Yuldea

Bangarra Dance Theatre
Thursday 28th September 28, 2023
Wednesday 4th October, 2023
Playhouse, Arts Centre, Melbourne / Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Country

Choreographer: Frances Rings and the dancers of Bangarra Dance Theatre
Set designer: Elizabeth Gadsby
Costume designer: Jennifer Irwin
Lighting designer: Karen Norris
Composer: Leon Rodgers
Guest composers: Electric Fields
Mirning Cultural Consultant: Clem Lawrie
Yalata Cultural Consultant: Maureen Smart
Rehearsal Director: Daniel Roberts
Cultural Authority Representatives from the Yalata Aṉangu Aboriginal Community Council
Cultural Astronomy Consultant: Karlie Noon
Aerial and Acrobatic Creative Consultant: Joshua Thomson

Hope on the Horizon, my response to Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Yuldea, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.

With a bang it begins, the explosion of a star, on stage at the Playhouse, Arts Centre. Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Yuldea has arrived on Wurundjeri Country / in Melbourne with a supernova to outshine entire galaxies, before heading to Bendigo, Djaara Country, for the final quivering leg and jutting arm of shifting gas and particles.

Told in four passages, Frances Rings’s first full-length choreographic work as Artistic Director, commences with “a beautiful sky story”, Supernova, which carries a water spirit who flows into Kapi (Water), replete with “the birds and the dingoes and the family tree, and their significance to Mob”, as company dancer Emily Flannery describes. Since 2002, Rings, a former dancer with the company herself, has created eight works for Bangarra, Rations, Unaipon, X300 (named after the code name for the test site on Maralinga, Tjarutja traditional lands), Artefact, Terrain, Sheoak, Bush and Sandsong (both co-choreographed with Stephen Page), and now Yuldea, the story of “the Anangu of the Great Victorian Desert and the Nunga of the Far West Region of South Australia, who have experienced every chapter of colonial incursions since British settlement, their traditional life colliding with the western capitalism and the Age of Imperialism,”[i] as conveyed in Act 3, Empire, and the full circle healing of Act 4, Ooldea Spirit. For this is also the story of the determination of the Anangu people “to honour the eternal bonds of kinship between people and place”[ii].

Wearing beautiful, sculptural neckpieces made from an iridescent green material to represent particles as they move through space, the dancers skitter through the chaos that is the explosion of a star and the change it signals. Jennifer Irwin’s textural costumes grow as if they are living forms, always seeking to emphasise movement. With each wear they assume layers of paint and sweat. The stars overhead are reflected on the black gloss of the stage flooring, thanks to Elizabeth Gadsby’s set design. And on opening night, in the circle, this unfurled sky lore in the theatre is breathtaking.

The horizon is drawn by a curved, floor to ceiling forest of ropes, hanging from the rigging, connecting the sky with the earth, in emphasis of all things being connected. Because “Country includes, seas, waters, rocks, animals, winds and all the beings that exists and make up a place, including people. It also embraces the stars, Moon, Milky Way, solar winds and storms, and intergalactic plasma. [Because what] we do in one part of country affects all others”[iii]. Nine kilometres of rope, painted black ombre, and interspersed with neon drops to make spark and tension, has been used to suggest Wirangu and Mirning Country. Karen Norris’s suspended lighting sculpture follows this arc and delineates a library of knowledge in the sky to the life-sustaining source of permanent water, Yuldea Kapi. In Kapi Spirit, Lillian Banks and Kallum Goolagong are captivating and their movements fluid, as if through their limbs water flows.

In Red Mallee, Daniel Mateo and Kassidy Waters become a mallee tree and move as one in sped-up evocation of ‘tree time’. Held aloft in Mateo’s arms, Waters extends her legs slowly, tentatively, as if they are tree roots in search of water, growing before my eyes to the creak-creak composition of Leon Rodgers, and guest composers Electric Fields. Just as the mallee tree holds water in their roots, their movements ‘take in’ water, and I am filled with a sense of how beautiful things would have looked before colonisation, under “65,000 years of caring for the planet”[iv].

Seen again the following week, though this time in the stalls, up close to the waters’ edge, the Water Diviners, the Birds and Dingoes, make away with my heart in equal portions. Heard in flittering song before they are seen, the Birds, Courtney Radford, Flannery, Maddison Paluch, Janaya Lamb, and Chantelle Lee Lockhart, with iridescent blue markings at the temples and elaborate plumage upon their shoulders, make light, fast movements as befits the desert waterfinders, the zebra finch, striated pardalote and a red-browned pardalote.

