the Other Side of Me

The Other Side of Me is a new dance production inspired by a collection of letters written by a young Aboriginal man to a Black British woman. It explores the story of one of Australia’s “Stolen Generations”.

Laura Fish first met him in the 1990s. During their four-year correspondence, he explained how being removed from his First Nations family in Australia to be brought up in the English countryside created a profound sense of dislocation. There was the English side he knew, and the Indigenous heritage from which he was taken.

Now, nearly 30 years later, The Other Side of Me tells the extraordinary story of his bitter search for identity. He died while being detained by the police in the late 1990s.

The production is a collaboration between Northumbria University, where Laura is now an award-winning writer and Assistant Professor in Creative Writing, and Gary Lang’s NT Dance Company.

Artistic Director, choreographer, and Senior Larrakia man, Gary Lang has family relationships that extend across to Yirrkala, NT. Lang’s artistic innovations have seen the development of the dance form, Aboriginal Ballet, which deconstructs the colonial ballet archetype using First Nations storytelling to create fresh relevance for all Australians. This is the legacy of Lang’s choreographic work.

The young man’s story puts into stark relief Australian federal and state government policies from 1910 until the 1970s to wrongly remove children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent from their families and culture and to integrate First Nations peoples into white society. His experience in England resonates with international debates concerning cultural genocide, displacement, visibility and perspective, national and cultural heritage, ‘race’, identity, and (whose) voice, that have been made more pressing by the global BLM movement.

The dance production forms part of a wider multidisciplinary project ‘When Words Fails Us: Expressing the Unspeakable: The Other Side of Me’; the research, development and performances aim to contribute to the public’s awareness of Australia’s Indigenous cultural heritage. In 2017, Laura invited her Northumbria University colleague Liz Pavey, Assistant Professor in Dance, to work with her on the project. Liz brings over 25 years’ experience as a lecturer and dance artist. Her work is informed by somatic movement practices and theories of embodiment, and explores relationships to place, time, and land. Both Laura and Liz have been in Darwin for the past 5 weeks, working alongside NT Dance Company to realise our shared vision for the work.

The research project also explores how to communicate a story of personal trauma that sits at the limits of linguistic expression. The adaptation of the letters into dance moves written words into motion and into a place and space beyond, where pathos and emotions are portrayed through the poetics of an affective medium – dance.

Another key aim of the project is to engage with vulnerable and disadvantaged young people within criminal justice systems. The project team has delivered short intensive cross-artform sessions at Aycliffe Secure Children’s Home (SCH), a residential youth detention centre in the UK, for young people aged 10 – 18 (2018, 2020, 2023). Artwork created by young people resident at Aycliffe SCH and Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin, will be displayed at the Darwin Exhibition Centre during the performance week of The Other Side of Me.

The Other Side of Me premieres at The Darwin Festival from 9 – 12 August.

The story is based, in part, upon actual events. However, names, and in certain cases incidents and timelines, have been changed for dramatic purposes, and some characters are composites, or entirely fictitious. Any similarity of those fictitious characters, composites, incidents to the name, attributes or actual background of an actual person, living or dead, or to any actual event, is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

For more information about The Other Side of Me 

Please visit: https://hosting.northumbria.ac.uk/theothersideofme/ or

Contact Dr Laura Fish: laura.fish@northumbria.ac.uk or
Liz Pavey: liz.pavey@northumbria.ac.uk

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