“Please stay on the sand – swimming is not permitted” is an unusual PSA to see before an opening night performance at the Adelaide festival.
It’s also kind of novel at Glenelg/Pathawilyangga, Adelaide’s most popular beach, where hundreds of people – from tween girls to 80-somethings – are camped out on towels and folding chairs as the sun inches over the horizon before being swallowed by sea.
It’s a beautiful night, the day after a heatwave with a cool change and a tideline lapping just metres from the crowd. A raised bank of compacted sand runs from the seawall to the ocean, with larger-than-life whalebones sticking up towards the sky. For four nights only, the beach has become an amphitheatre of sand, sea and bone.
In past years the festival’s big opening statements have included massive free concerts in inner-city parks with big names like Grace Jones, Paul Kelly or Ennio Morricone. In others, it constructed a floating palais on the Karrawirra Parri/Torrens River, or arty pop-ups on the back steps of parliament. But perhaps not since 2017 – when then-artistic directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy drew audiences out of the city to see The Secret River in an old quarry – has the festival attempted something quite like this.
The show is the world premiere of Baleen Moondjan, a newly commissioned work from Stephen Page, longtime artistic director of Bangarra Dance Theatre. He is no stranger to Kaurna Country, having directed the festival himself in 2004, and in his first major production since stepping away from Bangarra he’s turned to the stories of his mother’s Ngugi, Nunukul and Moondjan heritage from Minjerribah/Stradbroke Island.
Baleen Moondjan is inspired by the connection between Page’s people and baleen whales, and once the sun has set we watch as dancers daubed with white ochre make balletic moves that mimic the breaching, diving and weightless movement of ocean giants.
Filipino and Muruwari rapper Dobby sets the scene in gentle rhymes: once in 10 lifetimes, the great whale Yallingbillar breaches the sandbar and blurs the threshold between life and death. We meet an elder named Gindara, who is drawn to the whale as her own life comes to a close.
“She is my totem in life and in death, sacred caretaker as long as I have breath,” sings Pitjanjtajtarra, Warrigmal, South Sea Islander actor Elaine Crombie in a performance so moving you could hear a pin drop if it weren’t for the crashing waves.
As the beach darkens, the hour-long show traces cycles of life and death, kinship and story, grief and love.
Back in the city, another festival commission readies for its world premiere at Her Majesty’s Theatre, this time exploring a land and people slightly closer to Adelaide.
Located around the Gulf of St Vincent, the Yorke Peninsula is known for coastal getaways and farmland, but Kaurna and Narungga artist Jacob Boehme digs deeper to explore its true identity: this is Guuranda, home of the Narungga nation.
On either side of the stage Narungga songwoman Sonya Rankine and songman Warren Milera sit sentinel-like, projected on giant screens as they begin singing in language. Behind them, video of an intergenerational Narungga choir joins in before a troupe of eight dancers appear. Fishlike and lithe, they begin their own winding creation stories that range from the playful and fantastical – picture giant dingo and emu puppets – to brutal and defiant over 75 minutes.
On paper, Guuranda has a lot in common with Baleen Moondjan, with shared themes of land and sea, animals and people, survival and loss. But seeing these shows back-to-back, they couldn’t be more different. It speaks to the diversity and complexity of First Nations culture and experience across this continent, but also how contemporary creators like Page, Boehme and their many collaborators are reinterpreting and carrying those stories into new forms, new contexts and new audiences.
It’s also hard to imagine these two new shows happening in Adelaide without the festival – transformative and ambitious experiences of community and country that manage to be both epic and intimate.
Opening on Friday 1 March and running until 17 March, the festival program has other big draws to explore, including recurring favourites: a Barrie Kosky opera, Womadelaide music festival, the Adelaide biennial of Australian art, and a chamber music program in the Adelaide hills.
The festival has also drawn in experimental works that remix older classics, such as Akram Khan’s The Jungle Book Reimagined, which sets Mowgli in a post-apocalyptic cityscape; and Antigone in the Amazon, a political, multilingual and multimedia play developed in collaboration with the Amazon’s landless workers movement.
Elsewhere, audiences can find new experimentation inspired by influential artists like Marina Abramović, whose Institute has handpicked and mentored eight Australian and Asian artists who will perform long duration pieces in a four-day showcase; and Laurie Anderson, who teamed up with the Australian Institute of Machine Learning to create an AI chatbot of her late husband, Lou Reed, that she told me has become a little too addictive.
Back at Glenelg, Baleen Moondjan concludes as Gindara joins the whale and leaves her family behind. Crombie walks down the raised sandbar right up to the edge of the water, and as she stares out at the waves and night sky, it’s no longer a stage – it’s a passage.
Set back from the sea, singer Zipphorah Corser-Anu’s youthful Nundigili has taken on the stories and knowledge for the next generation. She sings: “We will always belong here, we will always belong”.
Baleen Moondjan takes place on Glenelg/Pathawilyangga beach until Saturday 2 March. Guuranda is on at Her Majesty’s Theatre until 3 March. Adelaide Festival runs until 17 March
