|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
Adelaide-born modernist artist Bessie Davidson built a career in Paris. She wrote home to her father, urging him not to worry, that she had many buyers for her paintings, which were usually of interior furnishings or women she knew well. “I was born under a lucky star,” she reassured him.
The letter’s optimistic twinkle belied the earthy reality for many Australian women artists such as Davidson who travelled to Europe around the early 20th century yet were often “overlooked or misunderstood” at home during their lifetimes and were “certainly obscured in written accounts of art history,” says associate curator Elle Freak of the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA).
|
|