Stephen Page’s Rite of Spring goes deep. So deep, in fact, that this mind-numbingly hypnotic barrage of dancers, from the unsuspecting lino of the Sadler’s Wells stage floor, has capacity to seize the most vital essence of Australia up through the centre of the earth with the soles of their sunkissed feet. From outset to completion, this was a grounding, astounding and extraordinarily powerful adoration of the earth.
Bangarra Dance Theatre is proclaimed to be Australia’s most celebrated contemporary dance initiative inspired and informed by indigenous practices. In their own words, Bangarra’s stylistic repertoire draws from many millenia of living culture. In this first historical partnership with the Australian Ballet, here remounted from its 1997 original for the Melbourne Festival, indigenous and non-indigenous Australians come together speaking with a bright, new, intuitive gestural voice. The performance content, cocooned away from the influences and tokenism of pop urbanism, current events and Aboriginal political history, is a fundamentally honest and impulsive fantasia of movement which speaks to a harmonious coexistence with the land and its elements. Animalistic gestures are vividly referential without being representational nor symbolic. Asymmetrical lopings, flexing of frog-limbs, the momentary fascination of the fixated roo are integrated into a profoundly organic gestural language which takes equally from Western carriage and ideas.
For me, the timeless strength of this production lies in its refusal to yield to the simplifications of a literal narrative. Taking a refreshing distance from Stravinsky’s sacrificial script, Page, Bangarra’s artistic director, conjures the spiritual essence of each of the elements: earth, wind, fire, water, rather than the effects of these these forces on its populus. The remarkable result is that of a dynamic, pulsating, lollopping landscape into which the members of the company are fully absorbed. They knit together into a seamless, soulful whole, the spirit of which is at once fallible, fragile, achingly human while at the same time, heavier than humanity, far transgressing the trivialities and controlling instincts of the individual. The groping, climbing, rotating kaleidoscope of bodies forms the rich and instinctive architecture of the land, not as a backdrop for narratorial small talk but as the end in and of itself, the communication of whatever subsonic message the gargantuan resonating land mass of Australia has to sing.
While Nijinsky’s allegedly outrageous 1913 choreographic response to Stravinsky’s music was considered anti-balletic, modernist and aggressively anti-establishment, Page’s motions and impetus are wrenchingly natural, fluid and fervently alive; breathtakingly intense but free of the implications of violence and vicissitude associated with humanity and human ritual.
Much has been said about the political connotations of this work and the fragile social context from which it was borne. An innovative and unprecedented fusion with the Australian Ballet, it was hailed by Page himself as “dance of reconciliation”. The final scene sees all dancers doused in ochres regardless of their indigenous or non-indigenous personal histories. Individual company members become unrecognizable from the next, Ballet members deeply interlocked and inseparable from their Bangarra counterparts.
Rites is startlingly Australian at its core and an impassioned shout out to the future of truly Australian physical theatre. Whether its content can be as effective and emotionally moving to a world audience remains to be seen, if of consequence at all. Indigenous fusion concepts are a problematic topic among international scholars and mixed-disciplinary artists but I challenge my colleagues to find fault with the foresight, resilience and latent creative instinct of Stephen Page and his concept of the Australian body in space. Without a doubt, the soul of our country hangs heavy in the air this week in Islington.
