Of all the arts, dance has a special capacity to create worlds. Centred around the moving body, these worlds draw on other art forms – music, visual art, design, projection – to fill-out visions in time-space.

Dance at this year’s Sydney Festival ranged from a 20 minute, salon-style performance for two dancers, to an outdoor, multimedia, participatory sunset event with Sydney Harbour as a backdrop.

Garrigarrang Badu

Jannawi Dance Clan’s premiere of Garrigarrang Badu by Peta Strachan is the perfect work to orient audiences to the Dharug Country at the heart of Sydney Festival.

Jannawi is an all-female group with members from across the country who work collaboratively with artistic director Strachan, a Dharug woman of the Boorooberongal clan. Strachan’s role as a Dharug Knowledge Holder informs the language-revitalisation-in-action that grounds and filters through this work.

In this full-length dance work in local language, lyrics to a song-cycle by Matthew Doyle are linked to places, materials, costumes and objects that fill each dance in a series that flows.

In Dharug, garrigarrang means salt water and badu fresh water. The title speaks to where the two meet in our water systems at Sydney Harbour where we gather on the sweltering night of the performance.

The work is shaped around women’s knowledge, artisanship, music and movement. They present to us an intergenerational connection to land, water, sky and all that they hold.

Garrigarrang badu is shaped around women’s knowledge, artisanship, music and movement. Stephen Wilson Barker/Sydney Festival

To see this all female performance, intimately and proudly connected to Country, is a moving occasion. Dancers Dubs Yunupingu and Buia David are stand-outs as the central protagonists of the loose narrative.

Digging sticks, eel traps and Nawi (canoes) focus our attention on a skilful, ethical and balanced collaboration with resources. Alongside the ephemeral cultural materials of music and dance, the whole presents as a living archive of the Dharug people.

Strachan’s choreography, with co-credits for the cast, Albert David and Beau Dean Riley Smith, reflects influences from her time at NAISDA (Australia’s National Indigenous Dance College) and with Bangarra (2000–04), and as a cultural performer and teacher.

Low shuffling walks, softly curved spines and mimetic hand gestures are combined with contemporary elements such as barrel jumps and high-leg extensions, reminiscent of the Bangarra vocabulary.

Garabari

We later moved outside for Melbourne-based, Wiradjuri choreographer Joel Bray’s Garabari, one of Bray’s first full-length, ensemble works, following his earlier solo pieces.

He describes himself as a gay Indigenous man raised in a white Pentecostal home, training at both NAISDA and the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and with an international career as a dancer prior to his first solo choreographies.

Garabari was developed across multiple cultural and artistic encounters. Time as a performer and artist-in-resident with Chunky Move may have supported the lean into popular culture in his work. The movement language draws on traditional, contemporary and popular vocabularies with a formal or shaped-based quality that perhaps reflects ten years Bray spent dancing in Israel, where a certain modern aesthetic associated with Ohad Naharin’s Gaga technique dominates.

In Joel Bray’s work, gradually we all become part of a whirling human garabari. Stephen Wilson Barker/Sydney Festival

At a language workshop I attended, led Bray and his father Christopher Kirkbright, Bray explained how this work came about. Consultation with the Wiradjuri community in Wagga Wagga led to conversations with local Elder, the late Uncle James Ingram.

Ingram shared the story of the birth of the Murrumbidgee River with Bray, the greedy Goanna men thwarted by a heroine, Ballina, which forms the core narrative of the work.

Garabari begins with some words of welcome from Bray, explaining that the title of the show is an Anglicised Wiradjuri word for corrobboree.

As the sky darkens, we are led to the furthest boardwalk of the Opera House where the Harbour Bridge looms large. We move through a smoking ceremony and wander among quiet dancers in white on multiple open-air stages. We hear recounted stories and watch danced dramas.

Gradually we become part of a whirling human garabari, with music by Byron Scullin and projections by Katie Sfetkidis coming into their own. The crowd swarms and pulses under the dancers’ instructions.

Featuring excellent dancers such as Luke Currie-Richardson and Zoe Brown Holten, this is a work with an inclusive, celebratory and contemporary spirit.

Exxy

A few days later I am back at the house to enter another world – Dan Daw Creative Project’s Exxy.

Based in the United Kingdom, this disabled-led company’s model of “theatre, dance and activism” is connected to Australia’s Restless Dance company in Adelaide through Daw, an ex-performer in the company.

The suburban, slightly grimy and claustrophobic scenography becomes a platform for vibrant truth-telling and venting. Emotional charge and physical excess go head-to-head in this relentless work that ends with both performers and audience crying to The Power of Love.

Dan Daw Creative Project’s Exxy is a work of vibrant truth-telling and venting. Neil Bennett/Sydney Festival

In the opening scenes, Daw takes time to care for his audience and introduce his collaborators Tiiu Mortley, Sofia Valdiri and Joe Brown. This introduction gives little indication of what is to come.

Like Garabari, this work grows in complexity and mood as each artist on stage shares autobiographical snippets through word and action.

The performers tell stories of lying about sports injuries and offensive sexual encounters. They perform drooling, running under duress and shaking. These stories and actions are connected by a repeated skipping or tripping movement to create a circle of unity. Interspersed are solo dances of delicate devastation.

Daw dances high and light on his feet with arms reaching above and around him. Mortley maps dramatic shapes with her arms and torso. Brown repeats actions punishingly in response to commands from off-stage and Valdiri stims violently on the floor.

Saltbush – a plant that can thrive in the harshest environments – becomes a central metaphor in this work about being not only unapologetic about disability, but expressing it with relish, abandon and anger.

Save the Last Dance for Me

Two shows at Sydney Town Hall in the Vestibule Room top off the dance program with lessons in refinement.

Italian choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni’s Save the Last Dance for Me is a 20 minute piece of perfection.

Dancers Gianmaria Borzillo and Giovanfrancesco Giannini, simply with a sound score and stylish outfits, perform a dance from the early 20th century Bologna called Polka Chinata.

Save the Last Dance for Me is a 20 minute piece of perfection. Stephen Wilson Barker/Sydney Festival

Recently rediscovered by Italian dance historians, like the Argentinian tango Polka Chinata is a male social dance form created to seduce a female audience.

Sciarroni simply adds a contemporary frame and the dance does the rest. It is intense, virtuosic and sexy.

Echo Mapping

Azzam Mohammed has emerged from the hip hop community in Sydney, winning competitive events and performing in Nick Power’s contemporary-street dance works.

A recent Sydney Festival staple, his new collaboration with composer and artist Jack Prest is Echo Mapping.

Echo Mapping is mesmerising. Victor Frankowski/Sydney Festival

This pared-back duet is mesmerising. Mohammed, trance-like, summons movement and vocalisations that shift across Africanist angular static forms, percussive geometric patterning and echoes of the most recent iteration of this deep lineage in the popping and locking that Mohammed excels in.

The music-dance dialogue between the two artists matches yearning trumpet calls to melodic cries and drum beats to looping running steps.

The perfect venue for this intimate spectacle.