Of all the arts, dance has a special capacity to create worlds. Centred around the moving body, these worlds draw on other art forms – music, visual art, design, projection – to fill-out visions in time-space.

Dance at this year’s Sydney Festival ranged from a 20 minute, salon-style performance for two dancers, to an outdoor, multimedia, participatory sunset event with Sydney Harbour as a backdrop.

Jannawi Dance Clan’s premiere of Garrigarrang Badu by Peta Strachan is the perfect work to orient audiences to the Dharug Country at the heart of Sydney Festival.

Jannawi is an all-female group with members from across the country who work collaboratively with artistic director Strachan, a Dharug woman of the Boorooberongal clan. Strachan’s role as a Dharug Knowledge Holder informs the language-revitalisation-in-action that grounds and filters through this work.

In this full-length dance work in local language, lyrics to a song-cycle by Matthew Doyle are linked to places, materials, costumes and objects that fill each dance in a series that flows.

In Dharug, garrigarrang means salt water and badu fresh water. The title speaks to where the two meet in our water systems at Sydney Harbour where we gather on the sweltering night of the performance.

The work is shaped around women’s knowledge, artisanship, music and movement. They present to us an intergenerational connection to land, water, sky and all that they hold.

To see this all female performance, intimately and proudly connected to Country, is a moving occasion. Dancers Dubs Yunupingu and Buia David are stand-outs as the central protagonists of the loose narrative.

Digging sticks, eel traps and Nawi (canoes) focus our attention on a skilful, ethical and balanced collaboration with resources. Alongside the ephemeral cultural materials of music and dance, the whole presents as a living archive of the........

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