‘Your failures are just as important as your successes’

Bangarra Dance Theatre’s latest show Illume took about a week – and 65,000 years – to create.

Artistic director Frances Rings, who took over Australia’s pre-eminent Indigenous dance company from Stephen Page in 2022, wanted to do something Bangarra had never done and collaborate with a visual artist to create a multidisciplinary work that interwove dance and visual storytelling. She has come to Melbourne for just one day to do media for the new work, and we’re at Yarra Botanica, floating on the Yarra, on one of those sunny, bright winter days that tricks you into thinking that maybe winter isn’t so bad.

She tells me she first met Goolarrgon Bard artist Darrell Sibosado in 1988, when she arrived at the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association (NAISDA) dance college as a fresh-faced 17-year-old. Sibosado was a few years ahead of her, and she was struck by his self-assurance.

“I was always really intimidated by him, actually, because he was just really strong and astute and cultural, this beautiful man who could kind of walk in two worlds and have this powerful presence,” says Rings. “I was just in awe of him. And also, he could dance, he was a really great dancer.”

We’ve decided to share a few seafood dishes, which seems appropriate given that we’re on the actual water itself. A baked scallop, seafood toastie, cured trout and calamari fit the bill, with a lime and jalapeno soda for Rings and a pear soda for me.

Sibosado ended up leaving NAISDA and focused on the visual medium, eventually returning to Country in Lombadina, on the Kimberley coast, Western Australia.

When Rings wanted to commission a piece of work, it was Sibosado who came to her mind.

“When I first saw his work, I was like, wow, there was something really theatrical and powerful about it. It was these large-scale, metal fabricated sculptures using neon and these symbols that were both ancient and very contemporary at the same time. That really aligns with what we do at Bangarra. We’re always traversing that, the ancient and the contemporary in this kind of timeless, liminal space.”

When Rings first reached out two years ago, Sibosado said he was busy, but that he’d come back to her in a few months. She’s very glad he did. “He said, ‘Let’s have a chat. I’m not sure what this would be like, but how about you come up to Lombadina and see my Country, and we’ll go from there’. So I went to Lombadina and met his elders and the leaders in this community. And we talked about who I was, what I wanted to do, Bangarra – you know, not everyone has seen or knows Bangarra, when you live in a community.”

Bangarra has a cultural and creative cycle to ensure that at every stage of a work’s development, the company is working with community and has consent and permission from the people whose stories they are telling.

Having secured permission from the elders in Sibosado’s community, Rings returned to Lombadina in February of this year with lighting designer Damien Cooper, set designer Charles Davis and composer Brendon Boney. They woke with the sun and spent their days learning from the land.

“It’s being guided through that Country and given that insight. And really changing your observation from your city eyes to having bush eyes, which takes a couple of days. And not listening, not seeing and listening with the head, but it has to come from an internal feeling that’s a different experience altogether.”

She says the entire process in Lombadina took about a week. Was there pressure to deliver in that short time, I asked her? “Absolutely!”

But she’s been preparing for this kind of creative endeavour her entire life.

“I knew what I wanted to be when I was five years old,” she says. “Dance is my first language. I was a dreamer, an imaginer, and would be found in the backyard creating my own world, creating these theatrical productions.”

The first professional production she ever saw was Cats at Sydney’s Theatre Royal as a year 11 HSC dance student. “It was transformative and confirmed that that’s the direction that I wanted to go,” she says. “It was fascinating for me that you could take people on a journey just through the movements of the body, through this language of movement.”

When she arrived at NAISDA at the age of 17, she initially wanted to do ballet. “But I found out pretty quickly that that ship has sailed,” she says. That was disappointment number one, the first of several key setbacks that made her the dancer and artist she is.

She refocused her attention from ballet to modern dance and forged a connection to her Indigenous heritage through the medium. “What I saw at NAISDA was that you could express your identity, or your challenges, or the complications of being a First Nations young person trying to find themselves and balancing lots of different issues.”

Rings found NAISDA transformative not just culturally and artistically, but also politically. “We turned up in 1988, the year at the Bicentenary ... Carole Johnson [NAISDA and Bangarra founder] came in with the other leaders of NAISDA at the time said, ‘There’s a big march going on, we’re cancelling classes. We’re all heading to Redfern. We’re marching to Hyde Park’.”

Stephen Page worked with NAISDA students on a Bangarra production while Rings was at the school, and she desperately wanted to be cast in it. She wasn’t. Disappointment number two.

“I was devastated,” she admits. “And I thought, I’m just going to use this disappointment as a motivation to just keep working and set some new goals.”

When she graduated she auditioned for Bangarra to join the company and was put on a traineeship. “Stephen was very strict, and it was, ‘you’re a trainee, so you should just watch, take in what these senior artists and cultural leaders are going to teach you’.

“As a graduate, you’re feeling on top, and then you drop to the bottom again. It was extremely humbling to be in that kind of environment where you have to listen, you have to observe, you have to wait, you’ve got to be patient.”

Rings was patient – to a point. But she really wanted to get out on stage. Her big break came in Melbourne, where the company was performing at the Arts Centre. But it also came with disappointment number three.

“I was understudying some of the roles from Praying Mantis Dreaming, Stephen’s first full-length work, and one of the dancers got injured. It was a matinee, and Stephen said, ‘You’re on. This is it’. And he said, ‘Do you know it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I think so’. We had no videos back then, so I was learning it backstage. It was a big learning experience – you’ve got to be ready to go when he says go.”

Terrified backstage, Rings threw up a few times, and then it was showtime.

“I went on stage, forgot all the choreography, made up my own choreography. When I came off-stage, I was just beside myself. I thought, ‘oh my God, Sis, you don’t have a job any more’.”

But Page was impressed that she’d covered so well. “He let me have it, like, what was that? So I got a big dressing down. But [he also said], ‘well, you got on and you kept going and you covered it. So you’re lucky that you still have a job’.”

She never did that again, always making sure she truly knew every part in the show. “It was learning by falling over and getting back up again. And I felt like I did that my whole life.”

Now that she’s the artistic director of the company, she makes sure she pays plenty of attention to the understudies. “When I’m holding rehearsals and I see the dancers, and I always watch on the side who’s understudying, who’s covering, and I’ve got my list in front of me. I know who’s supposed to be doing which role, and if I see that they’re not, I could pull them to the side and say something, but it’s a lesson a dancer needs to learn on their own journey.”

Mentorship is a hugely important part of what she does with Bangarra, and Rings says she wants her up-and-coming dancers to learn the lessons she did – though perhaps not to invent their own choreography on stage.

“They’d be like, ‘well, you did it!’” she laughs.

Her dancers all know the story, and yes, they all think it’s hilarious.

“But you have to know that your failures are just as important as your successes. That’s also part of the journey. And we’re dancers, we fall over all the time. I was with them the other day, doing this lift with one of our younger [dancers]. And I said, ‘Come with me. Look in the mirror. Even if you fell, you’re not going to hurt yourself. It’s just fear. Fear is up here’,” she taps her head.

“‘Just drop it in your belly and trust that all of your training is going to save you’. And she did, and it was beautiful. Sometimes it’s just those little bits of knowledge from 30 years of making it your language and making it your craft.”

Bangarra Dance Theatre will perform Illume at the Arts Centre, September 4-13.

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