Bangarra Dance is a premier Australian Dance company bringing the powerful, but often unfamiliar, indigenous Australian legends from the Dreaming to international audiences. Bangarra have developed a unique and celebrated style of contemporary dance, combining powerful and evocative movements in indigenous Australian dance with the continuing traditions of indigenous Australia for storytelling through dance.
In 2018, Bangarra launches the international premiere of dance production, Dark Emu, originally a celebrated book of the same title by indigenous author Bruce Pascoe who through historical records and indigenous legends, showed the inaccuracies of early records during European colonization in understanding the cultural adjustments, technologies and modifications indigenous Australians had developed over thousands of years of continual occupation. The result was an under-estimation of the necessary changes within indigenous Australian culture and the gradual changes over time to the natural landscape.
Corroboree was a popular production spanning many years and international tours highlighting the origins of life by retelling three key indigenous Australian legends from the Dreaming when animal spirits roamed the land and humans were not yet created.
Terrain was a production evoking the rich connection between the indigenous Australian cultures and the land, exploring the respect for country, using the dry-flood patterns of Lake Eyre as a powerful reminder that humans are reliant of the land.