State Library of NSW, September 11
The Mitchell Library’s colonial splendour is wreathed in ceremonial smoke when I arrive: ornate moulded walls, towering bookshelves, spiral stairs leading to elevated balconies and soaring skylights crowning a vast central reading space.
Here, amid the books, drawers, and antique reading tables, dance legend Stephen Page is back with a site-specific premiere. The former Bangarra Dance Theatre artistic director wields his fellowship with the State Library of NSW in RECLAIM: A Contemporary Ceremony, co-written with Alana Valentine for the library’s 200th anniversary.
Damien Cooper’s stage lights illuminate and the shelves seem to fade under fingers of sunlight and tree branches, the plasterwork receding beneath lapping coastal waves. The air comes alive with Steve Francis’s soundscape of birds, crackling fire and haunting Indigenous song, joined by the plaintive strains of Taj Pigram’s voice and mandolin.
The performers sweep onstage in ceremonial dance, singing and bearing leaves as light rays fall behind them like a setting sun. The impact is immediate, uncanny and unspeakably beautiful: the library’s familiar architecture superimposed with an overwhelming evocation of Country and memory. It is like being gifted second sight, the library fracturing into palpable layers of time and meaning before your eyes, each layer simultaneously visible and powerful.
Seven scenes follow, the audience gazing through the centuries at a crescendo of storytelling: by turns warm, devastating, funny, heartbreaking and hopeful.
In Place, Indigenous engagement librarian Melissa Jackson speaks from a balcony about the library’s decolonisation work, followed by Bradley Smith’s searing solo as an Indigenous man reduced to a collected “specimen”.
In Protest, actors Brendon Boney, Angeline Penrith and Dalara Williams in early 20th-century costume (Jennifer Irwin’s designs) are assembled beneath a banner, megaphone in hand, tracing generations of Indigenous advocates. Their true stories will make your eyes sting with tears.
An excerpt from Page’s Patyegarang pairs Smith and Buia David in a gorgeously romantic duet about the first historical colonial-Indigenous exchange of Dharug language. Preen has Penrith comically auditioning to play Matthew Flinders’ cat; and Protect warms with a storytelling tribute to Mum Shirl.
The evening emotionally detonates with Presence, the devastating final scene from Page’s Bennelong. The stage blazes with Beau Dean Riley Smith, reprising the eponymous role he originated, his electric limbs seemingly thrown together and torn apart by tectonic external forces, his face caught between surprise and pain. The concluding image – Riley Smith crying out as he is walled up alive in a white sepulchre – is every bit as poetic and horrifying as at its premiere almost a decade ago.
Somehow, these vignettes never feel like a Page jukebox. Page turns his extraordinary body of work into another kind of archive, placing past choreography beside living testimony, new theatrical scenes, historical storytelling, and the library’s own collection until each illuminates the others. RECLAIM is site-specific work in the fullest sense: it changes how you see the building itself.
At the finish, the audience leaps to its feet with a roar. Unmissable, and one of the best dance events in years.