Weir fashion the pas de deux in the work were just magnificent. But the whole was brilliantly conceived and filled with surprises, especially in Weir’s use of the space of the stage.
Unungkati Yantatja: one with the other. Sydney Dance Company
It was a real thrill to see a new work from Stephen Page in which he demonstrated again his interest in working collaboratively. Unungkati Yantatja: one with the other formed part of a triple bill, Continuum, from Sydney Dance Company. Page’s work focused on ‘the universality of breath’ and featured live music, performed onstage with input from William Barton, great stage design from Jacob Nash, and magnificent costumes from Jennifer Irwin. A notable input from former Bangarra dancer Ryan Pearson was an added highlight.
This 12th New Breed program was the last we will see. The series of New Breed, produced with a principal partnership from the Balnaves Foundation, has been a terrific initiative. Let’s hope the new arrangement, where the Balnaves Foundation will generously support an artist in residence program with Sydney Dance Company, will be as successful.
The 2025 program opened with a work called Save Point from current Sydney Dance Company artist, Ryan Pearson. Save Point was, Pearson tells us in the short video clip that preceded his work, inspired by video games from his childhood. Elsewhere he says that it was also a result of his mother’s collection of cleaning items that he enjoyed playing with as a child. And so the work includes mops, brooms and other cleaning items as props.
Save Point features eight artists, one soloist and seven dancers who largely dance around the soloist in circular patterns. Pearson’s choreography is most interesting for the movement of those seven dancers, especially for the fluid way they bend and twist the upper body, and for the way they are individuals in terms of the choreography while moving together.
Next up was From the horizon thereafter, created by New Zealand-born Ngaere Jenkins, currently also a dancer with Sydney Dance Company. It is a quiet, gentle work made for just six dancers and is Jenkins’ reflections on her New Zealand homeland and its varied countryside. In terms of structure, one dancer leads the team in a calm and thoughtful manner, while the others create shapes that seem to reference aspects of the landscape. Lighting by Alexander Berlage (who lit all four works on the program) added evocatively to the reflective nature of the work.
Following on from the Jenkins work was marathon o marathon from independent artist Emma Fishwick. Made on eight dancers, it was perhaps the most complex work on the program, at least in a narrative sense. We saw dancers running, marathon style, around the space of the stage; one seated dancer reading out a list of time sequences; several dancers working in a group as one sees when watching a marathon race; some dancers collapsing as time moved on; and more.
But all this was to set up the focus of the work not so much on a marathon itself but as a means of reflecting on life’s experiences, as a dancer or anyone involved in the dance world perhaps, but with a universal application. What is in it for us? Does dance have an answer to life’s difficulties? I’m not sure there was an answer but the group dancing was great to watch.
Perhaps the most spectacular, or at least the most mind-blowing work was that from Harrison Ritchie-Jones entitled Pigeon Humongous. Made for eight dancers, it closed the program, and was filled with quite extraordinary choreography. This was especially so when it came to lifts between dancers, which often involved dancers moving mid-air from partner to partner. The dancers were ‘punk pigeon people’ following on from a global virus. They were dressed outrageously for the most part—everyone differently (costumes from Aleisa Jelbart who was responsible for costumes in all four works). The dancers threw themselves around, shouted, behaved strangely. One’s mind never wandered. What would happen next?
Ritchie-Jones explained in his pre-performance video that his choreographic influences came from a variety of sources. And it is obvious when watching that this is the case. The work was beautifully structured and the dancing was simply fabulous. I felt exhausted but thrilled as it ended.
I can’t help feeling a little sad that the New Breed seasons have come to an end. They have given us a terrific look into the future. I haven’t seen every season but I have to say that the choreographer whose work I admired the most over the course of the years has been Melanie Lane. Her work WOOF from 2017 was just brilliant and since then she has gone from strength to strength.
But let’s look forward now. Early in November Sydney Dance Company and the Balnaves Foundation announced that choreographer Jenni Large would be the 2026 Balnaves Foundation Artist in Residence. Large will have the opportunity to work with the various areas of Sydney Dance Company in order to discover the various aspects associated with the production of a program of dance. At the same time she will continue to develop her choreography.
