REVIEWS

Bangarra Dance Theatre

DARK EMU

SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE JUNE

Bold, thought-provoking and a little hard to follow.

BANGARRA Dance Theatre’s new production Dark Emu is a bold and thought-provoking work based on the ideas explored by Bruce Pascoe in his book of the same name. Published in 2014 and the winner of the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, Pascoe’s book has garnered attention well beyond literary circles. Key concepts are that the hunter-gatherer tag applied to precolonial Indigenous people was not just incorrect, but wilfully misleading; that the evidence for this lies in early written accounts by a range of colonial explorers; and that the colonisation of Australia had devastating and far-reaching environmental impacts, overturning the balance of custodianship, respect and care for the land that had existed for thousands of years in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander society.

So how, you might wonder, are such theoretical concepts translated into and communicated through the visual aesthetic of dance? As it turns out – surprisingly well, for the most part.

Approximately the first half of this 70-minute work is a series of scenes in which the dancers’ bodies are abstracted by costumes and choreography that depict them as native grass seeds, embers of fire, bogong moths or a type of native fly threatened by other dancers portraying the introduced blowfly. Jacob Nash’s set design is crucial in pulling off these scenes as the large I found a little more difficult to follow as it was not always clear whether the dancers were portraying elements of nature or their ancestors – and to what purpose. But importantly, the production remained aesthetically pleasing and interesting to watch.