Stephen Page stands wrapped in scarf and beanie against the morning winter chill at Sydney’s Marrinawi (big canoe) cove, at the northern end of Barangaroo reserve. “This mouth of water, one of the biggest in the world, it’s an operatic landscape and it was so inspirational,” he says.
As he looks past the sculpted sandstone across the harbour, the acclaimed choreographer recollects the Eora nation stories that prompted some of his best-known dance works during his 31 years as artistic director of the Sydney-based Bangarra Dance Theatre.
There was, for instance, Patyegarang, in 2014, about the Cammeraygal teenager who taught the English astronomer William Dawes her language; and Bennelong, in 2017, about the Wangal man who developed a close bond with the New South Wales governor Arthur Phillip but died addicted to alcohol.
Set to turn 60 this December, Page is relaxed these days, and makes an excellent walking companion as we stroll past the Sydney red gums and coastal banksias. Having offered a hearty hug upon our meeting, he leans in along this waterside walk named Wulugul (kingfish), laughing often.
By contrast, in his final years before departing Bangarra in 2022, he drove himself hard.
Leaving Bangarra was “bittersweet”, he recalls, “because I was dealing with the grieving of stepping down from that”.
But while he was saying goodbye to the company he had devoted most of his adult life to, he was also pushing through grief after the sudden death in 2016 of his older brother David Page, Bangarra’s longtime music director and composer.
Three Page brothers had each been a key part of the company: Stephen, David and Russell, a charismatic dancer who died by suicide in 2002, aged 34. By the time Stephen stepped away, he was the last of the brothers left at Bangarra, even as he built a clan of dancers around him. It magnified his sense of loss.
“David and Russell would always be quite vivid images and visions in my memory. David’s music is always in our mind.”
Page talks readily about David, with an awe. It all comes back to when they were kids, the solidarity of growing up with little money in a family of 12 children who loved pop culture and musicals, putting on concerts in their back yard in the working-class Brisbane suburb of Mount Gravatt.
The enigmatic David, who had a brief career as the child pop star Little Davey Page, would turn the rotary clothesline into a merry-go-round, and film them all with a Super8 camera. The children would dress up as the Jackson Five and perform to neighbours on their laundry roof. It was their playground, and their training ground.
Page recalls that the family bond was deeper and stronger than any material absence: “When there was struggling, when there was no food, when they couldn’t pay bills, it was about telling stories and humour and performance. David and I and Russell, we digested that creative instinct to carry it through into our professional lives.”
Page laughs at the memory of some of the play the three brothers had in rehearsing together over the years. They had found a creative haven together, he says. “We would talk about the spirit of story constantly, and it was always about the emotional [aspects] and the psychology for us.”
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It took Page more than a year after leaving Bangarra to feel like his old self. “I had time to think. I had to see my good old therapist, because I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ They’re like, ‘Stephen, you’re grieving, you’re leaving something after 31 years’.”
Page is far from retired, “creating better than I ever have”, he reflects, as we pass hard-hatted workers drilling at the Cutaway, the large below-ground sandstone venue being turned into a gallery and events hall (but not an Indigenous cultural centre as earlier mooted).
Page says David’s “spirit and energy has inspired” his newest works. He feels “cleansed” through these latest stories. His first major post-Bangarra work is Baleen Moondjan, a story of grief, love and kinship, which opened the 2024 Adelaide festival on Glenelg beach, and will now be adapted for performance on a barge for the Brisbane festival this September.
Page says his late mother, Doreen, would have loved this story being staged close to where she raised her family. The song and dance cycle will feature giant replica whale bones, a totem figure for Doreen’s Nunukul/Ngugi saltwater maternal line from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island). His mother had been forbidden by her English/Irish father from acknowledging her Aboriginality: he told her instead to say she was Indian.
The whale story is based on cultural knowledge passed on by Doreen’s older sister, Auntie Joyce, after their own mother died.
“I wanted to use the metaphor of the whale as a sense of empowerment and strength that sits within my mother’s matriarchal kinship system,” Page says. “It’s about continuing the spirit of stories. I thought, ‘Mum, I’m going to give you a gift, and David, your spirit is going to help me create Baleen Moondjan’.”
It follows Page’s final work for Bangarra, Wudjang: Not the Past, in 2022, an ode to his late father, Roy, a Munaldjali bushman from the Yugambeh nation, who during his childhood was forbidden from speaking his language. Page’s parents nonetheless both became great storytellers who instilled a respect for Country in their large brood. Roy died in 2010 and Doreen in 2018.
Both productions honouring their parents essentially began with David’s legacy: a three-minute recording uncovered in the late composer’s office based on a song Roy had given him in his own Yugambeh language, which he spoke on his deathbed, as well as notations written in Jandai, the traditional language of their mother.
Page in the past has spoken of the challenge of living in two worlds, of being denied a traditional language because he has come from “a forbidden generation, an assimilated generation”. Page once recalled Roy using the term “whispering language” because Stephen’s grandmother could only whisper their language to Roy at night.
Loss is profound throughout the family, thus dance and what Page calls his “blackfella operas” became a medicine, a means of reconnection.
“Mum’s last years, she didn’t have quality of life, she didn’t speak,” Page recalls. “She was at Georgina Hostel, a First Nations old age home. She had dementia, Alzheimer’s.
“The night before David passed, late at night, she was wailing, making these noises, and the nurses told my sister the next day. They were like, ‘We haven’t heard her talk or make a sound for 18 months’. I think she knew [David was passing away], and that always stayed with me.”
Page’s renewal and cleansing has been aided by his son, actor and writer Hunter Page-Lochard, 32, who founded the production company Djali House, for which father and son are billed as co-directors, although Page insists Hunter is his “boss”.
One gets the impression he enjoys working with his son so much because it reminds him of the creative energy of working with David and Russell: wherever the urban mob is, that’s his creative home. The pair have four development projects on their slate, including an imminent adaptation of David’s one-man autobiographical play, Page 8, into a narrative feature film with the working title of Songman.
“It’s been really beautiful to work with Hunter, and also to see the first [full-length feature] story that we birth through Djali House is our story, through the lens of David’s life,” says Page.
The generations continue to unfold. Page, who also has a stepdaughter, Tanika, glows when asked about Page-Lochard’s two daughters, Mila, 6, and Evara, 3. “It just makes this crazy world and life worth living for,” he says of becoming a grandfather. “The combination of that, going through and reflecting the Bangarra chapter of my life, and then finding a sacred stability, of feeling recharged and reawakened for the next chapter.
“You go, am I old? Am I not old? Can I still create? But the reason Hunter started Djali House is we have imagination, we have creativity, we have vision. We love stories.
Walking with Page, there’s a sense he is seizing the moment, surveying the Country and water before us for the next story, plugging into youthful energy. But that was how it always was with the big Page mob.
“I’ve always started with a blank canvas for my work. David would jump on, and with our creative clan we’d just paint the story and bring it to life.”
Baleen Moondjan is at Queen’s Wharf, Brisbane festival, September 18-21
