Follow your dreaming: Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Page 8

First staged in 2004, Belvoir’s production of Page 8 – the autobiographical one-person show by David Page – toured the country and internationally for the next five years. Presented here by Bangarra Dance Theatre on its tenth anniversary, as part of Corroboree Sydney, the show is a collection of stories from the Page family’s rich goldseam of experiences, peppered with fragments of home videos, direct audience address, re-enactment, and song-and-dance numbers.

Putuwá: Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Patyegarang

I have written about the story of Patyegarang and William Dawes on this blog before. It’s a beautiful story about language, friendship, trust, heart, and sacrifice; it’s a story about building bridges, whether you realise it or not; how different things might be now had the understanding not been rudely interrupted in 1791. When Bangarra announced their major production for 2014, their twenty-fifth year, was to be based on this story, I added it to my list of must-see productions and eagerly held my breath. And here we are, nine months later; the same amount of time it took those eleven ships to sail from London to Sydney Cove, two-hundred and twenty-seven years ago.

Bangarra’s Patyegarang takes the notebooks William Dawes made of the Sydney language, and turns them into a haunting, elegant and powerfully fluid seventy minutes of dance theatre. If you’re familiar with Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant, then you’re already thinking along the right track of this piece. Except there is a difference: where Grenville’s book is about the friendship from Dawes’ point of view, Bangarra’s Patyegarang is about the young woman, her culture, her land, her language, and her relationship with the white man to whom she taught her language. It is Patyegarang’s story; it is her show.