Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Dark Emu draws standing ovation for its retelling of Bruce Pascoe’s book
Bangarra delivers 70 scintillating minutes of dance that lucidly explains how the First Australians grew grain, harvested food and cared for their land in a way far beyond others’ understanding.
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IT sounds an impossible task: to tell a sophisticated story about the land management practices of Aboriginal people pre-European settlement without a script and without explanation.
But Hell! No one relishes a challenge quite like the Bangarra Dance Theatre. Nor attacks it with more energy, zeal and ingenuity.
And the result? Seventy scintillating minutes of dance, with amazingly atmospheric staging, that lucidly explains how the First Australians grew grain, harvested food and cared for their land in a way far beyond others’ understanding.
A standing ovation at the premiere showed how handsomely they’d succeeded too.
Bangarra’s newest production is of Dark Emu, an acclaimed book by Bruce Pascoe that smashed the myth that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were only nomadic hunter-gatherers before colonisation.
Yes, in advance, it was hard to imagine how such groundbreaking research could possibly be presented in the form of dance. Afterwards, it somehow seemed so simple.
We saw the company show the ceremony of planting seeds, of writhing and bending and thrashing on stage like grasses in the wind, and then dancing through clouds of billowing grain dust.
There was fire used to manage the land, according to the season and ecosystem, as the stage turned red, sparks flew, smoke poured forth, the soundtrack crackled and dancers ignited in a fury of explosive, acrobatic moves. Then there were the gossamer, fluttery moments of the Bogong moth harvest, all hovering towards, and retreating from, a single pillar of light.
And, of course, there had to come the crushing lack of comprehension from the newcomers to their land, who viewed them as ignorant savages, and tried to capture them, assimilate them and, too often, became their bloodied killers.
For an audience entranced by the vision of a culture that had carefully tended land for thousands of years, those scenes came as a massive shock. With a dark stage, coils of rope, dancers huddling together on a platform for shelter and others roughly pulling it apart beneath their feet to the sounds of thunder, they were some of the most affecting passages I’ve ever seen from the company.
The final dances, however, happily revealed the spirit revived and a culture that had proven itself resilient to attack.
Yes, a complex story indeed, but told by choreographer Stephen Page with verve and grace and passion, as well as a gut-wrenching horror, that really touches hearts.
The staging, with set designer Jacob Nash, looked simple but was terribly effective all the way through, with chalk, smoke, dust, giant leaves, seed pods and moving rocks lit beautifully by lighting designer Sian James-Holland. The costumes also worked hard to tell the story, imaginatively designed by Jennifer Irwin to mark precisely each episode of the tale.
Yet the real glory still belongs to the dancers, with a true assembly piece that works hard to dispel the enduring myth that, as Pascoe says, Australia’s abundance was more accident than the result of thousands of years of judicious land care.
Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Dark Emu, Sydney Opera House, until July 14