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| home | news lKinship and Creativity: The Phillip Parsons Memorial LectureStephen Page The Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture commemorates the life's work of Dr. Parsons, AM (1926-93), co-founder of arts publishing house Currency Press and influential scholar, teacher and mentor. Stephen Page delivered the lecture for 2003. Kinship and Creativity I've always learned by listening. That's what I do when I spend time with traditional elders. I'm like a three-year-old again, listening to their stories, watching and learning their traditional culture. So, here I am today with you fellas listening to me, yarnin' about my life and my art. It's been a challenge to take up this invitation to present the Philip Parsons Lecture, on this its tenth anniversary. I never had the privilege of knowing Philip, but, having read some of the previous lectures given in his honour, I know I would like to have known him. He was a teacher, a dreamer, a rebel. He cared about black issues, about justice, about challenging the status quo. He sounds like my kinda fella! I'm also very aware that previous presenters of this lecture have been the luminaries of the Australian theatre world - directors, actors - people whose craft is with words. Words were important to Philip Parsons too, and this is no more evident than in the successful publishing house Currency Press, which he established with Katharine Brisbane. But whether it's words or sounds or music or movement, it comes down to poetry and the artists' ability to channel the spiritual world and touch the emotions. The media I work in are physical, poetic, spiritual and emotional. In those moments, as we sit in the darkened theatre or around the night-time camp fire, we share the community of the soul, a coming together of people prepared to give themselves over to a shared cultural experience. My cultural world, and that of most artistic leaders, revolves around the bringing together of a clan. Theatre and dance companies work as creative clans in artistic cults and Bangarra is my cult. People become part of the cult because it is their life. They are in a spirit of cultivation where they feel secure and fulfilled. In the Bangarra cult, our religion happens to be indigenous culture. This brings with it a strong personal bond, like a creative kinship. If you can imagine... I had grown up in the equivalent of the Bronx in Brisbane with eleven siblings and my hard-working parents, Doreen and Roy, living in a housing commission home. Our backyard provided the stage for performances by my brothers and me for our older sisters and parents. We did everything from death-defying leaps off the laundry roof to fully-frocked musicals on the kitchen table. Growing up, I always loved the performing arts - music, dance, anything from old time movies. As a working-class family living in that situation we were always bound to be locked up in our own backyard. A lot of time was spent in creative modes, trying to mimic things, whether it was the Olympics or stunt shows or TV shows like Starsky and Hutch - we'd always be mimicking something, using our imaginations. It was cheap entertainment; we couldn't afford to go anywhere. We had no exposure to our traditional culture. My parents had grown up in a world in which they needed to behave like whites to survive. Our family was the success story - we'd made it off the mission lands of Beaudesert to Mt Gravatt on the city fringe. The mob used to visit us at home, which meant we always had a ready-made audience of uncles, aunts and cousins joining in those impromptu performances. What I love most in my memories of our upbringing was the laughter, and anyone who knows my family will attest to their ability to tell funny yarns. Not that there wasn't trouble too, it's just that we had this way of coping with it through laughter and parody. Someone was always mimicking someone or something! We didn't have a traditional upbringing, but we can remember our great aunt and grandmother singing traditional songs and calling the spirits. We had some remaining language and some of the old stories. With Dad's family there was language that surfaced, so it didn't entirely die out, but was used in the home - a kind of domestic lingo. With these stories and myths still lingering, it wasn't until I became connected up north that I came to realise that these stories were my tradition. It was difficult to find that re-connection to our roots while there was such pressure for my parents to assimilate. The family connections were also broken: many of my father's siblings were taken away. They were part of the stolen generation, and only regained contact with us later in life. Developing kinship ties with traditional clans is a privilege and a big responsibility for me. I have been adopted into the families of Bunduk Marika and Djakapurra Munyaryun. These kinship ties are my link to our indigenous heritage and the strong connection with this land. In bringing together the customs, clans and cultures from the north with the city in the south we have a kinship that connects the traditional and urban cultures. The idea of linking urban Aboriginal experiences with traditional culture was at the heart of the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre (AIDT). There had been a strong black theatre movement in the early 1970s which had produced people like Brian Syron, Bob Maza, Justine Saunders and Christine Donnelly. By the late 1970s I had left school in Year 11 after fighting with my teacher over why there was no Aboriginal history in the curriculum. I was lucky in getting a job as a legal clerk with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service in Brisbane and had the prospect of being assisted to attend university. But as luck would have it, I saw a fantastic poster of Sylvia Blanco promoting the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre. Sylvia was from North Queensland and our first black Aboriginal dance diva. For me, that was it. As a student at the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre in Sydney I went on a remote area tour to Arnhem Land, where I experienced traditional culture for the first time. I saw there a culture that was living and breathing the old ways. I connected with the customs, values, religions and traditions. For me, the traditional culture is much more interesting creatively than modern culture - the stories, the kinship - much more complex. This was a profound experience that has informed my creative work ever since, and continues to do so.
