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At 90, Janet Dawson has spent a life drawn to the light and energy of the natural and celestial worlds as she crosses boundaries of abstraction and figuration.
Her dressmaker mother, Olga, was the first to teach her to examine the everyday, from clouds to chooks to a cauliflower on their kitchen bench. “She could draw but recognised in me something she had not had; the power of pushing it further,” the artist recalls now.
Dawson is in Sydney after two days of being driven from her home of recent years in southern Victoria.
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Stephen Page stands wrapped in scarf and beanie against the morning winter chill at Sydney’s Marrinawi (big canoe) cove, at the northern end of Barangaroo reserve. “This mouth of water, one of the biggest in the world, it’s an operatic landscape and it was so inspirational,” he says.
As he looks past the sculpted sandstone across the harbour, the acclaimed choreographer recollects the Eora nation stories that prompted some of his best-known dance works during his 31 years as artistic director of the Sydney-based Bangarra Dance Theatre.
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Kinetic light and energy gloriously transmit Indigenous cultural knowledge in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s latest production, Illume: a dance cycle that flows across 11 interwoven sections within an abstracted, ephemeral landscape that shimmers with light, a symbol of life.
Tubular poles of neon click on and off to the dancers’ rhythms, as shooting lights conjure both the cosmos and ceremonial dance wear designs. The ensemble then loops one another in bright white cables that form connected patterns suggesting their kinship.
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