Wudjang: Not the Past

"A metal mouth digging

A change unforgiving

A dam is constructed

The land is disrupted"

In the deep darkness just before dawn, workmen find ancestral bones while excavating for a dam. This ancestor is Wudjang, who longs to be buried the proper way.

An epic-scale contemporary corroboree by Bangarra Dance Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company, Wudjang: Not the Past reveals the power of ancestral stories to reach us through generations. 17 dancers, four musicians and five actors all take the stage in an ambitious performance full of humour and tragedy.

Wudjang reclaims stories from non-Indigenous historians, teaching how to acknowledge, listen and learn from the past. Directed by Stephen Page and cowritten with Alana Valentine, the work uses the Mibinyah language from Page’s Yugambeh country home in Queensland. In every poem chanted, strutted, muttered and sung, dance is alive. This vivid piece of First Nations performance promises to be a benchmark Australian production.

Through song and dance and music and story, we are swept through the tumult of resistance and the trauma endured by massacre and misogyny, assassination of culture and language through forced assimilation. There’s a healthy anger on show here and a rightful shaming for the commodifying of indigenous people, the rape of the women, the assault of spirit. In the spirit that it’s offered, accepting this healthy anger can only help in healing. Within the venom, there is the antivenin.
The truth is that the debt to truth is long overdue and the ledger needs to balanced.

WUDJANG: NOT THE PAST is celebratory, a celebration of resilience, a celebration of resurgence, a celebration of regeneration.

By Stephen Page and Alana Valentine
Choreographed and directed by Stephen Page
Music by Steve Francis