Bangarra had been started in 1989 with funding provided by the Australia Council to Carole Johnson, an African-American dance teacher. The company adopted the fusion of contemporary and traditional dance forms that had been seeded by AIDT. But the leaders in the Aboriginal dance theatre community split. Christine Donnelly moved to the Redfern Dance Theatre that was true to its urban Aboriginal roots; while others joined Bangarra creating a kind of universal black energy. Dance theatre is the closest artistic medium to the traditional cultural forms which are always sung, danced and painted. I draw inspiration from the traditional people - whether it's the art of the myth stories, or the way they hunt, or how they make songs part of their everyday survival. Their life is art. I've always aspired to that. I don't think being in the arts is about finding my identity as a person. The fact that I've been able to surrender to my imagination and my vision, that's my artistic drive. But at the same time the traditional cultural identity has been the religious discipline that grounds me and enables me to tap into that world. My beliefs and connection to traditional culture support me through my journey in the art world. I hope that through Bangarra's works, such as Ochres, Fish and Skin, it is possible for audiences to share the spirituality of the land and the significance of that experience. One of the best skills I learned with Bangarra was 'old blackfella way'. That is, a cultural way of clanning with our mob. Artists such as Richard Talonga, Philip Langley and Sylvia Blanco had the modern dance forms, but they also had the traditional culture. They did the hard work and laid the seed for the Bangarra of today. The true leaders of our Bangarra clan are the traditional elders who are the cultural custodians. Djakapurra Munyarryun from Dhulunbuy in Arnhem Land worked with Bangarra from 1991, providing a strong foundation on which to build traditional roots for the Bangarra clan. Djakapurra and I met in 1989, when he was visiting his sister Janet Munyarryun, who was a principal performer with AIDT. I was directing Kayn Walu, a final-year production at AIDT. It was the first time an indigenous artist had been invited to direct for the school. We were short a yirrdaki player and the sixteen-year-old Djakapurra was just sitting there quietly watching, so I asked him to fill in. That moment started a long creative culture kinship. My brothers Russell, David and I adopted Djakapurra into our urban clan, and he in turn adopted us into his traditional clan. Coming out of the Sydney Dance Company into Bangarra as I did, I was now able to challenge that mainstream formula. Together Djakapurra, my brothers Russell and David, Francis Rings, the performers and the other mainstream collaborators like Jenny Irwin, Steve Francis and Peter England - we've been able to develop a particular way of working. It has developed over the years and involves a full engagement by all the clan in the story-telling, the visualisation and the cultural and social debates. In this way, everyone is a contributor and part of the source of the work, experienced and interpreted from their particular perspective. When I started working with my own dancers and the traditional elders, I was instinctively critical of what I was doing. I was constantly in discussion with Russell and David, who have been an essential part of the creative process. In my relationship with Djakapurra for all those years there were times when I'd express my frustrations and criticism with the process. This would spark a conversation in which he would relate the experience I was having to his cultural stories and compare his frustrations in dealing with the customs of the modern world. All through this process of testing and challenging our work and our process, and sharing these with the clan, we were seeking the right kind of identity to form the basis of future works. I had surrendered my ego when I was young and tried to be really honest in my process. This allowed me and the Bangarra clan to discover a uniqueness in our productions and importantly in our creative processes. It's very easy to think there's only one way, whether it's the Australian Ballet or Sydney Dance. I too wanted those great sets, costumes, lights and choice of music and I realised that I could embrace them, together with traditional music and dance and painting, as long as I had the right cultural integrity. So, we began to work on a fusion of modern Western form and ancient traditional form. The work Corroboree had been brewing in my head for many years before it was created with Bangarra. It explores the relationship between animals and humans in indigenous culture. They were one in their world once upon a time. The work is also about transformation. One source of inspiration for the first section, titled 'Brolga', was a beautiful brolga feeding ground shown to me by Djakapurra in North-east Arnhem Land. Another was the music video Right Here Right Now by Fat Boy Slim, which is a brilliant animation of human evolution from primeval slime to hip modern homo sapiens. For me it's the same thing, popular culture and this constant process of transformation. This duality reflects our fusion of urban and traditional culture. In nurturing the growth of Bangarra from the early seed to what it is today I found that the more honest I became in my work processes, the more the creative team believed in them. I started to realise that if the process and the kinship was honest then, however the production turned out, it would be accessible to the general public. Today the dancers are grounded by their