Word: bangarra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hushed tones about the sacred in art, reconciliation and breaking down barriers in a quiet corner of the Festival Centre, the performing hub of the Adelaide Festival, of which he is artistic director. It's a typically spellbinding performance from this Mad Hatter of Australian indigenous arts, whose Bangarra Dance Theatre provided the cosmic corroboree for the Sydney Olympics' opening ceremony in 2000. Then over the speakers comes the clunk-clunk of piano chords as I Go to Rio begins. "Oh, my God," says Page. "It's Peter Allen...
...Coming out of Peter's and working into this (festival) was very hard, and I thought I was being punished," says Brisbane-born Page, 38, who midway through the planning had to cope with the suicide of his younger brother Russell, Bangarra's gifted senior dancer. "I thought, 'Oh, God, I must have been a mongrel dog in my past life.'" If there's one thing 15 years in the arts have taught Page - first as a performer with the Sydney Dance Company, then from 1991 as artistic director of Bangarra - it's not to bite the hand that feeds...
...Rolls-Royce. Letters, the State Theatre Company of South Australia's new four-hour adaptation of Robert Dessaix's intimate novel about a writer's "death" in Venice, looks good but wobbles without a suitably dramatic engine. And with some of the most anticipated works still to come (Bangarra's Unaipon, based on the life of the late Aboriginal inventor; and actor David Gulpilil's one-man show, directed by Neil Armfield), it remains to be seen if Page's dot-painting festival really resonates...
What is radical is Page's appointment as Australia's first indigenous director of a mainstream festival. He brings to the job the protocols he developed at Bangarra for bringing traditional art practices into the contemporary world. For Adelaide's opening ceremony, tea-tree bonfires were lit along the Torrens river, symbolically uniting the three local tribes, the Kaurna, Narrungga and Ngarrindjeri. On the opening weekend, a Sacred Symposium was held on how to present "secret" ceremonial knowledge, while Page's creative network has eased the way for the commissioning of indigenous work. "Another cultural consultation!" cries an Aboriginal urbanite...
...With Bangarra, Page has pushed the idea of Aboriginal art as a medium in which different cultures can converse. Can there be reconciliation on stage? That was the subject of the symposium, which brought together indigenous leaders such as academic Marcia Langton, Senator Aden Ridgeway and filmmaker Rachel Perkins. Perhaps the pithiest comments came from curator Djon Mundine, who spoke of Aboriginal arts as a soliloquy cast into a silent void. "We keep giving it to you people," he told a largely white audience. "We want something to come back...
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