The night sky is infinite
Illume
Bangarra Dance Theatre
Thursday 4th September, 2024
Playhouse, Arts Centre, Melbourne / Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung Country
Choreographer: Frances Rings, The Dancers of Bangarra Dance Theatre
Artistic & Cultural Collaborator: Darrell Sibosado
Set Designer: Charles Davis
Costume Designer: Elizabeth Gadsby
Associate Costume Designer: Rika Hamaguchi
Lighting Designer: Damien Cooper
Video Designer: Craig Wilkinson
Composer: Brendon Boney
Cultural Consultant: Trevor Sampi
Cultural Consultant: Audrey (Pippi) Bin Swani
Sky Country, my response to Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Illume, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
Looking up at the night sky, the stars can tell you when to seed, harvest, and fish. The overhead knowledge system heralds seasonal change, and allows you to read the weather forecast. Whether for navigation in the physical sense, or called upon as a deep trove of cultural knowledge, the constancy of the illuminated constellation brings past, present, and future together[i]. And it is to the stars that Mirning choreographer Frances Rings invites us to look in Illume, presented by Bangarra Dance Theatre, last night in the Playhouse Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne.
Created in collaboration with Goolarrgon Bard visual artist Darrell Sibosado, Illume, which opened at the Sydney Opera House in June, before touring nationally, takes us to sky country, an iridescence of intuition and imagination, two senses as guiding as touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. The night sky is infinite, suggested set designer Charles Davis, and lighting designer Damien Cooper, as stars sparked and darted, skittled and flickered. Tumbling beyond the stage, the theatre became an expansive sky, and I was looking at a constellation beholden of splendour and wisdom. Opening with Shadow Spirits, the first of several connected chapters, the full ensemble rebounded and spun, as I said farewell to my earth-bound form and floated in the frequency of light. In costumes designed by Elizabeth Gadsby, behind a transparent screen, 18 dancers, comprised of many new-to-the-company faces, gave shape to light’s rhythm continuum.
Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Illume, photographed by Daniel Boud
In Mother of Pearl (Guan), the connection between “the physical and spiritual worlds” came to the fore. For the Goolarrgon Bard people, the presence and significance of the Mother-of-pearl shell, “permeate[s] every aspect of their environment and human experience, reflecting ancestral ties, cultural identity, and the enduring relationship between land, sea, and Lian/Liarrn (inner-being)”. The dancers now in what read as soft, cascading, pearlescent costumes evoked the undecorated, inside shell of a mollusc[ii]. In this state, they are guan. Through the process of preparing, shaping, and carving ancestral lines, guan shells become riji. Lines which could be read in the movements of the dancers, most notably when Mother of Pearl is reprised, this time for the full ensemble, and extended into something deeper at the conclusion of Illume. As light diffracted, the dancers appeared engraved in a prismatic rainbow of colour, as “through its essence and spirit, the intangible [became] tangible”[iii].
Echoing the luminosity of the shells, but through the contemporary language of neon, writ large, Sibosado’s riji[iv] designs glow throughout Illume. Whether pulsing, growing, flickering overhead, framed by the night sky, or layered across, and becoming a part of the dancers’ bodies (through the lowering of a transparent screen), his reinterpretation and magnification of designs passed down through generations of Bard people conveys the shared, adaptive systems of kinship and lore of a living culture. Together with video design by Craig Wilkinson and composition by Brendon Boney, as the individual chapters interwove, the lifeforce of Illume felt as though it was taking place in new terrain for the company, reinforcing Sibosado’s belief that “when we live in harmony, we keep adding to the pattern”[v].
Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Illume, photographed by Daniel Boud
The brilliant abstraction of the Manawan, or ‘woolybutt’ trees, with their fire-blackened trunks, which came into flower through the activation of dancers wearing singular bright orange gloves like the blossoms at the trees’ crown, in Manawan, was a highlight. So, too, the mournful, migration fringing of the Humpback whale (Minnimb), in Whale Song, led by Courtney Radford. Purposefully wedged to disrupt these two cues, Light Pollution revealed the shattering of sky-lore connection, as a result of colonisation and the ongoing destruction in the wake of invasion. Carrying the load of weighted blocks, the dancers were disorientated and reshaped, for though light carries a rhythm that gives a positive shape to an ecosystem, as seen in the orange blossoms and whale’s migration, ‘light’ when tied to ‘pollution’ “destroys our ability to see the stars”[vi]. Light pollution (caused by artificial light, from direct light to sky glow) disregards the circadian cycles of ecosystems, as typified by a strip of headlights turned high-beam upon the audience. Burning bright, it was impossible to see the stars, in the brutality of this action. It was impossible to ignore the meaning, and I hope many won’t.
Though there were few stars visible in the sky above when I left the theatre, the image of the dancers weaving long, serpent-like cables of white light across the stage, which they later braided into a large net, remains vivid in my mind’s eye, an image of connectivity.
Courtney Radford in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Illume, photographed by Daniel Boud
[i] ‘A Language of Light’, Illume Study Guide, Bangarra Dance Theatre, https://www.bangarra.com.au/media/x3teeqxn/bdt-illlume-studyguidea4v9.pdf, accessed 5th September, 2025, p.5.
[ii] Abalone, oyster, or muscle. Pearl shell engraving is synonymous with the people of the northwest Kimberley, Western Australia.
[iii] Mother of Pearl (Guan), Sections within Illume, Illume programme, Bangarra Dance Theatre, p.10.
[iv] “Riji, or pearl shell designs, are etched onto the shell and worn by men as ceremonial pubic coverings. Believed to be the glistening scales shed by Aalingoon, the Rainbow Snake, when he rests on the ocean’s surface, riji embody deep cultural knowledge and lore.” Darrell Sibosado, 2025 Biennale of Sydney, https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/participants/darrell-sibosado/, accessed 5th September, 2025.
[v] ‘The Creative Process’, Illume programme, Bangarra Dance Theatre, p.11.
[vi] ‘A Language of Light’, Illume Study Guide, p.5.
Image credit: Janaya Lamb in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Illume, by Daniel Boud