experiences of working with indigenous communities, whether in the Central Desert or in Eveleigh Street, Redfern. Most young people don't want to do culture any more - they're into pop culture, they're into petrol sniffing and all the social dilemmas. And so we go there as teachers, to bridge the gap between the kids and the elders by showing a young, sassy, urban company who are proud of culture. That we can hip hop as well as our boys can hunt and our girls can weave. It psyches the kids into wanting to understand the dreaming, and if it's strong enough it will challenge their perceptions. This grassroots activity keeps Bangarra strong and feeds our inner cause and purpose. The link of land and culture for indigenous peoples is something that's accepted but is often misunderstood. Our land is the mother earth and the source of spiritual strength. The spirit of the land runs deep and, for me, it's a central source of inspiration for my work. But it's not until you come into intense contact with the traditional cultures, and feel the essence of the land for yourself, that it makes much sense. Like being in the central desert and watching the people bathe in earth where the earth is their water. Bangarra could have been an easy ride if we had accepted a role as the token indigenous company. But we had good support from our urban elders like Charles Perkins, Pat O'Shane, and Faith Bandler. They were aware that the exterior of Bangarra could look like tokenism, especially to white audiences. So they got me thinking about how we could change the internal experience of what this company is about. We've always lived with this tokenism, but we've also tried to challenge it. I find that people involved in funding, sponsorship and presentation are innocently ignorant of our purpose. They have the money, but no idea of how to present the work. I've sought to challenge their perspective. We became so sick of not getting to perform in the Opera Theatre or the Drama Theatre. Instead we were constantly being called up to perform in the foyers or on the forecourt. So I stylised these token performances and people began to notice, saying, 'Hey, this looks like a festival piece.' Instead of getting frustrated and giving in, and feeling I was powerless, I kept challenging myself and Fran, Russell, David and Djakapurra about the message we were trying to give. Bangarra is a diverse company, and we decided that to increase our base of understanding we should perform for the corporate sector. Aden Ridgeway and Danny Gilbert, both Bangarra board members, have helped the company to build this relationship between the arts and the corporate sector. I didn't care that corporate clients would expect only what they knew, which was minimal. I thought, 'Why don't we make them care? Why not try to educate them and reclaim our integrity?' We're spending a lot of energy re-educating people, but I figure it's a good investment. We'll get better long-term support if we put in the effort now. There is a growing group of indigenous artists in the contemporary world who inspire and understand cultural kinship. A whole generation of artists who have been able to translate the traditional into the mainstream and create visual and performed works that are challenging. The ones who have come through - Hettie Perkins, Djon Mundine, Ningali Lawford, Mundaway Yunipingu - somehow they have been faithful to their traditional learning and have incorporated it into their contemporary works. I'm part of that clan and draw tremendous strength from that kinship. I see our work as part of an Aboriginal art movement that's based on frustration and the social issues of our communities. We portray the abuses of alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, the stolen children. Bangarra has made works on these issues but we do it through physicality and spirit. By using the media of traditional music and all those cinematic Western soundscapes, we're tapping into specific art forms to create the one spiritual message. I've been allowed to listen and have been trusted and respected to be the caretaker of the traditional stories. I feel and live that responsibility - it's enough for one person's energy in this lifetime. Accepting traditional complexities has made me much more worldly and universal. I'm an incredibly optimistic person. I love philosophy and tapping into the human spirit and energies. I'm always trying to tell a good story universally, through the indigenous identity. Take such global issues as tolerance and acceptance. We've come to the 21st century where our society has to accept a myriad of cults. I'm a bit over this supremist Western formula and the power of that. I'm more interested in the galaxy of cults that exist and the human desire to express our stories through our own identities and religions. I feel I'm part of setting up the 21st-century library, being part of the process of making work now. Doing that with Bangarra, and with my cultural heritage, makes it harder, as there's always a need to preserve cultural protocol and sensitivity. In putting a mainstream production together, a choreographer like Meryl Tankard doesn't have to go and talk to Hans Christian Anderson and sit with the family and explain that she wants to make a ballet of his tale of the Wild Swans. Although maybe she'd like to. I have to do that; I have to talk to the people and I have to be the caretaker of the culture. Black politics are stimulating, but it's always the same, you never get a great big surprising resolution. In black politics it's always ten steps forward and ten steps back, so for me it's a familiar pattern. But the politics