One of Australia's most celebrated First Nations performing arts organisations is set to be honoured with a prestigious international accolade.
The Bangarra Dance Theatre company, originally founded in 1989, will be awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance at the Venice Biennale on July 26.
While it is not the first Golden Lion to be won by a First Nations Australian - Archie Moore's kith and kin won the award for Best National Participation in 2024 - Bangarra will be the first Australian recipient in the dance division.
It will also be the first time the Golden Lion has been awarded to an entire company, rather than to a single director, choreographer or dancer.
The award acknowledges Bangarra's monumental body of work and the hundreds of participants who have told First Nations stories through it over nearly four decades.
The company has won a staggering number of awards, including more than 30 Helpmann Awards for dance and ballet, and contributed to both the opening and closing ceremonies of the Sydney Olympics.
Artistic director Frances Rings, whose influential work Terrain will make its European debut at the Biennale, said she was overwhelmed by the award.
"It's a validation of the important work Bangarra does in using our platform to put First Nations stories on stage to shift perspectives and create and effect change," she told AAP.
Rings, a Mirning woman from Kaurna (Adelaide), said the role of the company had been to keep First Nations stories and culture alive.
"The most affirming thing about this is that we are a global company, and First Nations stories belong everywhere," she said.
Rings' first full-length work for Bangarra as choreographer came from a trip to Kati-Thanda (Lake Eyre) with Arabunna Elder, Uncle Reginald Dodd.
She said it was about the connection First Nations people had to land.
"That goes beyond saying, that you come from a place," she said.
"It's about understanding the past, the present, and the future - what you inherit, what you carry today, and what is your responsibility and obligation."
Long-serving artistic director Stephen Page, who led Bangarra almost from its inception in 1991 before handing over to protege Rings in 2022, said it was fitting that the company had been honoured collectively.
Page, a Noonuccal-Munaldjali man, said he had been "pushed to the front" when he took over the company, saying he didn't even know what an artistic director was at the time.
"I didn't go to university to be a choreographer," he said.
"But we learnt along the way, and then we got some serious funding."
He paid tribute to Aden Ridgeway, who served as chairman of Bangarra between 1998 and 2010 and helped shepherd the company into the mainstream as Australia was roiled by social change during the Howard era.
"He thought, what a way to be seen, to be heard - to have a Black voice through dance theatre. He just thought it was magical," Page said.
"We were distinctive, we were original, and we could truly say we celebrated our heritage.
"But we were present in this contemporary form, so it almost was a new language out of an old expression ... there was a potency to it."
Bangarra is currently in Page's home town of Meanjin (Brisbane), performing three collected stories of Country, Sheltering.
"This is 35 years of 65,000 years of continuing to be deadly, and to be proud," Page said.
"We've got to take ownership. All that energy and all that wonderful belief has fuelled this resilience."
