Bangarra is back with a powerful dance tribute to a people’s survival

Audiences can get a second chance to see SandSong, Bangarra Dance Theatre’s powerful and moving show, after two years of disruption.

Bangarra dancers get airborne in SandSong at Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre. Pictures: Daniel Boud

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* Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following article contains the name of someone who has passed. The family of Ningali Lawford-Wolf has given the media permission to use her name.

An explosive burst of electronic music and powerful black and white video images of colonial land grabs, Aboriginal prisoners in neck chains and First Nations families split apart pins the audience back in their seats for the start of SandSong, Bangarra Dance Theatre’s brilliant tribute to the Kimberley and Great Sandy Desert.

The 80 minute show, choreographed jointly by retiring artistic director Stephen Page and Frances Rings, who will succeed him in the role next year, as well as the dancers themselves, was postponed by Covid in 2020 and premiered in 2021, only to be closed down due to lockdown after a few performances. Now it’s back at the Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre and the wait has been worth it.

It was originally planned as a collaboration with dancer and actor Ningali Josie Lawford-Wolf (Rabbit Proof Fence, Last Cab To Darwin), a Wangkatjungka woman who was born and raised in the Western Desert, but she died unexpectedly on tour in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2019.

Bangarra's SandSong is a powerful tribute to the Kimberley and Great Sandy Desert. Picture: Daniel Boud

However we do hear her voice and vocals at various points in composer Steve Francis’s evocative soundtrack, along with that of Gurindji stockman Vincent Lingiari, one of 200 drovers to walk off the Vestey station at Wave Hill in 1966, sparking the land rights movement and ultimately leading to the land being returned to its First Nations owners.

Page, Rings and the dancers all spent time with the country’s elders at Fitzroy Crossing, learning their dances and their culture.

The result is a comprehensive series of scenes depicting both men’s business and women’s business – the gathering of bush onions and potatoes, skin ceremonies, male totems, surviving the seasons – along with a powerful middle section which deals with the “auctioning” of young males and females to leave their culture and work and serve the pastoral industry.

Jennifer Irwin’s superb costumes, as well as Jacob Nash’s sets and Nick Schlieper’s lighting, are integral to the story telling and the dancers – led by Rikki Mason and Glory Tuohy-Daniell – all bring their trademark tight ensemble work, timing and lithe athleticism to the production.

This is surely a show not to be missed.

DETAILS

• SHOW Bangarra Dance Theatre: SandSong

• WHERE Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre

• WHEN Friday, July 2

• SEASON Until July 23