SKY COUNTRY
Recently landed: Sky Country
Gracia’s written response to Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Illume, especially for Fjord Review.
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Look up at the night sky, and the stars can tell you when to seed, harvest, and fish. The overhead knowledge system heralds seasonal change, and allows you to read the weather forecast. Whether for navigation in the physical sense, or called upon as a deep trove of cultural knowledge, the constancy of the illuminated constellation brings past, present, and future together.[i] And it is to the stars that Mirning choreographer Frances Rings invites us to look in Illume, presented by Bangarra Dance Theatre, last night in the Playhouse Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne.
Created in collaboration with Goolarrgon Bard visual artist Darrell Sibosado, Illume, which opened at the Sydney Opera House in June before touring nationally, takes us to sky country, an iridescence of intuition and imagination, two senses as guiding as touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. The night sky is infinite, suggested set designer Charles Davis, and light designer Damien Cooper, as stars sparked and darted, skittled and flickered. Tumbling beyond the stage, the theatre became an expansive sky, and I was looking at a constellation beholden of splendour and wisdom. Opening with Shadow Spirits, the first of several connected chapters, the full ensemble rebounded and spun, as I said farewell to my earth-bound form and floated in the frequency of light. In costumes designed by Elizabeth Gadsby, behind a transparent screen, 18 dancers, comprised of many new-to-the-company faces, gave shape to light’s rhythm continuum.
In Mother of Pearl (Guan), the connection between “the physical and spiritual worlds” came to the fore. For the Goolarrgon Bard people, the presence and significance of the Mother-of-pearl shell, “permeate[s] every aspect of their environment and human experience, reflecting ancestral ties, cultural identity, and the enduring relationship between land, sea, and Lian/Liarrn (inner-being).” The dancers now in what read as soft, cascading, pearlescent costumes evoked the undecorated, inside shell of a mollusc.[ii] In this state, they are guan. Through the process of preparing, shaping, and carving ancestral lines, guan shells become riji. Lines which could be read in the movements of the dancers, most notably when Mother of Pearl is reprised, this time for the full ensemble, and extended into something deeper at the conclusion of Illume. As light diffracted, the dancers appeared engraved in a prismatic rainbow of colour, as “through its essence and spirit, the intangible became tangible.”[iii]
[i] ‘A Language of Light’, Illume Study Guide, Bangarra Dance Theatre, https://www.bangarra.com.au/media/x3teeqxn/bdt-illlume-studyguidea4v9.pdf, accessed 5th September, 2025, p.5.
[ii] Abalone, oyster, or muscle. Pearl shell engraving is synonymous with the people of the northwest Kimberley, Western Australia.
[iii] Mother of Pearl (Guan), Illume programme, Bangarra Dance Theatre, p.10.
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6th of September, 2025
