Bangarra Dance Theatre may be based on the other side of the planet, but the Aussie company feels a deep kinship with what’s going on here in Canada. That’s because for the last three decades, it’s been bringing its own contemporary spin on Indigenous culture to the masses—reflecting a kind of reconciliation and rebirth that’s going on here too.

“The dancers are so excited—they feel like they’re going to see a sister or brother that they’ve never seen,” enthuses artistic director Stephen Page from the company’s headquarters in Sydney. “Yet we carry traumas, but at the same time we’re empowered in that.…We are changing people’s consciousness on-stage.”

In its first visit to Vancouver and first extensive tour of Canada, the iconic company will draw from 30 years of repertoire in its show Spirit—although Page likes to point out that, despite its bold contemporary movement and striking visuals, the work actually pulls from 65,000 years of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island culture. “With the work we’re bringing now, we’re trying to curate it so it doesn’t feel like a best-of variety show,” the affable Page explains, adding each vignette will meld up to five separate pieces, all pulled together with scenery, lights, and costumes, and played out in front of a giant traditional cloth that captures the diversity of the continent’s First Nations. Short works take inspiration from mythology, the natural environment, and its wet season, and even delve directly into social issues.

There is a wealth of material to draw from by now. In its home country, the company is a major force. “We just did 75 performances in eight cities, so about 50,000 people saw our work,” Page relates. “In Sydney alone, there’s 15,000 people that would have seen it in the run we had at a 600-seat theatre. There’s a demographic range of 18 to 40, and it’s multicultural, but predominantly non-Indigenous people. And then we do special shows for Indigenous people.”

That renown has built steadily over the company’s history, not just for artistic excellence, but for extensive, sensitive work with elders in the northern regions of Australia and a commitment to Indigenous protocol.

“Many of the artists are from the south of the country, and they’re really connecting back to their tradition,” Page explains. “Dancers do contemporary ballet, Pilates, yoga, but Indigenous dance is injected into it. So it’s this beautiful collection of practices. You’ll see it in our dancers: we have a very diverse palette of skin colour. There are some who grew up not celebrating their culture.

“A lot of this is entrusted to us from the northern part of the country,” he adds. “We are comforted by living with the song and the story that are surviving in the north.”

Like the Indigenous people still grappling with the legacy of residential schools and the Sixties Scoop here, Bangarra carries the pain of history even as it celebrates the vibrant Indigenous culture. In the last century, Australia enacted atrocities on children similar to those committed in Canada: by law, officials could kidnap mixed-race and Indigenous children from their parents and force them into institutions and foster homes. (Those children are now known as the Stolen Generations.)

“Only in 1967 Indigenous people were considered human,” Page adds. “We weren’t recognized as humans from 1788 to 1967. We were part of a massacre, part of a human displacement.”

Page, who is of Nunukul and Munaldjali heritage, grew up the third-youngest in a family of 12 children in Brisbane. His parents had experienced the hardship of the last century: his father’s mother was a domestic labourer, forbidden from speaking her Indigenous language, but passing it secretly to her children; when the welfare people came, she hid those kids “in the dungeon”, Page says, beneath a house. Page’s mother was half English-Irish and half Aboriginal, and he says the family would sometimes call themselves Indian to make things easier. “But when she met my father it was like going back to culture and back to Country,” Page says, using the Aboriginal term that encompasses land, living things, and creation spirits.

Raising their big clan in Brisbane, the couple managed to instill a deep respect for family and heritage in their children, and particularly the fair-skinned Page. “My father said I cried for four years because I wasn’t black,” he relates with a laugh.

Page carried his love of the culture to dance studies and a three-year apprenticeship at Sydney Dance Company before taking over Bangarra in 1991 at just 25, with his brothers David composing the music and Russell performing on-stage. Page went on to choreograph work for everything from the Australian Ballet to the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.

All of that history is woven into the work of Bangarra, whose name is the Wiradjuri word meaning “to make fire”.

“Politics is in our DNA,” asserts Page, who’s looking forward to building bridges between Indigenous people in the Southern and Northern hemispheres. “We reflect the land and its social climate, and within that comes a strong line of politics. But we’re not out there campaigning.

“We’re carrying on the creative knowledge, protected and preserved,” he adds. “It’s full of honesty and spirit.” And true to its name, it’s full of fire.

DanceHouse and Dancers of Damelahamid present Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Spirit on Friday and Saturday (October 25 and 26) at the Vancouver Playhouse.