Bangarra Dance Theatre lives and breathes stories of the great southern land. Roaming through time and space it offers a different way of looking at history and place. It opens hearts. It expands minds. 

New artistic director Frances Rings continues this great work with Yuldea. It takes us beyond the Nullarbor to that most precious of resources, a waterhole that nurtured every aspect of traditional life – spiritual, social, commercial – until colonists sucked it dry in the service of building a railway to link Port Augusta in South Australia with the gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. Yuldea was where the two halves of the line came together in 1917 after five years of construction. 

It was then a short hop to atomic tests conducted by the British at Maralinga and displacement to soul-destroying missions was part of the dismal picture. But if this sounds like unrelenting tragedy, Yuldea takes a longer view, born of the 60,000 years or so of continuous custodianship of Australia. There is a fundamental belief in the healing power of kin, Country and the numinous. 

Yuldea is found on the map by searching for Ooldea, the spelling imposed by colonial rulers along with so much else. The place is a tiny speck and looks like nothing much. To Western eyes, that is. Rings alerts her audience to both the troubled history of the place and its value to those who knew how to read it and look after it. She has familial links to the region, making it a poignant choice of subject for her first full-length work as Bangarra artistic director.

Rings depicts a huge cycle of creation, destruction and renewal. The stunning opening shows nothing less than the convulsive death of a star before calm is restored at Yooldil Kapi, the claypan waterhole ever-present in Elizabeth Gadsby’s design as a glowing semi-circle. Behind is a vast curved curtain of streamers with a life of its own, revealing and concealing under Karen Norris’s superb lighting. The curtain can look and move like water or be as solid and forbidding as a dark wall. Long-time Bangarra collaborator Jennifer Irwin again costumes the dancers in pieces of great imagination and beauty.

The dance-making is thrilling. Black-clad dancers stagger and quiver to Leon Rodgers’s uncompromisingly apocalyptic score in the cosmic cataclysm that sets Yuldea in motion, bunching into groups and scattering wildly in death throes. The view from the universe then gives way to survival in a harsh environment. Ethereal Kapi Spirits (Lillian Banks and Kallum Goolagong), the water-holding Red Mallee (Kassidy Waters and Daniel Mateo, as closely intertwined as tree roots), graceful birds and rugged dingoes point the way to the life-sustaining Yooldil Kapi.

The intrusion of colonial nation-building is shown in an unexpectedly delicate way, although Rings she doesn’t hold back in showing the consequences for the Anangu people of the region. Maralinga brings more violence to the traditional way of life, most memorably seen in a searing solo for Rikki Mason, on whom the black rain falls. It’s not the first time Rings has tackled this important subject for Bangarra. In 2007 X300, named after the test site’s codename, was part of a double bill. It was aptly called True Stories.

Rings declines to end Yuldea on this dark note. She returns to the larger world of creation and culture where light and optimism prevail. It is both moving and instructive.

Bangarra has never shied away from a big idea and it’s clear Rings isn’t taking a backwards step, doing it her way as the company goes through its own cycle of renewal. 

Yuldea ends in Sydney on July 15 then tours to Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Bendigo until October.