Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
June 14, 2018

Bangarra Dance Theatre’s latest production Dark Emu draws on Bruce Pascoe’s 2014 book Dark Emu: Black Seeds, Agriculture or Accident? which explores the relationship Aboriginal people had with the land before colonial settlement. The non-fiction work provides evidence that they were not hunter-gatherers as they have been depicted but used sophisticated farming, fishing and sustainable land care, which was ignored by the settlers.

Dark Emu. Photographs © Daniel Boud

It’s a big, challenging theme to try to explore through dance – and altogether different from the company’s previous work, the hugely successful Bennelong, which had a narrative to play with. Dark Emu is by its nature a much more abstract work. Like Pascoe’s book, Bangarra’s work is divided into different segments with titles such as Ceremony of Seed, Forged by Fire, Bogong Moth Harvest, Crushed by Ignorance, and Smashed by Colonisation among many others. Without doing some background reading, however, much of it would be hard to understand (though the program does provide plenty of useful information). It is a beautiful piece to watch with some lovely, glowing group work, but it doesn’t have the same emotional force as...