Next year’s centrepiece is a new work inspired by Bruce Pascoe’s award-winning book Dark Emu.

Bangarra Dance Theatre has announced its 2018, which includes a new work called Dark Emu, a tour of the company’s 2016 work OUR land people stories, and a season of the hit 2017 work Bennelong in Adelaide as part of the Adelaide Festival.

The centrepiece of the 2018 season is a new work called Dark Emu inspired by Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Pascoe is an Indigenous Victorian writer from the Bunurong clan of the Kulin nation. His book – which was named Book of the Year at the 2016 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards – puts forward evidence that Aboriginal Australians pre-colonisation were not hunter-gatherers but cultivated domesticated plants, built permanent dwellings, and developed sophisticated systems of governance and sustainable land care for thousands of years across the country.

^{Yolanda Lowatta, Rika Hamaguchi, Daniel Riley and Tyrel Dulvarie. Photograph supplied}

Dark Emu will be directed by Stephen Page in collaboration with senior dancer Daniel Riley, Bangarra alumna Yolande Brown and the...