After Welcome to Country, the house lights flicker and the audience is plunged into pitch black.

Bangarra’s bold new enterprise, WUDJANG: NOT THE PAST, begins in the present, the lights slowly dawning on the image of a metal mouth mining machine, an awesome auger, a metallic ogre, while a Yugambeh man sings in language of the anticipation of the exhumation of ancestral bones.

Epic in its sweep of history, culture and spirit, WUDJANG: NOT THE PAST is part musical, part opera, part drama, part ceremony making it fully theatrical – a potent potion of pure theatre.

Ceremony can be sombre, and certainly there is an underlying sadness in the story, but in essence, WUDJANG: NOT THE PAST is celebratory, a celebration of resilience, a celebration of resurgence, a celebration of regeneration.

Putting the celebration into perspective, WUDJANG: NOT THE PAST examines the precedents that have have brought us to the present, depicting the coming of the colonisers, starting with their flag planting pomp and disrespectful description of the land as His Majesty’s royal pigsty.

This morphs into a brilliant ballet about the introduction of sheep, a jolly jumbuck choreography that pulls our eyes over the woolly concept that the nation was built on the backs of sheep. Really? Whose backs?

Through song and dance and music and story, we are swept through the tumult of resistance and the trauma endured by massacre and misogyny, assassination of culture and language through forced assimilation.

Coruscating imagery created through movement and light conjures a choreographed equivalent of a zombie apocalypse, an unnatural disruption and displacement, a tangible dispiriting of a people.

There’s a healthy anger on show here and a rightful shaming for the commodifying of indigenous people, the rape of the women, the assault of spirit. In the spirit that it’s offered, accepting this healthy anger can only help in healing. Within the venom, there is the antivenin.

The truth is that the debt to truth is long overdue and the ledger needs to balanced.

Director Stephen Page has assembled a striking cohort of collaborators – co writer, Alana Valentine, language consultant, Donna Page, composer, Steve Francis, set designer, Jacob Nash, costume designer, Jennifer Irwin, lighting designer, Nick Schlieper, and musical director, Alan John.

The ensemble of actors and musicians is superb as is the core of Bangarra – the dancers, athletic, aesthetic, electric and thrilling.

WUDJANG: NOT THE PAST is unmissable and unforgettable.

 

DANCERS
Beau Dean Riley Smith, Rikki Mason, Rika Hamaguchi, Glory Tuohy-Daniell, Baden Hitchcock, Ryan
Pearson, Lillian Banks, Bradley Smith, Courtney Radford, Kassidy Waters, Kallum Goolagong, Gusta
Mara, Kiarn Doyle, Maddison Paluch, Daniel Mateo, Emily Flannery
CAST
Elaine Crombie, Jess Hitchcock, Elma Kris, Justin Smith
MUSICIANS
Brendon Boney, Amaru Derwent, Tessa Nuku, Véronique Serret
Wudjang: Not the Past
19 January – 12 February 2022 – Rosyln Packer Theatre, Sydney
18 – 19 February 2022 – Theatre Royal, Hobart
15 – 18 March 2022 – Adelaide Festival Centre
Tickets are available at: https://www.bangarra.com.au/productions/wudjang-not-the-past/

Photos by Daniel Boud.

Richard Cotter