The panting of the Dingoes, too, is heard before they are seen, as the stage lighting begins to glow red. Rikki Mason, Bradley Smith, Kiarn Doyle, Jesse Murray, and James Boyd weight themselves closer to the floor, closer to a quadruped. They sniff at the air, they scratch the ground, and like the Birds before them, they know where water can be found and they live its importance.

To carve into this comes the construction of the Trans-Australian railway at the sacred site of the Ooldea Soak on the edge of the Nullarbor. To claim, to exploit, to all this comes Act 3’s Empire and greed, with Letters Patent[v], Steel Snake, Mission, and the devastation of Black Mist, the Australian Government’s atomic testing at Maralinga between 1956 and 1963[vi]. This rain of particles is now radioactive. And beneath which Mason’s devastated form huddles and writhes, as he is coated in a black, ash-like rain that sticks to and sears the skin. Norris’s suspended sculpture now reads to me like a bone in the body exposed to radioactive materials[vii].

From destruction comes renewal in the creative cycle, and in Ooldea Spirit, we hear voices from the Yalata community, ensuring the remembrance of the spirit of Yuldea. As Cultural Consultant Maureen “Mima” Smart describes, “it’s important that these stories are told for our next generation”. Rings continues, “we keep them alive in moments like this … And what a privilege to be able to walk with our Elders through the light and shadow of our experience, and also to join them in their journey of healing as well.” The constellation of the stage is bathed blue, and there is an overwhelming sense of hope perhaps not present, but on the horizon.

[i] “Anangu means ‘people’ in Pitjantjatjara language. Anangu is the name used by the people of the Western Desert when referring to themselves. Nunga also means ‘people’ in Pitjantjatnara language. Nunga is used by the people of the Far West Region of South Australia.” Yuldea Cheat Sheet, Bangarra Dance Theatre, https://www.bangarra.com.au/about/yuldea-cheat-sheet/, accessed 27th September, 2023.

[ii] Creative Life Cycle, Yuldea, Bangarra Dance Theatre, https://www.bangarra.com.au/about/creative-life-cycle/, accessed 28th September, 2023.

[iii] Bawaka Country, ‘Dukarr lakarama: Listening to Guwak, Talking back to Space Colonisation’, Political Geography, Volume 81, 2020, p.2 in Karlie Noon and Krystal De Napoli, Sky Country, 2022.

[iv] ‘Celestial Terrains / Chaos and Order’, Yuldea Study Guide for Teachers and Students, Bangarra Dance Theatre, p.5, https://www.bangarra.com.au/media/clhpqpcq/bdt-yuldea-studyguide.pdf, accessed 28th September, 2023.

[v] “The Letters patent of 1836 is one of the first and the most clearly expressed statements of intent regarding land rights for Australia’s First Nations people. In 1838, the South Australian Act of 1834 was amended to include the King’s provision. However, apart from some small portions of land being set aside for reserves and missions, the intent of the statement has been largely ignored and the dialogue around recognition of the South Australian 1836 Letters Patent continues to this day.” ‘The Letters Patent’, Yuldea Study Guide for Teachers and Students, Bangarra Dance Theatre, p.8, https://www.bangarra.com.au/media/clhpqpcq/bdt-yuldea-studyguide.pdf, accessed 28th September, 2023.

[vi] Rudi Bremer, ‘In Bangarra’s new work Yuldea, Frances Rings peels back Indigenous, colonial and personal history, inspired by a precious water source’, ABC Arts, 6th August, 2023,  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-06/frances-rings-yuldea-bangarra-dance-theatre-ooldea/102674594, accessed 29th September, 2023

[vii] Mike Ladd, ‘The lesser known history of the Maralinga nuclear tests — and what it’s like to stand at ground zero’, ABC RN, 24th March, 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-24/maralinga-nuclear-tests-ground-zero-lesser-known-history/11882608, accessed 29th September, 2023.

Bangarra Dancers:
Rikki Mason
Ryan Pearson
Lillian Banks
Bradley Smith
Courtney Radford
Kallum Goolagong
Kassidy Waters
Kiarn Doyle
Maddison Paluch
Daniel Mateo
Emily Flannery
Janaya Lamb
Jesse Murray
Chantelle Lee Lockhart
James Boyd
Amberlilly Gordon
Lucy May

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Image credit: Rikki Mason in Yuldea, Sydney Opera House, by Kate Longley