Ngurragabu [From the last night / next / tomorrow]

Ngurragabu is a speculative reckoning with the polycrisis of climate catastrophe, untethered machine learning and greed. Taking a deep dive into Indigenous and allied futurisms, Co-Artistic Directors Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain’s intercultural world building envisions a provocative world order– born of relocation, adaptation and repair in the face of volatile change.

Ngurragabu is performed as a continuously evolving procession inspired by the survival of those who have already faced end times. As the latest iteration of their long term collaboration, Dalisa and Rachael’s unique choreo-political truth telling reaches new futurist dimensions. Together with an extraordinary intersectional cast building connections across diverse Indigenous and settler-diasporic communities in Australia, South East Asia and Melanesia and their long term dramaturgical partners — Yawuru leader Patrick Dodson and Belgian dance dramaturge Hildegard de Vuyst — their devising process explores possibilities of radical transformation. From neurobiological augmented machine learning to interspecies relationality and from Indigenous frameworks of responsiveness and protection to the dismantling power of gender diversities.

Audiences are immersed in the oscillations of North West Australia’s land and sea Country, envisioned in dialogue with Yawuru and Bardi knowledge holders and researched in collaboration with Landscape Futurists REALMStudios. Seated within a spectacular petrified mangrove forest designed by Malay-Australian visual artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, the viewers are personally entangled in the works ode to connectivity.  The parade of survival, resistance and repair unfolds though past/future times in costumes and regalia by Matthew Stegh and with techno-futurist music by composer Corin Ileto. Evocative floor projections of ‘the great midden’,  invasive algae blooms or a creeping salt desert by media artist Sohan Ariel-Hayes lay the ground for Ngurragabu’s investigations of ways place and story can endure the ravages of humanity’s disregard.

Now, at this defining time in history, we rewild our imaginations to remember the possibilities of transformation and repair at the precipice of survival. Ngurragabu: from the last night.

Images by Michael Jalaru Torres, and Rachael Swain 2025