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Choreographer Stephen Page is talking in 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...
Allen would feel at home in Adelaide right now. If the late Australian showman were still shaking his maracas, he'd most likely head for Universal Playground, the hugely popular outdoor festival club. After problems with the plumbing, the joint is now jumping. The same could be said of Page's festival, which runs through March 14. When he inherited it from Californian opera director Peter Sellars, the biennial event was not in good shape. Sellars had tried to explode the traditional multi-arts model by pouring more money into film and grassroots programs. But his quest for a communal...
...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...
...honest, there's nothing too radical here. As Page admits, his aim was to "do everything - Aboriginal content, a bit for the conservatives, a bit for the crazies, a bit of a circus. A universal smorgasbord." That he's delivered. By the end of the first week, there were the usual hits (The Overcoat) and misses (Night Letters). The former, a piece of bravura theater-making from Canada, mixes Buster Keaton with Gogol and - after seven years on the festival circuit - purrs like a Rolls-Royce. Letters, the State Theatre Company of South Australia's new four-hour adaptation...
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...