Famed Australian dance company shuns 'ooga booga'
SYDNEY — Australia's Aboriginal dance company Bangarra has won global accolades but says it has been a victim of its own success in terms of funding at home and at times…
SYDNEY — Australia's Aboriginal dance company Bangarra has won global accolades but says it has been a victim of its own success in terms of funding at home and at times faces demands for "ooga booga" abroad.Formed in 1989, the Bangarra Dance Theatre is the country's foremost indigenous performing arts company and is often called on to be Australia's cultural ambassador at major events.But the troupe, which performs everywhere from remote Australian outback communities to the likes of the World Economic Forum in Davos, carries a significant but underfunded cultural load, said executive director Catherine Baldwin."It's great to be able to wave the flag for Australia," Baldwin said."My concern is that it doesn't necessarily translate into securing the company for the long run to do the work that it does."Bangarra, which has plans to tour Asia in 2012 with China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore likely on the itinerary, has won acclaim overseas, particularly in its tour last year of Germany where the dancers regularly received five or six curtain calls, Baldwin said.But Bangarra artistic director Stephen Page said some British critics still expected the troupe to perform what he termed "ooga-booga dancing"."The London critics expected the company to do traditional anthropological dance rather than telling contemporary Australian stories in the way we do," he told The Sun-Herald recently."Perhaps they couldn't cope with the fact that we have a dynamic, living, modern culture that draws on over 50,000 years of tradition."Baldwin said this response was only encountered in Britain, describing it as "a misunderstanding" over the fact that Bangarra represented a link between the ancient and modern and was not an anthropological artefact."We're a contemporary artform that draws on and is inspired by this extraordinary ancient culture. But they seemed not to be able to get their heads around that," she said.Asked whether Bangarra gets the right amount of government support for its work -- which includes
last modification 2011-07-12 09:30:02
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