The blossoming friendship between Bangarra Dance Theatre and The Australian Ballet

Flora, Frances Rings’ full-length work for the dancers of Bangarra Dance Theatre and The Australian Ballet, is the fourth collaboration between the companies over a span of three decades. In that time, a relationship of mutual respect and creative expansiveness has evolved, and something unique has flowered.

The Australian Ballet first experienced Bangarra’s style in the 1996 work Alchemy, choreographed by Stephen Page, the artistic director of the First Nations company. He had been commissioned by Maina Gielgud, the Ballet’s outgoing artistic director, as part of a triple bill of new Australian contemporary works. Having just made Ochres for Bangarra, Page had minerals on the mind. When he began to think about them in a Western context, mining emerged as a theme. He and the composer, his brother David Page, arranged Alchemy in four thematic blocks – Lead, Salt, Mercury and Gold. The work, Stephen said, was “a metaphor for mankind’s propensity to quest for gold, versus our need to respect the spiritual essence of nature”.

For the dancers, this taste of Page’s style was intoxicating. But the real connection between the Ballet and Bangarra would come the following year, when Page returned – bringing his dancers.

Rites had its origins in Alchemy. Ross Stretton, who took over from Gielgud, saw the work and was struck by the idea of a more ambitious collaboration. He invited Page to make a new work, set to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, that would bring the dancers of both companies together on one stage. Page would be following in the footprints of the great choreographers who had taken on Stravinsky’s jolting, propulsive score: Nijinsky, MacMillan, Bausch, Graham. At first Page was unmoved. He didn’t know the music, and the first time he listened to it, it sent him to sleep. However, as he listened more deeply, an idea unfolded for a work about “the natural forces which determine Australia’s ancient landscape”.

In 2022, Yolande Brown, a former Bangarra dancer who performed in Rites in her first year with the company, gathered together a key group of those involved in its creation to make a podcast. Steven Heathcote, a former principal artist and now a company ballet master, told her, “The very first day Bangarra and The Australian Ballet came together in The Australian Ballet studios in Kavanagh Street, South Melbourne was a momentous day, and I don’t use that word lightly.” There was curiosity, trepidation and wonder on both sides. Many of the Ballet’s dancers had never met or talked with a First Nations person. Some of Bangarra’s dancers felt protective of their movement, so deeply rooted in Country and their culture. Page had them form a circle. He asked everyone to take their shoes off. Then he had everyone pair off – one Bangarra dancer and one Ballet dancer would enter the circle and move together, shadowing each other.

Frances Rings, the choreographer of Flora, was one of the dancers, and her initial resistance to teaming up with the Ballet soon dissolved. “There was just this wonderful, curious wonderment from both sides,” she told Brown. “It just kind of was this: well, if it’s not happening externally, if it’s not happening in society, and if it’s not happening in our communities or if our politicians aren’t making it happen, then our artists are and our artists are creating this moment of change.”

For the Ballet’s dancers, exploring Page’s movement in the studio alongside his company was revelatory. Ballet is vertical, airborne, lilting and contained. Bangarra’s language is earthed, flexed, with sudden explosive leaps. The Ballet’s dancers had to lower their centre of gravity. But more than that, they had to feel the movement in a different way. Miranda Coney, a former principal artist who had a central role in the ‘Wind’ section of Rites, says that Bangarra’s movement “is, it’s innate, you know, it’s part of their Culture and their heritage and it just sort of comes through the inside and breathes out … it permeates the whole room, the whole of the theatre. For classical dancers, it’s hard to find that.”

“The very first day Bangarra and The Australian Ballet came together in The Australian Ballet studios in Kavanagh Street, South Melbourne was a momentous day, and I don’t use that word lightly.”
— Steven Heath­cote AM

The word Bangarra, from the Wiradjuri language, means “to make fire”. Rites was a blazing sensation, both at home and on tour to New York, London and Paris. Certainly, the Ballet’s dancers had been creatively kindled by the experience of making and performing in it. The 2006 work Amalgamate bought the companies together again, and paired David Page with Elena Kats Chernin to create a score that fused Western and First Nations elements, echoing the collaboration on stage. This time, the dancers were more integrated, as opposed to Rites, which had mostly kept them in distinct sections.

They also shared the stage more fully in Page’s next work, Waramuk: in the dark night, which was commissioned for the Ballet’s 50th anniversary year in 2012. For this work, he chose to use First Nations stories rather than just themes as the basis of his creative process. With the help of a cultural consultant, Aunty Kathy Marika, the production took shape around Indigenous stories of the night sky, starting with the Evening Star and ending with the Morning Star. The dancers – many of who were delighted to pick up and explore friendships made during the Rites tours – looked more bonded than ever before. Moments like ‘Eclipse’, a pas de deux that paired the Ballet’s Jake Mangakahia with Bangarra’s Ella Havelka, sang. (Havelka, who trained at The Australian Ballet School, would later resume her classical career at the Ballet, and still choreographs for its Education department.) The Seven Sisters segment, based on the story of the constellation and featuring women from both companies, had a shimmering power.

This year, Frances Rings – now artistic director of Bangarra and with several works for that company to her credit – will again form the circle for her dancers and a new generation of Ballet dancers. Flora will be the next chapter in their shared history.

As Yolande Brown remembers, “We … learnt so much through being in the studio together and admiring the discipline of the different forms and just that level of respect. It was inspiring and it’s something I think that all Australians can aspire to, you know, to have in their daily life practice; that respect for difference and how, when that’s appreciated, things can come together, and magic can be created.”

I have always been a huge fan of both these organisations, so I was very happy to run across this blog from Rose Mulready

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