Australia's acclaimed Bangarra Dance Theatre opens DanceHouse 2019-20 season with its show Spirit
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 19:08:18 +0000
When: Oct. 25-26, 8 p.m.
Where: Vancouver Playhouse, 600 Hamilton St.
Tickets and info: From $35 at dancehouse.ca
Bangarra Dance Theatre’s mission statement doesn’t mince words: “To create inspiring experiences that change society.”
The company was founded in 1989 out of the NAISDA (National Aboriginal Islander Skills Development Association). It’s the only Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander national performing arts company out of 29 in the nation that receives federal funding. This enables the company to create one new work a year, and they draw from numerous sources. Bangarra’s show Spirit opens the 2019-20 season at DanceHouse and is presented in partnership with B.C.-based Indigenous dance company Dancers of Damelahamid.
“Bangarra has gone through different types of inspirations with First Nations families and communities, from reservations stories to urban stories and so on,” said artistic director Stephen Page. “While the company resides in Sydney, we draw dancers from all over the country, and the majority of these people won’t have grown up on the land with any … traditional language, dance and stories. So we are creating works from our own explorations, as well as traditional tutors and cultural consultants, to provide ideas of stories and choreography.”
Spirit is a series of nine vignettes from past major works over the company’s history. Pieces can range from Brolga, a 22-minute dance about a girl going out before the wet season entering a kind of creation-dreaming story set in a totemic, human and mythological land, to something far more direct such as black social issues in Black. Contemporary interpretation of traditional stories, as well as personal histories, also find their way into Bangarra Dance Theatre performances. Spirit has its Canadian premiere at DanceHouse, before heading to Montreal, Ottawa, Branford, Ont., and finishing up in Toronto.
“We’ll also be dropping in to visit the First Nations at Six Nations to do workshops, cultural exchanges and performing,” he said. “It’s our first time through Canada and it’s taken two years to pull it all together. One of the great things about having federal funding is we can employ as many as 18 dancers in a show, but travel is still demanding.”
Hailing from Brisbane, Page studied at the First Nations Dance College in Sydney, where he also worked for a time. Graduating to a contemporary dance company, in 1991, he took over Bangarra and never looked back. He says his experience was different from his parents’ generation, who were largely forced into government assimilation programs that can be considered the Australian equivalent of Canada’s residential schools. Page’s generation are reclaiming what was lost as well as recontextualizing it.
“For the 30th anniversary we are putting together a major work called Knowledge Ground: 30 Years of Sixty Five Thousand, which is a fully immersive installation that covers a lot of the song, dance and stories that Bangarra has shared in the last three decades,” he said. “What we bring to Canada will also reflect work that looks at country, kinship, social and cultural history. A lot of it is early works that were our first crossover of the contemporary expression of the traditional stories, and In Her Mind, which is a 10-minute-long piece about the meditative processes of a traditional visual artist.”
Many of these stories arise out of the extremely strong and complex songlines — the dreaming tracks that local creator-spirits traversed in Aboriginal animist belief systems — which are recorded in songs, stories, dances and specific painting designs. Page says the company likes to grab the essence of these to create an abstract expression of it. This is done in accordance with many cultural protocols laid down in the early days of the company’s founding around sharing songlines and so forth.
Page says growing up in the city and first encountering a living language, song and such was both a wonderful awakening and a culture shock, as well as very frustrating. You get mad at colonization, at colonizers, and develop a social activist DNA that then blends the two worlds together establishing a contemporary landscape. He says there is a vocabulary throughout the arts community now about acknowledging these realities and what can and can’t be used or taken out of context.
“We try to grab enough of the essence to dip into the contemporary practice of our movement, without losing the spiritual and ritual connection to the source,” he said. “We use all original music, have native-tongue language in our music and bring all of that tradition into our process. We wouldn’t have lasted 30 years if we didn’t care and carry forth the traditional integrity of that history.”
All of the performers are able to tap into their personal regional histories and share them within Bangarra to develop works. Page says doing the same with Six Nations peoples and other Indigenous arts groups on the coming tour is a really exciting prospect.
“We’re doing a four-day-long cultural exchange and series of workshops, and share our history on a global scale and talk about where it’s going,” he said. “Four years ago, we had a feature film in the Toronto Film Festival and I was able to meet with a few small- to medium-gathering groups telling stories about their communities and cultures, and they were saying how they wished there was a full-time Bangarra over there.”
Having shared culture with Native Peoples in Greenland and Samiland, Norway-Sweden-Finland, coming to Canada and the U.S. is just one more key in developing the global Indigenous spirit.
Visit the DanceHouse website for full information on this season’s performances.