Why this is Stephen Page’s most personal work yet

Stephen Page’s latest work honours his grandmother’s legacy and his Indigenous culture.

Adelaide Festival 2024 opening event Baleen Moondjan, by Stephen Page. Performers Maanyung and Rika Hamaguchi. Picture: Daniel Boud

When Stephen Page was a little boy his mother Doreen would often tell the 12 Page kids stories about the humpback whale and the specific seasons when these beautiful giants of the ocean would swim through the sandbars at Quandamooka in southeast Queensland. The stories had a personal connection for Doreen, as the family believed the humpback was her mother’s totem.

Many years later those stories would go on to have a profound effect on Page’s own life when, in the years leading up to Doreen’s death in 2018, Page would visit her in the First Nations aged care home where she lived in Brisbane. He would speak to her about her stories of the whales and play her music on his phone composed by his late brother David that featured the jandeai language of his mother’s clan, the Ngugi/Nunukul/Moondjan people of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island).

“Mum had dementia and the past few years before she passed she didn’t have a great quality of life. She was quite deadpan, her spirit wasn’t right there, and she rarely physically moved,” Page recalls. “But when I played the song she touched my hand and she had a little tear in her eye when she was looking at me. I was thinking, ‘Isn’t this incredible?’ I’d thought her spirit had totally gone. You think of music and language and storytelling and art – they’re healers.”

So Page decided to honour Doreen and his granny in the best way he knew how – through song, contemporary dance, music and storytelling – by sharing the story of his grandmother’s totem in Baleen Moondjan.

“I wanted to pay homage to my mum and her mother, because she wasn’t allowed to celebrate the totemic system or the stories.”

Baleen Moondjan is the first full-length work the choreographer has created since leaving his post last April as artistic director of Bangarra, the celebrated First Nations national dance theatre company he ran for no less than 32 years. Staged outdoors on the beach at sunset on Adelaide’s landmark Glenelg Beach, the work will open this year’s Adelaide Festival following an invitation from new artistic director Ruth McKenzie to Page, himself a former Adelaide Festival artistic director.

A 60-minute creation/ceremonial story, Baleen Moondjan celebrates family, a story that depicts a proud, elderly grandmother, her cherished granddaughter and the day a baleen whale came to shore to catch Granny Gindara’s spirit and carry it out to sea. It gently details the sharing of cultural knowledge and passing down the totemic spirit to her curious young granddaughter.

“Creation stories often fall into children’s stories, so I wanted to put a more human, adult spin on it. So there was a lot of seeding ideas that sat around the bigger ideas,” says Page. “I always feel when I’m creating stories I like to think they come from my personal experiences.”

Adelaide Festival 2024 opening event Baleen Moondjan, by Stephen Page. Performers Maanyung and Rika Hamaguchi. Picture: Daniel Boud

The production reunites long-term Bangarra collaborators, from set designer Jacob Nash to costume designer Jennifer Irwin, composer Steve Francis, lighting designer Damien Cooper, former David Page fellow Brendon Boney and co-writer Alana Valentine; along with six former Bangarra dancers including Beau Dean Riley Smith, Nicola Sabatino, Rika Hamaguchi and Glory Tuohy-Daniell.

The cast, too, are like family to Page: performer Elaine Crombie (Granny Gindara) who featured in Page’s final work with Bangarra, Wudjang: Not the Past, the story of his father’s country the Yugambeh nation of southeast Queensland, Christine Anu and Rodger Corser’s daughter Zipporah Corser-Anu (the granddaughter), singer and musician Taj Pigram (grandson of the famous Pigram Brothers’ Steve Pigram) and drummer and rapper Dobby, among others.

“They’re so respectful to each other, it’s beautiful,” says Page. “They’re all quite young and very respectful of Brendon and Elaine who are like mum and dad, then there’s this eclectic little baleen whale clan of young ’uns who are our future. So even the casting and energy is a great companion for the story.”

The beautiful, ghostly, powerful set of 40 ancient whale bones that emerges in the twilight is the brainchild of Nash and a character in its own right, one that took a lot of thought and problem-solving.

