LARRAKIA man Gary Lang loves to tell the story of the time when the internationally famous (late) ballerina, Lucette Aldous, came into the room where he was rehearsing. After watching for a while, she said to him: “Gary, your work isn’t contemporary Aboriginal dance, it’s Aboriginal ballet.”
It’s a description he has embraced with pride. “I love the aesthetics of classical ballet,” he says, joking that he’s “a bit of a bunhead”. Now the director of his own Northern Territory Dance Company in Darwin, he is adamant that as a choreographer and creator he is pursuing his own aesthetic and vision, which is not confined to Indigenous culture. His own background, as he points out, is a mix of Scots, Larrakia and Filipino. “One of the fore things I say,…