22 October 2025. Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay (Sydney)
I loved the title of Sydney Dance Company’s latest production—Continuum. It was a triple bill of works from three choreographers, Stephen Page, Rafael Bonachela and Tra Mi Dinh and It encouraged me to think on the development (and continuation) of the choreographic and dancerly art that has characterised Sydney Dance Company over the several decades of its existence. Page danced with the company in its earliest days before going on to direct Bangarra Dance Theatre; Rafael Bonachela is the company’s current director; and Tra Mi Dinh, the youngest of the three, was the recipient of the Keir Choreographic Award in 2022, which resulted in a commission to her from Sydney Dance Company.
The evening opened with Bonachela’s Spell, a work he says was inspired by singer Alice Smith and her cover presentation of I put a spell on you. Along with this cover, extra music included a choral arrangement by Olafur Arnalds, and a suite of three songs for solo violin from composer Bryce Dessner. In his program notes Bonachela commented on the impetus he derived from the music and noted that he was aiming to build ‘elements of compression and release within the choreography to build a series of dances that are spells.’
Although I’m not sure that the notion of spells came across strongly enough, the work clearly showed the movement style we have come to expect from Bonachela—powerful movement that was filled with surprising lifts and twisting bodies. But there were quite a number of sections that took place in strong darkness and I have never really understood why this is such a common occurrence these days. Having said that, a spectacular sequence occurred towards the end when the colour red dominated, not just in costumes (Kelsey Lee) but in lighting (Damien Cooper) and in a haze of red that continued to descend from the upper part of the space.
But for me the highlight of Spell was a section early in in the piece when two groups of four dancers engaged in unison work, sometimes together, at other times as two separate groups, and in much brighter lighting. I have always admired Bonachela’s ability to create unison movement, and the dancers responded beautifully to the changing structural groupings, as they always do.
After a brief pause the second work, Tra Mi Dinh’s Somewhere between ten and fourteen, took the stage. The opening few minutes consisted of a flurry of artists dancing together. The audience loved the opening and cheered as the curtain went up and the dancing was on show. The opening sequence also opened up Dinh’s choreographic style to those of us who were seeing her work for the first time. Pretty much every part of the body came into play, but there was strong emphasis on arms—lifting, bending, dropping, linking. And as a whole the choreography was fast, complex and fascinating to watch.
Somewhere between ten and fourteen is, we are told, ‘a study on dusk’ and the ‘transient yet expansive moments between day and night’. The variety of blue colour in the costumes (Aleisa Jelbart) recognised this as did, I believe, the fast-changing nature of the choreography. I felt exhausted, but thrilled, at the end of the work and I look forward to seeing more of Dinh’s work.
The third work, Unungkati Yantatja: one with the other, which centred on the notion of ‘the universality of breath’, came from Stephen Page working with an onstage group of musicians including William Barton on yidaki (Barton also sang) and the Omega Ensemble. In an unusual creative move (unusual for Page) the work began with examining the ‘story’ behind the music, which was already written (Page noted in the program that he had only rarely worked with existing music). But for me the major fascination of the work was that it was a major collaborative venture with, in addition to the live music, exceptional designs (Jennifer Irwin) reflecting Indigenous patterns and a boomerang-inspired section of the setting from Jacob Nash.
It was great to see Page’s work once more with its very grounded movement, and his ongoing interest in collaboration as an intrinsic element in a dance work. I was also especially thrilled to see Ryan Pearson now dancing with Sydney Dance Company after an earlier association with Bangarra. Pearson’s contribution to Page’s work was exceptional and was made especially clear in a solo he performed towards the end of the work. He danced with such a strong immersive quality as he engaged with the choreography and the others on stage.
Continuum was an engrossing production. Each work was quite different, and it was absorbing to watch three quite different choreographic styles and methods of engaging with music and design.
The BOLD Festival started as a biennial event in 2017 but it suffered in terms of being biennial as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It will, however, be back in a mini form in March 2024. BOLD24 will be a ‘Bite Size’ initiative and will feature a series of events celebrating International Women’s Day 2024. It will anticipate the next major BOLD festival in 2025. BOLD Bites will, as is the focus of all BOLD activities, honour intercultural, inclusive and intergenerational dance.