are always there in our work. The political context of everything we do stirs up the theatre production. And when you become a cultural ambassador to the international market, you're on a learning curve and you see other indigenous cultures in a similar situation. They're experiencing the same frustrations; they're aspiring to your fusion and uniqueness. They see Bangarra as having been through this initiation of traditional protocol and at the same time having learned to survive in a mainstream way. They see us confident about our uniqueness. We challenge other mainstream companies that don't have that fusion. When Bangarra performed in America in 2001, we were surprised at the number of Native Americans that would come to our show and admire what they saw. They too were experimenting with their stories and evolving their traditional myths in a modern way. We became role models for other indigenous clans, and this made us realise we have that responsibility to become mature and accept that role. This has given me the tough goanna skin to be a lot more honest in the way we explore the ongoing passages of work that we do for the future. It all goes back to the old values of optimism, being positive and living with one spirit.
I liked the madness of it all - the sense of complexity - mentally, physically and spiritually. I felt that because we were experimenting we were opening up to other cults and religions and experiences in the world; and that it was because of what we were exploring in our own creative cave that we made these extraordinary links. Dance is such a physical, emotional and mental discipline. When I'm an elder I'd like to think that I had been able to establish an honesty with my craft that had become the anchor and the seed to the work. If I moved into film or drama I think I would want to edit out as many of the words as I could in order to enhance the physicality. Dance is such an ancient form because of the labour of the physicality. It has a strong connection with people and land and how people live by the land. There are a myriad of landscapes in our global society and many types of human relationships, especially in the physical relationship of people with the land. Indigenous dance is more earthbound than the modern forms. When the New York City Ballet performs Balanchine's choreography, it reflects a city with a modern society, mixed religion and culture, in which the energy is swift and sophisticated. So, naturally those energies being birthed into that city will generate through in the ballet. Just as in Australia Chunky Move and the Australian Dance Theatre are led by vibrant nearly-40-year-old men, who have been influenced by popular culture, surfing, skateboarding, martial arts, who have broken the boundaries (Billy Elliott style) and are able to bring to their craft all that physicality in their pop-culture street life. But Bangarra bridges two worlds. In 2001, after completing a major United States tour, we returned to Australia to perform for remote Aboriginal communities. One performance took place in a dry riverbed, where a series of gym mats covered with sand formed a stage lit by four-wheel drive lights hung in the trees and with a backdrop painted by local children. Some four hundred Aboriginal people watched our performance sitting around in a circle of fires created for each clan. I'm grateful to be able to bring the stomping grounded-ness of my traditional heritage and the Australian desert and Northern Territory to my dance, and to be reminded of how humans live from the land. Whenever I go to remote areas, I am always inspired watching someone like Djakapurra hunt a stingray or Mungajay Yunipingu crossing an oyster bank, where the skin of his feet relaxes into the oysters as if he is walking on sand. If I were to step on the oyster bed I would be picking up my feet. Mungajay says that's how the children learn the 'pick-up' dance. The children learn to surrender to the essence of the grounded-ness of the oyster shells, which somehow toughens their feet and their spirits. It's all about the relationship of land and energies. I'm lucky to have had those cultural experiences. Somehow in my young adulthood, I was awakened by my traditional culture and had it introduced into my spirit and my profession. To listen and to instinctively be in touch with it has been great for me. The more I produce the more it becomes a circular experience, and the more I realise that the challenges and tasks I face are not a wasted experience but are links in the journey. They are such strong experiences that I can sense when I don't do something honestly. I've learned that it's actually a sin to not have religion and culture. In the planning for the Sydney 2000 Olympics Opening Ceremony I was tempted to choreograph a boycott. Rhoda Roberts and I were constantly debating the political outcome and trying to work out a two-way system - what to boycott and what not to. (1) We were willing to stylize a boycott theatrically. Instead we brought a thousand people together on this Eora land and it made a much more powerful statement. The complexity of cultural protocol was our main mission - how to encourage the Eora Nation to open up their lands to all those other clans. We wanted to achieve this mission first because they had forty thousand years of stories to tell. It's essential to be able to have such cultural intellectual debate with your peers. Michael Knight (2) and others thought the plans for the indigenous segment might be too folksy. I'd be radical and say things like 'Let's have Archie Roach sitting in the middle of the ground singing his biographical song "They Took the