“It’s that magical thing that Stephen does where he comes to you as a fellow creative and poses questions because he has an idea in his head, then gives you the space to transform that idea into something I don’t think any of us could have imagined. He said, ‘Imagine a world where these bones have just been uncovered from 40,000 years of this ancient past, and the sand and the ocean have swept across this beach, revealing them’. It’s such a visually provocative thing as a beginning point to start dreaming what that might look like. Then you get to the practicality of it: how do we actually do this?”

Page and Nash are no stranger to outdoor spectacles – Page was involved with the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games opening ceremony and both collaborated on the 2018 Commonwealth Games. But when it comes to creating a set for the beach you have to consider scale.

“You can look out to the horizon, you can look up to the sky, so you have to get the scale right and I think we’ve done that,” says Nash, Sydney Festival’s creative artist in residence.

The stage itself is long, elegant and appears to emerge from the sand which runs right to the stage edge. Gently curving over the stage like a cresting wave are 40 graded whale bones, at their largest reaching a whopping 7m high (the height of most proscenium arches) before gently sloping down to 1.5m. Initially 3D printed, they are made from steel armature and a steel base, then coated in fibreglass.

“Hopefully it will travel all over the country, so you’ve got to find a way to create the organic object but also make it strong and sustainable and able to fit these crazy shapes into shipping containers.”

There’s also the unpredictable nature of weather to contend with – the show will go ahead rain or shine – not to mention a 30-year record high tide is set to occur during the show’s run.

“The water will end up actually lapping one end of the stage, which I think could be spectacular, and there’s a full moon. So there’s quite a few elements floating around that we can’t control but that I think will make the show quite special,” Nash says.

The score, too, promises to be something special, if the past works of the creatives are anything to go by. In addition to a pre-recorded soundscape arranged by Steve Francis and Paul Mac, with Page’s sister Donna Page, there will be live vocals, percussive instruments including clapsticks and boomerangs, drums, lead guitar, keyboards and bass.

“I always feel David is with me, usually he comes to me in dreams and probably tells me the music is pretty bad,” Page says with a laugh of composer David, who died in 2016 and was Bangarra’s talented music director. “David’s processes and his idea of working have inspired the score so I always look to him for advice. I just want it to be truthful and honest.”

This is Page’s first significant work post-Bangarra and he says while the festival’s production staff have been supportive he misses the luxury of resources, vast studio space and the immersive creative world that was Bangarra and that he was so accustomed to. He points out Jennifer Irwin has been designing and producing the costumes from home, while the show itself was only given a short amount of time in which to come together.

Nearly 12 months on Page is in a good place, confident Bangarra is in strong, reliable hands under artistic director Frances Rings, his close friend and former colleague.

“I really do feel closure,” he says.

“My memories of Bangarra now are mainly through my brothers [Page’s late brother Russell was a talented senior dancer with the company] and the works I’ve done. My stories ignite great memories,” says Page, of the 40 new creative works spanning dance, film and events that came into being under his leadership, 25 of them choreographed by him.

He is enjoying having the time to explore film projects with his actor-director son Hunter Page-Lochard, and the pair run a film and theatre production company Djali House Productions together through which they have produced the screen adaptation of Dubboo – Life of a Songman, Page’s moving tribute to David for Bangarra; while they are also working on two TV series, the details of which are a closely guarded secret, for now.

Nash believes Page is creating some of his best work yet. “I’m super excited about this show. That’s a weird expression, ‘super excited’, it sounds like I’m talking to my kids. But there’s something really special going on, I felt it in the rehearsal room. Sometimes when you make a work there’s things that just start happening, you don’t really talk about it as creatives, but you go, ‘Wow, I can really feel the momentum of this thing growing’, the energy and life force.”

As for Page, he simply hopes Baleen Moondjan honours his maternal legacy, honours the local Kaurna people and gives audiences a memorable, entertaining night out.

“I want it to be an experience. It’s sunset, a creation story, a ceremony, it’s song and dance. The simplicity of it, it’s generational – about the totemic system, it’s a life cycle about death, leaving the physical world and your spirit being carried in your totem. It’s almost like an adult creation lullaby.”

The opening event of the Adelaide Festival, Baleen Moondjanwill be held at Glenelg Beach from February 28 – March 2.