The program will take place over three days, from 8 to 10 March, in various venues in Canberra. Further information shortly on the BOLD website. Stay tuned. UPDATE: Here is a link to the schedule.
I will be involved in three conversation sessions:
BOLD critique with author Emma Batchelor on writing about dance in reviews, articles and other formats. Our conversation will be followed by an open Q & A session.
BOLD Moves with Elizabeth Cameron Dalman focusing on the foundations of Mirramu on Lake Weereewa, and on the inspiration Dalman finds in nature. It will be a prequel to the premiere screening of a new film, Lake Song, choreographed by Dalman, directed by Sue Healey and featuring Canberra’s company of older dancers, the GOLDS.
BOLD Diva with Morag Deyes, former director of Dance Base in Scotland. This conversation will focus on the rich tapestry of Deyes’ career as the leader of Dance Base and as the founder of PRIME, Scotland’s premier dance company of elders.
New dancers for Sydney Dance Company
Sydney Dance Company has announced that five new dancers will join the company for its 2024 season—Timmy Blakenship, Ngaere Jenkins, Ryan Pearson, Anika Boet and Tayla Gartner. It was more than interesting to read a brief biography of each of these new dancers. Two have strong New Zealand connections (Jenkins and Boet); Blakenship was born, raised and trained in dance in the United States; and Pearson and Gartner are Australian with Pearson having a strong First Nations background and a memorable early career with Bangarra Dance Theatre.
Sydney Dance Company has always been a company of dancers with diverse backgrounds but with the new additions in 2024 that diversity is being strengthened. And from a personal point of view, after watching Ryan Pearson perform so magnificently with Bangarra Dance Theatre, I really look forward to watching him work with Sydney Dance Company. Below are brief biographies of the five new artists (taken from the Sydney Dance Company media release):
American dancerTimmy Blakenship was born on the Lands of the Arapaho Nation/Colorado, and completed his early training in contemporary dance and choreography at Artistic Fusion in Thornton, Colorado and Dance Town in Miami, Florida. He continued his training at the prestigious University of Southern California’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance on scholarship, graduating with a BFA in 2023 where he performed works by William Forsythe, Jiří Kylián, Merce Cunningham and Yin Yue.
Ryan Pearson was born and raised in Biripi Country/Taree, New South Wales and is of Biripi and Worimi descent on his mother’s side and Minang, Goreng and Balardung on his father’s side. Ryan began his dance training at NAISDA at age 16, after taking part in the NSW Public Schools’ Aboriginal Dance Company, facilitated by Bangarra’s Youth Program Team in 2012. Ryan joined Bangarra Dance Theatre in 2017 as part of the Russell Page Graduate Program and was nominated in the 2020 Australian Dance Awards for Most Outstanding Performance by a Male Dancer for his performance in Jiri Kylian’s Stamping Ground.
Originally from Wadawurrung Country/Geelong in Victoria, Tayla Gartner commenced full-time training at the Patrick Studios Australia Academy program in 2018 before undertaking the Sydney Dance Company’s Pre-Professional Year in 2022, where she performed works by choreographers including Melanie Lane, Stephanie Lake, Jenni Large, Tobiah Booth-Remmers and Rafael Bonachela. In 2022, Tayla worked with and performed repertoire by Ohad Naharin and was a finalist in the Brisbane International Contemporary Dance Prix.
Born in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Ngaere Jenkins is of Te Arawa and Ngāti Kahungunu descent. Ngaere trained at the New Zealand School of Dance, graduating in 2018. Throughout her studies, she worked with influential mentors including James O’Hara, Victoria (Tor) Colombus, Taiaroa Royal and Tanemahuta Gray. Ngaere represented the school as a guest artist in Tahiti at the Académie de Danse Annie FAYN fifth International Dance Festival and Singapore Ballet Academy’s 60th Anniversary Gala. From 2019 Ngaere was a dancer with The New Zealand Dance Company and was the recipient of the Bill Sheat Dance Award.
