Bloodland – QPAC season

Bloodland is a collaboration between the Sydney Theatre Company, Adelaide Festival and Bangarra Dance Theatre. It’s about the struggle to assimilate technology into a culture rich with history and tradition and seamlessly blends dance with theatre to explore the tragic consequences of imposing one culture upon another. This sort of production is sure to elicit widely varied responses from its audiences. While it’s not an angry show, it paints an honest, eye-opening picture of what has happened to Indigenous people and their culture since the arrival of white people.

Bloodland is a production you feel. Not just emotionally, but physically. A lot of the dialogue is in an Indigenous dialect (Yolngu) so, if you don’t speak that language, you have to sit and allow the production to wash over you without worrying about catching the meaning of every single sentence. This may well enhance the experience and the message of the show, because in order to understand it you have to bypass the analytical, linguistic centre of the brain and connect with something deeper. It helps that everything about the production is so visceral. The dancing, the chorus of grief in the face of death, the smoke of fires and cigarettes, are all things you experience physically. The production captures all the senses, and the images speak for themselves.

The set is striking – bushland, with a huge, metal fence in the foreground. The fence has a gaping hole, as if it doesn’t belong and even the environment is rebelling against it. In fact, throughout the production there’s a beautiful contrast between the natural and the synthetic, the native and the alien. Against the soundscape of bush noises and music, the sound of a car, a gunshot, and a phone are all uncomfortably loud and jarring. A car’s headlights are too bright next to the generally natural lighting. In fact, this production is so authentically natural at times, that it would be really interesting to see it performed in an actual bush setting.

Director Stephen Page’s cast and creatives have done a brilliant job of bringing alive a show that is full of beauty and meaning.