The Other Side of Me

A new dance theatre production by Indigenous Australian choreographer Gary Lang
This cross art-form collaboration brings together a black British writer, Laura Fish, and a dance practitioner, Liz Pavey – both UK-based - to form a creative team with Gary Lang, a Larrakia man, (NT Dance Company choreographer and director) and two First Nations dance artists – all of whom are Australian-based - to devise a production that explores experiences of indigeneity in the contemporary world.

The Other Side of Me is inspired by the story of a young Indigenous Australian man, born in Australia's Northern Territory, adopted by an English family, and raised in the English countryside. His story is inseparable from the 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. These children are known as the Stolen Generations. The ease and haste of the adoption process, which took less than a week, is typical of the history of Aboriginal adoption in Australia at that time.

The production translates an extraordinary search for identity into movement by combining Indigenous and contemporary Australian dance practices with written words to communicate the conflicts of an individual living within two very different cultures.