Since appearing on the Australian arts scene in 1989, Indigenous dance company Bangarra Dance Theatre has established itself as one of the nation’s most innovative and important performing arts collectives, creating and touring theatrical productions that deftly combine dance, music, poetry, culture, and design. Its latest production, the multidimensional Illume, is perhaps its greatest achievement yet.

Currently in its thirty-sixth year, Illume constitutes a major artistic evolution for Bangarra. Choreographed by artistic director Frances Rings, who took the reins of the collective from long-time artistic director Stephen Page in 2023, it marks the company’s first collaboration with a visual artist, in this case Goolarrgon Bard pearl carver Darrell Sibosado, who hails from Lombardina on the Dampier Peninsula in Western Australia. The results are both artistically exquisite and gloriously immersive for the audience.

As the show opens, an expansive night sky is projected onto the stage and out into the Playhouse theatre, tiny stars covering the stage, the audience, and the venue itself as eighteen dancers slowly emerge, gathering together under the dark sky. This sky – and the light emitted by the stars – are at the core of Illume, which takes as its centre point the importance of light to Indigenous cultures and an unravelling of the environment as the climate crisis takes hold.

Over the course of a mere seventy minutes, the show unfolds across eleven distinctive chapters within three different phases. The stories and scenes draw directly on the lore and culture of the Bardi Jawi people, the First Peoples of the Dampier Peninsula. With his stunning visuals, Sibosado brings his cultural knowledge to the production, which was also informed by the input of cultural consultants Trevor Sampi and Audrey (Pippi) Bin Swani, both of whom are from Bardi Country.

The opening sections of Illume are both integrated and immersive, emphasising that for First Nations people light is both ancestral and literal, both a metaphor and an existing force that enables seeing and envisioning. One of the most powerful aspects of Illume is the way in which lighting designer Damien Cooper communicates the impacts of colonisation via the juxtaposition of natural light – sun, stars, the moon – with the glaring, oppressive garishness of artificial light.

Over the course of the show’s eleven chapters, light evolves and changes, setting up an opposition between the softness of the natural landscape and Indigenous cultures with the harsher, more controlled atmosphere of the colonial period. The differences in the qualities and comfort levels of the lighting are also movingly and effectively embodied in the pervasive tension that undercuts Rings’s choreography, which veers between delicate and contained to become, at other times, percussive and uncontrolled.

Illume (photograph by Daniel Boud)

Sitting at the core of Illume are important questions: Why has light proven so pivotal in Indigenous cultures? Why is it considered a connective force between the physical and the spiritual worlds? What impact does artificial light pollution have upon the land and sky, and how does it affect First Nations people’s links to sky, Country, and celestial knowledge?

In collaborating with a visual artist, Bangarra has sought to expand its storytelling oeuvre, ultimately crafting a multidimensional response to these questions. That response combines the company’s interest in communication through dance and culture with immersive, large-scale visual interpretations.

In ‘Niman Aarl (Many Fish)’, a whirlpool of tiny fish swirls frenetically around a giant conch shell and the dancers too swirl and spiral, their movements at once rapid and flowing, languid and fluid. The central section of Illume is more disjointed, representing the disruption and destruction of place and culture caused by invasion.  

Here, the dancers are weighted down as they move slowly, lumbering as they carry large brown blocks, each block representative of the burdens colonisation brought to the inhabitants of the land. The choreography depicts trauma with its push-and-pull, embodying a muscularity that is echoed in composer Brendon Boney’s score, which is by turns mesmeric, reflective, electrifyingly intense, and thunderous. 

The entire scene comes to a climax with the loud and unmistakable ringing of church bells, symbolising the introduction of Christianity, and a flaming, crucifix-like form. It is as arresting and effective a visual metaphor as the flickers of light that represent the fire burns, ash falls, and embers, as well as the ropes of light that are utilised elsewhere in the production to signify the ties of kinship, passed back-and-forth and wound around the bodies of the dancers to great effect.

The final sections of Illume – ‘Middens’, ‘Whale Song’, and ‘Mother of Pearl Reprise’ – situate both the performers and audience firmly in the milieu of land and sea. The stage floor shimmers, masterfully illuminating set designer Charles Davis’s beautifully understated work. Boney’s score morphs from quiet and understated to booming and propulsive, keeping perfect time with the ebb-and-flow of Rings’s highly structured yet flowy choreography. 

Special mention must also be made of the gorgeous costuming work of designer Elizabeth Gadsby. Her eye for form, colour, and detail unquestionably enhances every aspect of this production and of note are the impressively executed and staged scenes where the women dancers are brilliantly dressed to mimic the glowing two-toned Manawan trees that grow on Goolarrgon Country.

The potency of Illume lies primarily in its remarkable symbiosis: each movement and gesture is exacting and purposeful, resonating with quiet precision; every beam of light projected and every noise made serves a specific purpose; every garment donned by the dancers enhances and embodies the movements their bodies are making and the stories those movements are telling. The fusion of these elements with the rich and evocative carved tribal artworks of Sibosado results in a triumphant and exceptional production that is simultaneously an act of homage and one of cultural transmission, rich with longing, connection, and collective memory.

Illume will be performed at the Darwin Entertainment Centre on August 15 and 16 and at the Arts Centre Melbourne from September 4 to 13, 2025. Performance attended: August 7 at the Queensland Performing Arts Complex.