Raised in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Anika Boet is of South African and Dutch descent. Moving to Sydney in 2020, Anika completed two years of full-time training at Brent Street School of Performing Arts, receiving her Diploma of Dance (focusing on Contemporary) with Honours. Anika made her professional debut in Sydney Festival in January 2022 performing a work Grey Rhino, choreographed by Charmene Yap and Cass Mortimer Eipper. Anika completed a post-graduate course at Transit Dance, performing works by Chimene Steele Prior, Prue Lang, and Paul Malek.
Ruth Osborne, OAM
Ruth Osborne, outgoing director of Canberra’s QL2 Dance, was honoured with the richly deserved award of a Medal of the Order of Australia at the 2024 Australia Day Awards. Osborne has had a distinguished career over several decades, most recently since 1999 with Canberra’s outstanding youth dance organisation, QL2 Dance. Among her previous awards are an Australian Dance Award (Services to Dance), 2011; a Churchill Fellowship, 2017; and three Canberra Critics’ Circle Awards, most recently in 2023 for her performance and input into James Batchelor’s Shortcuts to Familiar Places. For more about Ruth Osborne on this website see, in particular, this link and, more generally, this tag.
My colleague Jennifer Shennan has passed on the news that Ballet Zürich has just premiered a new work by Meryl Tankard. Called For Hedy, it is part of a triple bill called Timekeepers, which looks back to the artistic achievements of the 1920s. Other choreographers represented in Timekeepers are Bronislava Nijinska (Les Noces) and Mthuthuzeli November (Rhapsodies). More information is on the Ballet Zürich website.
Press for January 2024
It has been a while since I have been able to add a section called ‘Press …. ‘ in a dance diary, but in January I had two items published in print outlets (which of course also appeared in an online version). The first appeared in Canberra’s City News, the second in Dance Australia for the 2023 Critics’ Choice section.
‘Flatfooted funding threatens company’s future.’ City News (Canberra), 4-10 January 2024, p. 17. Online version at this link.
‘MICHELLE POTTER, Canberra’. Dance Australia: ‘Critics’ Choice’. Issue 242 (January, February, March 2024), p. 46. The text for this item is quite difficult to read against its black background, even in a blown-up version, so that text is inserted below next to a small image of the page.
Choreographer James Batchelor regards himself as a Canberran, although at this stage in his dance life he works between Australia and the rest of the world. To make a career as a professional, independent artist he goes where work is available for him and most recently has been working in Sweden with Norrdans. But he grew up in Canberra and had his dance training with QL2, Canberra’s youth dance organisation. He returns frequently to his home town and in 2023 presented Shortcuts to Familiar Places, a work that in fact had a significant connection with Canberra. It was a major highlight in the city’s dance calendar.
The work began as an investigation into the transmission of dance from one generation to another. Batchelor was especially interested in his own “body luggage” as passed on to him by his early dance teacher at QL2, Ruth Osborne, whose background had links to the work of pioneering dancer and teacher Gertrud Bodenwieser. Shortcuts to Familiar Places was the end result of this interest and investigation.
Shortcuts began with footage of Osborne giving an insight into the swirling movements of the arms and upper body that she absorbed via her own teacher, former Bodenwieser dancer Margaret Chapple.
As the footage came to an end, Batchelor appeared onstage and performed a shadowy solo that began slowly but that gathered momentum as time passed. From then on there was a beautifully conceived melding of film footage and onstage movement with Batchelor being joined by Chloe Chignell in a series of duets. It was a fascinating experience to watch the movement unfold and to feel a clear connection to what Osborne and others demonstrated and spoke about on film at various moments during the work. In addition to Osborne we saw on film Eileen Kramer, who demonstrated the movements she recalled from Bodenwieser’s Waterlilies, as well as Carol Brown and Shona Dunlop MacTavish. But it was also interesting to see how Batchelor and Chignell moved away from the movement of Bodenwieser and her followers to develop an individual but connected style.
One moment stood out in an exceptional way. It happened when, on film, Osborne stretched her arm forward in a straight line towards Batchelor and Chignell on stage as if reaching to them in a gesture of transmission, which they accepted with arms outstretched towards the footage. There it was, the lineage and its transmission for us all to see.