Children Away". He'd be surrounded by members of the stolen generation wearing T-shirts with "Sorry" on them.' But that was too much for some of those people. It was certainly an extraordinary process, bringing such a big mob together. We had eleven minutes in all and a whole host of cultural groups to represent. So ceremonies that would normally be performed from dusk to dawn would have to be represented in one-and-a-half minutes. As you can imagine, a great deal of our time was spent in preparation. We didn't need to get them to rehearse something that was part of their everyday lives, but we did need to help them understand the significance of being a part of this universal ceremony. Time was taken with the traditional elders to reassure them and negotiate the incorporation of traditional images, dances and music into the Opening Ceremony. The logistics of bringing together such a disparate mob was unbelievable. And yet, the moments of pure magic were there during preparation. Everyone, from performers to technicians, was spellbound when the elders took control of the microphone and, speaking in traditional language across the vast space of the stadium, got us through the rehearsal. Everyone experienced a different kind of artistic protocol, and for the first time the International Olympics Committee agreed to allow indigenous performers to retain their intellectual property rights over their culture. This was a world first and will continue for future Olympics. The experience for those lucky enough to see the ceremony live was far more powerful than for the majority of people watching on television. Whilst the media loved the images of Djakapurra and Nikki Webster holding hands, it was not my idea and I thought it was romanticised. It was hard for Djakapurra to take responsibility for the ceremony as he did. It didn't come across on television, but he was the link throughout the performance to each of the nine segments and this link was intended as a statement about reconciliation. But the editing of the TV recording did not follow this through and in my view the result turned out to be rather token. The experience of seeing performances of Bangarra builds enormous awareness. A country that does not acknowledge in its constitution a respect for its first people is pretty wicked. So to spit out work after work that struggles with social issues or offers a poetic, theatrical, visual experience is very much part of the political artistic campaign. With the loss of my brother Russell, who committed suicide last year, I have begun to reflect on how important the next generation had been to Russell, and the handing down of culture from one generation to the next. From that experience of sorrow and despair I have developed a hunger for what the next generation can achieve. There is spirit and hope out there. Sadly, though, not from this present government. They do not have a good understanding.
I've imagined how it might have been, had the landing of Captain James Cook on Terra Australis two hundred years ago turned out differently. Let me take you back for a minute. It's 1770 and Captain Cook walks up to the first black man: 'Black skin, pink skin, you smell different, I smell different, where do we go from here?' Imagine if he had said, 'Shit man, your land's rich, your art is your life. This is amazing, we're sitting on a pot of gold. Yes, teach me the language.' Today everyone would be Aboriginal. Everyone would have a sense of Aboriginality in them. And we'd have a common language. People would come from overseas and want to learn the language. I can't help thinking, 'What if?' I just hope time will change and, even though it's long seconds away from reality, there's potential for the land to be reclaimed. The use of the title Walkabout for one of our productions was about reclaiming a word that has come to mean, often in a derogatory way, someone who is flaky or unreliable. But in fact it's really about that time when Aboriginal boys become men. Young boys are given initiations to maybe go out and hunt; and there were certain things they had to get, like a kangaroo and three barramundis. This might take days, and the women would be setting fires and waiting for the boys to return. They had to bring home their prize and then there would be celebration through song and dance. But 'walkabout' is also about family, about going back to homeland, back to where you were birthed, back to the tree where the placenta was buried. It has a myriad of meanings. We will never assimilate the spirituality of black and white. I think nineteenth-century life was very laboured, based around physical work and the pre-industrial era. Then in the 20th century the energy and activity have been mental. So what does that mean for the 21st century? Well, I think it will be the century of the spirit. The current male dominant extremist Western approach is really at an end. The key to reconciliation, I believe, is language. If we could just bring together the elders from each state, maybe even take them to Uluru, and get them to create a new, but old, indigenous language - that would make a difference. We would have one domestic language which the whole country could speak. They could start a new dictionary, and put the Aboriginal language into schools, so that the next generation of white and black would speak it. That would give indigenous culture true power and status. In black politics, where you have black on black, there's the urban fellas, many with degrees. They can tick all the boxes and think there's more to learn. But there's nothing more they need to learn from Western ways; what's more interesting is the depth