Quotes of the Day

Choreographer Stephen Page is talking in hushed tones about the sacred in art, reconciliation and breaking down barriers in a quiet corner of the Festival Centre, the performing hub of the Adelaide Festival, of which he is artistic director. It's a typically spellbinding performance from this Mad Hatter of Australian indigenous arts, whose Bangarra Dance Theatre provided the cosmic corroboree for the Sydney Olympics' opening ceremony in 2000. Then over the speakers comes the clunk-clunk of piano chords as I Go to Rio begins. "Oh, my God," says Page. "It's Peter Allen!"

Allen would feel at home in Adelaide right now. If the late Australian showman were still shaking his maracas, he'd most likely head for Universal Playground, the hugely popular outdoor festival club. After problems with the plumbing, the joint is now jumping. The same could be said of Page's festival, which runs through March 14. When he inherited it from Californian opera director Peter Sellars, the biennial event was not in good shape. Sellars had tried to explode the traditional multi-arts model by pouring more money into film and grassroots programs. But his quest for a communal love-in turned into war with the festival's board. Box office and sponsorship flagged, and Sellars walked before the festival began.

"Coming out of Peter's and working into this (festival) was very hard, and I thought I was being punished," says Brisbane-born Page, 38, who midway through the planning had to cope with the suicide of his younger brother Russell, Bangarra's gifted senior dancer. "I thought, 'Oh, God, I must have been a mongrel dog in my past life.'" If there's one thing 15 years in the arts have taught Page - first as a performer with the Sydney Dance Company, then from 1991 as artistic director of Bangarra - it's not to bite the hand that feeds him. Putting on his political hat, Page assembled a new administrative team and built bridges to government and business sponsors. Then, for the program, he put on his artistic hat. "It's a bit like choreography," he explains. "It's just a big canvas, and I felt like a great brolga looking down, looking at creating this wonderful festival dot painting."

To be honest, there's nothing too radical here. As Page admits, his aim was to "do everything - Aboriginal content, a bit for the conservatives, a bit for the crazies, a bit of a circus. A universal smorgasbord." That he's delivered. By the end of the first week, there were the usual hits (The Overcoat) and misses (Night Letters). The former, a piece of bravura theater-making from Canada, mixes Buster Keaton with Gogol and - after seven years on the festival circuit - purrs like a Rolls-Royce. Letters, the State Theatre Company of South Australia's new four-hour adaptation of Robert Dessaix's intimate novel about a writer's "death" in Venice, looks good but wobbles without a suitably dramatic engine. And with some of the most anticipated works still to come (Bangarra's Unaipon, based on the life of the late Aboriginal inventor; and actor David Gulpilil's one-man show, directed by Neil Armfield), it remains to be seen if Page's dot-painting festival really resonates.

What is radical is Page's appointment as Australia's first indigenous director of a mainstream festival. He brings to the job the protocols he developed at Bangarra for bringing traditional art practices into the contemporary world. For Adelaide's opening ceremony, tea-tree bonfires were lit along the Torrens river, symbolically uniting the three local tribes, the Kaurna, Narrungga and Ngarrindjeri. On the opening weekend, a Sacred Symposium was held on how to present "secret" ceremonial knowledge, while Page's creative network has eased the way for the commissioning of indigenous work. "Another cultural consultation!" cries an Aboriginal urbanite who goes bush in the Windmill Performing Arts' new play, RiverlanD. Well may she joke, but this could be Page's lasting legacy. "It takes time," he says, "but there starts to be an understanding or acceptance that there can be a different process, a reconciled process."

With the festival's Body Dreaming, process is all. An outdoor showcase of the body painting, initiation and men's ceremonies of the Yirrkala region of northeast Arnhem Land, it was a show more organic than organized. On opening night, indigenous women in the audience cackled, men heckled and a singing elder left the stage coughing in mid-performance. For white audiences, it was a matter of leaving behind the assumptions of Western theater. Enacted on a red-dirt stage at dusk, it brought a sense of simple ritual to Adelaide. "That's it for tonight," said Body Dreaming's host Banduk Marika as she concluded proceedings. "That was sunset."

With Bangarra, Page has pushed the idea of Aboriginal art as a medium in which different cultures can converse. Can there be reconciliation on stage? That was the subject of the symposium, which brought together indigenous leaders such as academic Marcia Langton, Senator Aden Ridgeway and filmmaker Rachel Perkins. Perhaps the pithiest comments came from curator Djon Mundine, who spoke of Aboriginal arts as a soliloquy cast into a silent void. "We keep giving it to you people," he told a largely white audience. "We want something to come back."

His wish came true at the Adelaide Town Hall on Wednesday night with the world premiere of Peter Sculthorpe's Requiem for orchestra, chorus and didjeridu. For nearly 60 years, this Tasmanian-born composer's music has resonated with the sacred quality of nature. The Requiem is his masterwork. Based on an old Aboriginal lullaby, Sculthorpe's soaring choral work is punctuated by weeping cellos and grounded by the majestic hum of soloist William Barton's didjeridu, suggesting the long horizon of the Outback.

"There's a songline from Arnhem Land right through the Central Desert to Adelaide that hasn't been touched for a very long time," says Stephen Page. Last week his festival took you there.

• MICHAEL FITZGERALD Adelaide
• The Adelaide Festival's first Aboriginal director injects some spirit and vaults cultural divides