“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 DanceTheatre. 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.
