Neha Kale

Stephen Page is familiar with the responsibilities that stem from occupying two worlds. Page, 54, has spent nearly three decades as the artistic director of Bangarra Dance Theatre, a company that’s devoted itself to telling stories rooted in Indigenous culture while also addressing a wider audience. It’s fitting that Unaipon, a work that celebrates David Unaipon, the Aboriginal inventor who showed how the physics of the boomerang predated modern aerodynamics, introduces 30 Years of Sixty Five Thousand. The three-part program, which is accompanied by the most ambitious national tour in the company’s history, commemorates the company’s 30th year.  “I first commissioned Unaipon by [choreographer and Kokatha woman] Frances Ring when I was the director of the 2004 Adelaide Festival and Franny was really able to dig into Unaipon’s mind, his beautiful spirit, the way he had a foot in each world,” says Page, who is a descendent of southeast Queensland’s Nunukul people and Munaldjali clan. “Now, we have to live with the reality of our social and political climate, the environment and Indigenous welfare systems breaking down. But we’re also navigating these conversations with First Nations knowledge. We’ve spent so much of our lives having non-Indigenous perspectives on our stories. [At Bangarra] we are always in the process of reclaiming them.” Stephen Page in rehearsal. Photograph: Lisa Tomasetti Page, who took the helm at Bangarra when he was just 25, is no stranger to reclaiming

When Matthew Lutton was growing up in Perth, he experienced a West Australian rite of passage — an encounter with Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet. Lutton, the artistic director of Malthouse Theatre, recalls having a near-visceral reaction to the book’s ability to portray both the mundane and the epic in a way that was fiercely Australian. The strange beauty of the 1991 novel is the basis for one of Malthouse Theatre’s most ambitious productions to date. “Cloudstreet was the only book I was asked to read in high school that I really loved,” Lutton says, a wistful note creeping into his voice. “I loved the talking pig, the moments out on the river as the characters step into another dimension, the young man hallucinating in the field, running away from his family. [It explores] both the everyday and the extraordinary.”   In May, Malthouse will translate the much-loved tale of the Lambs and the Pickles, a pair of working-class families that flee the country to live side by side in a rambling Perth terrace during the ’40s and ’50s, into a sprawling production starring Benjamin Oakes as Fish Lamb and Brenna Harding as Rose Pickles. The play runs for five hours and was originally adapted for the stage by Nick Enright and Justin Monjo. It’s part of Lutton’s commitment to exploring the “multidimensional” nature of classic Australian stories as well as their relevance to a new generation. "Every character has a chance to step into a life and out again" It’s a creative instinct shared by Sar