HOPE ON THE HORIZON
Recently landed: Hope on the Horizon
Gracia’s written response to Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Yuldea, 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 (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,” a 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 nuclear 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]
[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.
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8th of October, 2023
Up now, on Fjord Review