A driving, original score from Morgan Hickinbotham was played live and a changing pattern of light and dark came from lighting designer Vinny Jones. With dramaturgy by Bek Berger, Shortcuts was an intelligently thought through show. The idea of embodied transmission is one that is so often mentioned in dance discussions today, but with Shortcuts Batchelor showed the concept to us specifically through dance, and demonstrated in particular how a style from an older period can be developed to suit the current era. Shortcuts to Familiar Places was just brilliant to watch and consider.
Bangarra’s 2023 season will see the revival of the Dance Clan series for the first time in ten years. The series began in 1998 and fostered new work by choreographers, dancers and designers, most of whom were emerging artists in those fields. Artists whose careers were advanced by appearances in Dance Clan performances have included Deborah Brown, Tara Gower, Yolande Brown and Frances Rings, who will shortly take on the artistic directorship of Bangarra. In 2023 Beau Dean Riley Smith, Glory Tuohy-Daniell, Ryan Pearson and Sani Townson will create new works focusing on their own storytelling. Costume designs will be by Clair Parker, mentored by Jennifer Irwin, lighting by Maddison Craven mentored by Karen Norris, and set design by Shana O’Brien under the guidance of Jacob Nash. Separate scores for each work are being composed by Brendon Boney, Amy Flannery and Leon Rodgers.
The major production for 2023 by the main company will be Yuldea being created by Frances Rings in collaboration with Jennifer Irwin (costumes), Jacob Nash (set), Karen Norris (lighting) and Leon Rodgers (score). The show will premiere at the Sydney Opera House on 14 June as part of the 50th anniversary season before touring across Australia including to Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Bendigo. The work is inspired by the story of the Anangu people of the Great Victorian Desert. Rings says:
Within my family lineage lie the stories of forefathers and mothers who lived a dynamic, sophisticated desert life, leaving their imprint scattered throughout Country like memories suspended in time. Their lives were forever changed by the impact of colonial progress.
Further details on the Bangarra website.
A new work by Meryl Tankard
Given that Meryl Tankard’s Wild Swans* has long stayed in my mind as an exceptional collaborative work between Tankard as choreographer, composer Elena Kats Chernin and visual artist Régis Lansac, it was more than exciting to hear that this trio will be presenting their latest collaboration, Kairos, as part of the 2023 Sydney Festival. Commissioned and produced by FORM Dance Projects, Kairos will open at Carriageworks on 19 January and will feature dancers Lillian Fearn, Cloé Fournier, Taiga Kita-Leong, Jasmin Luna, Julie Ann Minaai and Thuba Ndibali.
‘Kairos’ in ancient Greek means ‘the right or opportune moment for doing, a moment that cannot be scheduled’. Publicity for the show suggests that the work responds to the current ‘uncertain and challenging times’ in which we currently find ourselves.
News from Houston Ballet
News recently announced in Houston, Texas, is that Julie Kent, currently artistic director of Washington Ballet and former principal artist with American Ballet Theatre, will leave Washington Ballet at the end of the 2022-2023 season. She will join Stanton Welch as co-director of Houston Ballet with Welch keen to be able to devote more time to choreography.
Barbara Cuckson
In October I had the pleasure of recording an oral history interview with Barbara Cuckson, owner and director of Rozelle School of Visual Arts, whose dance training was largely with Gertrud Bodenwieser. The interview, which will eventually be available online from the National Library of Australia, is not only an exceptional insight into the Bodenwieser heritage and Cuckson’s training within and beyond that heritage, but it also contains a wealth of information about Cuckson’s parents, Eric and Marie Cuckson, and their outstanding contribution to the growth of the arts in Australia.
Michelle Potter, 31 October 2022
* There is no review of Wild Swans on this website as it was produced and performed in 2003, that is before I began …on dancing. But here is a link to a post in which I mention it as a result of a BBC program I heard.
Bangarra Dance Theatre is 30 years old this year and its latest program, 30 years of sixty five thousand, celebrates that anniversary. It also acknowledges the extent of the heritage on which the company is built, and to which it looks for inspiration.
First up on the program was a revival of Unaipon, Frances Rings’ 2004 portrait of Aboriginal inventor, philosopher, writer and storyteller David Unaipon, whose portrait now appears on the Australian $50 note. Unaipon opens with a sequence in which a figure, representing Unaipon himself, dances behind a scrim in a mystical evocation of man’s existence. It then focuses on aspects of Unaipon’s early background as a Ngarrindjeri man, and subsequently follows some of his thoughts and ideas in areas of science and religion.
