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Canberra Today 18°/23° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review: Bangarra creates ‘a moving meditation’

HOW do you create a score inspired by a place where the silence is overwhelming? composer David Page pondered.  Whatever challenges faced, Page has come up with a truly beautiful and sensual soundtrack for Bangarra’s “Terrain”. 

Lake Eyre (Kati Thanda) was the inspiration for Frances Ring’s choreography, Page’s composition, Stephen Page’s direction, Jacob Nash’s set design, Karen Norris’s lighting and Jennifer Irwin’s costumes. What a brilliant job they have done.

This stunning creation is like watching a moving meditation, where the music and stage design entice the dancers to make their way through the landscape.

Terrain is quite different from Bangarra’s other recent offerings – the dancing is softer, gentler, while still clearly rooted in Indigenous influence, it’s more subtly integrated into the contemporary style.

The costuming was beautiful, some resembling fossils, women in long skirts and spinifex headpieces, beautiful and original, although a few feet caught in the skirts at times. White clouds of dry clay rise from the dancers and linger in the air in these eerie and haunting pieces.

Nine beautiful transitions make up “Terrain”, from a calling heard in suburbia to return to the land, of reclaiming land, to rebirth and the many cycles of theLake– arid, fullness, salt, to the scars inflicted on the land by man.

Although not perfectly executed throughout, the female dancing appeared developed from previous shows. Dancers move across the stage, often locked together like creatures traversing the lake and surrounds, seeming to skate across saltbeds, between the two pieces with sharper movement and stronger beats. “Shields” and “Scar” – the latter had a club feel to it, with slashed black costumes and a sexy, throbbing beat.

Deborah Brown was captivating as always, in “Reflect,” before being joined by the ensemble for the colourful “Deluge,” the finale for a show that was over too soon.

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

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