of their political indigenous kinship, their family kinship and traditional law. There are amazing systems within the way the political songlines have been developed over the centuries; and then there's this 'extremist Western formula' - dominant, cold, greedy, abrupt, arrogant. Trying to bring the two together is like trying to mix oil and water. There's never going to be true reconciliation, I believe, until society adapts to what the land kinship is. Every country speaks in that way. Every country's ancient land, blood line, has to evolve from its own values. I see the political process as a two-way street. There's always the road of guilt, and there's always the road of hope. The older our Prime Minister gets, the more guilt he's going to inhale, so he'll keep walking that way. It's action and reaction. The more he retreats down that side of the road, the more energy will be streaming in the opposite direction, on the other side of the road. The recently discovered letter written by Captain Phillip in 1788 refers to our land as a dumping ground for convicts. ATSIC (3) has become just another means of issuing rations like flour and sugar. We can't even decide on a new Australian flag, which in my view points to a lack of maturity in our society. So where are we heading as a nation? If all the money and resources that have been going into the war play of Cowboys and Indians over the past nine months had been used to support issues in our own backyards, then we might have really pushed things forward here at home. The 21st century is the century of hope and spirit. I think it's about regaining spirit - its honesty, its identity, its religion. People want to identify with belonging. This century is about accepting many global cults. The global atmosphere must be working in harmony. Bonds of kinship, in whatever ways these are formed, tie us to one another and strengthen the spirit. Cathy Freeman and footballers like Michael O'Loughlin and Michael Long are wonderful, indigenous sports stars. They are building on the strengths of past indigenous leaders and role models who've been able to live that complexity of culture and politics. They've carried the Aboriginal identity with them and built the confidence of our children by boosting their self-esteem. If it takes a hundred years to reclaim those confidences, then that's the life we are living now. That's what my work does - it aspires to build confidence, to be part of that motivation. The indigenous kids of the last two decades are much more proud. They've been pushed to go through Year 12 and universities, so we're seeing many more doctors, lawyers graduating. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids are much more confident about their identity today. They will be the ones to carry forward the philosophy our leaders are living today. They'll carry the political message sticks, and they'll have the tough warrior skin to live in harmony. This two-way street is all about acceptance and understanding. It's funny to remember what it was like for me at school. They made Aboriginal kids line up separately when there was a head lice inspection or something similar. But they'd always make me go in the line with the white fellas. I had the fairest skin of all my family and people thought I belonged to the milkman, or had been adopted. My brothers would tease me about it all the time. I used to have to argue to get in the line with the other blackfellas. I cried to be in that line. But I was caught in the middle. All I ever wanted was to be Aboriginal. I wasn't very conscious of being coloured until I was older, when I connected to traditional families and they saw me for what I was, a dancer and a performer. They recognised my strong spirit through my creativity rather than my exterior; not the colour of my skin, but my art. That meeting of kinship and creativity is my inspiration. This whole journey has inspired me and taken me back to my immediate family, to my mother and father and their indigenous heritage. It's helped me to rekindle the true spirit of my traditional kinship with the Nunukul people of Stradbroke Island and the Munaldjali clan of the Yugambeh tribe from south-east Queensland. Time will tell if this mix of freshwater and saltwater peoples becomes the inspiration for future creative projects, awakening my own traditional languages, paintings, songs and dance. (1) Rhoda Roberts was co-creative director of Tubowgule, the indigenous segment of the opening ceremony. There had been a move within the Aboriginal community to boycott the Opening Ceremony. (2) Michael Knight was Labor Minister for the Olympics and president of the Sydney Organising Committee of the 2000 Olympic Games. (3) The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, the national body responsible for the distribution of funds to Aboriginal communities. Source: Bangarra Dance Company related links :
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its one year on from the Australian Governments controversial intervention into NT Indigenous communities
action Roll back, listen to Indigenous community voices speaking about the intervention |
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After graduating from AIDT, I joined Sydney Dance Company. Graeme Murphy's choreography is contemporary modern classical ballet and it's a very technical form that I liked. But I hadn't trained in ballet, so it was amazing to be given this opportunity to work with a professional company. Then, in 1991, after I'd had my first choreographic showing with Sydney Dance, and while I was staying in New York, I got the call to join Bangarra and choreograph a work. 
