2025: Illume - Bangarra Dance Theatre

 

 

Illume – Bangarra Dance Theatre.  Canberra Theatre Centre July 25-26 2025-07-27

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 25 

Choreography: Frances Rings and artists of Bangarra Dance Theatre  

Artistic & Cultural Collaborator: Darrell Sibosado  

Composition: Brendon Boney  

Set Design: Charles Davis; Costume Design: Elizabeth Gadsby; Lighting Design: Damien Cooper. Cultural Consultant: Trevor Sampi. 

Dancers:Lillian Banks, Courtney Radford, Kallum Goolagong, Daniel Mateo, Emily Flannery, Janaya Lamb, Kassidy Waters, Jye Uren, Maddison Paluch, James Boyd, Chantelle Lee Lockhart, Amberlilly Gordon, Donta Witham, Zeak Tass, Edan Porter,Tamara Bouman, Roxie Syron, Eli Clarke.

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If I were to tell you about me, I would begin with my grandfather on my mother’s side – a Cockney, born within the sound of the Bow Bells who could read the newspaper upside down and back to front in the mirror (because he was a compositor).  And so I am a Londoner, who went to Enfield Grammar School, a state school approved by Queen Elizabeth in about 1550.  She went riding at ‘Endfield” and supported education for the ordinary people.  That was where I played the part of Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s play when I was in Form 2.

Yet on my father’s side, my grandmother was a Welsh Methodist, and my Uncle Llewellyn in Cardiff played Chopin on the piano and was a Socialist and a Naturopath who told me that “everyone’s the same without their clothes on”.  

And now I have lived in Australia for 70 years and became legally an Australian in 1975. And you think you know who I am.

So when you read in the Illume program that Artistic & Cultural Collaborator Darrell Sibosado  is a "Goolarrgon Bard man from Lombadina, Western Australia, whose multidisciplinary practice reimagines the traditional pearl shell carving practices into contemporary art; and Frances Rings is a Mirning woman from the Far West Region of South Australia and also has German Heritage", you are only just beginning to know who these people are.

A dance for me would have to include Irish (McKone is, I think, West Coast of Ireland from the 18th Century), probably Anglo-Saxon from 1500 years ago, and maybe French or Jewish from up to 1000 years ago (my mother's maiden name was Solly).  

Yet that’s nothing compared to the Australian history of around 600 peoples beginning some 65,000 years ago.

So just as I saw Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, performed in a modern style and interpretation by the Russian-named Chaika Theatre on Wednesday, on Friday I saw Bangarra’s story of the history of the Lombadina and Djarindjin people who live on the North-West Dampier Peninsula, from the rising of the sea-level as the last Ice Age melted and formed King Sound 7000 years ago, in a very up-to-date modern dance style in a very modern highly technical audio-visual setting.

In eleven scenes over 90 minutes, centred on Ngarrgidj Morr (the Proper Path), the dance takes us through all the changes from times of a sense of freedom and positive excitement through times of hardship, focussed on how, to quote the excellent program, “All living things are interconnected in harmony.  Goolarrgon people navigate Country with purpose, changing their behaviours to align with the true rhythm of Country.”

It is like, in my culture, dancing all the scenes you can imagine from Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the French Revolution and Colonialism, with hope for World Peace.  

Bangarra gives us that hope.

©Frank McKone, Canberra