Every scene in Unaipon had its unique choreographic qualities. On the one hand, for example, there was Bangarra’s distinctive take on traditional movement in Sister baskets, a section about the intricate style of weaving that is distinctive to Ngarrindjeri culture. On the other, and in contrast, one of Unaipon’s particular scientific interests was the concept of motion and this concept was explored with choreography in which walking across the stage dominated. I don’t usually enjoy those moments that find their way into a lot of choreography where walking and running around the stage go on forever, or so it seems. But in the case of Unaipon, the movement was diverse as dancers dodged each other, passed each other, and gently bumped each other, all the time reflecting Unaipon’s interest in bodies in space.
The absolute stand-out performer in Unaipon was Tyrel Dulvarie, who danced the role of David Unaipon. In the opening sequence, gliding across the stage (on some hidden device?) and using exquisitely lyrical arm movements, he transported us into a world of dreams and ideas. Then in the section called Four Winds, which dealt with man’s need for knowledge about the seasons, he danced as Tolkami (the West Wind) wearing an astonishing grass costume by Jennifer Irwin. Dulvarie’s presence was commanding and his dancing transfixing in this solo. In the final section, which focused on Unaipon’s interest in religion, Dulvarie showed his ability to isolate individual movements (even toes played a role) and, again, his powerful stage presence was clear and imposing
The middle work on the program was Jiří Kylián’s Stamping Ground created in 1983 after a momentous visit made by Kylián to Groote Eylandt in 1980. In the Bangarra program, Stamping Ground was preceded by a brief video clip in which Kylián explained the origins of the work; his emotional response to his experiences on Groote Eylandt; and that the work was created not with the aim of copying Indigenous movement but as an homage to Indigenous culture. The dance itself was performed by six dancers, three male, three female. It was a revelation as it had all the characteristics of Kylián’s later choreography, including the manner in which he uses a backcloth as part of a work; the little snatches of humour; the beautiful, bird-like use of extended arms; the incredible lifts; and so on. Staged for Bangarra by Roslyn Anderson, Stamping Ground was stunningly danced by Tara Gower, Baden Hitchcock, Rika Hamaguchi, Ella Havelka, Tyrel Dulvarie, and Ryan Pearson. Their performance indicated the growing technical strengths of Bangarra dancers, who can now hold their own across a range of choreographic styles.
Bangarra means ‘to make fire’ in the Wiradjuri language and, for the closing section of Bangarra’s anniversary program, artistic director Stephen Page brought together a selection of moments from previous Bangarra productions and curated them under the name To make fire. The selections showed different aspects of Bangarra’s output, including biographical productions with selections from Mathinna; stories from the Torres Strait Islands with selections from About; and, in the final section given the over-arching name Clan, excerpts from Belong and Walkabout. This final section suggests a vision for a future in which identity can be reclaimed and reconciled with contemporary society.
A trio from Mathinna was a highlight for me. It suggested, through its varied movement and differing connections between the dancers, the potential nature of relationships between Mathinna, a young Tasmanian woman of Lowreenne heritage, and the colonial couple who adopted but then rejected her. Another highlight came in Clan when a short section called Wiradjuri was danced strongly by Beau Dean Riley Smith (a Wiradjuri man as it happens). Its music by David Page was mesmerising with a whispering voice-over murmuring the single word ‘Wiradjuri’ over and over.
In program notes for 30 years of sixty five thousand, Stephen Page suggests that Bangarra’s greatest achievement is that it has survived for those 30 years. But Bangarra has done more than survive. It has flourished. It can now claim an extensive repertoire of music and dance, which it can and does draw upon; it has a spirited associate artistic director in Frances Rings, who supports the dynamic director Stephen Page; and its dancers are polished performers whose movement vocabulary has gone from strength to strength over those 30 years. And if you are lucky enough to be at an opening night in Sydney, the company’s home base, it becomes very clear that the company has an appreciative audience unafraid to express its pride in and appreciation for Bangarra.
