Two young indigenous dancers from New South Wales are set to enjoy a year of invaluable professional performance experience and training with Bangarra Dance Theatre thanks to the Company’s Russell Page Graduate Program.

Ryan Pearson and Baden Hitchcock have joined the Company for 2017 during which time they will perform in Bennelong, the latest work by Bangarra Artistic Director Stephen Page, which has its world premiere at the Sydney Opera House in June. The duo will then join the Company when they travel back to Country in the Torres Strait Island in August. They will also take part in a major international tour to Germany in October, before returning to Sydney to perform in Ones Country – The Spine of Our Stories, a new triple bill of works by Djakapurra Munyarryun, Elma Kris, and Nicola Sabatino and Kaine Sultan-Babij, directed by Page.

^{Ryan Pearson. Photograph © Tiffany Parker}

Initiated in 2014, the Russell Page Graduate Program is named after the late Russell Page, who was a founding member of Bangarra with his brothers Stephen and David, and one of its most revered dancers. He passed away in 2002. The Program offers recently...