Acclaimed dance theatre company Marrugeku has officially announced the world premiere of Ngurragabu (from the last night/next/tomorrow).

Presented at Sydney Festival as part of the internationally renowned Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels program, Ngurragabu will run across January 21-23 at Carriageworks, on Gadigal Country/Sydney.

As the only Australian company in the program, Marrugeku brings its unique choreographic vision to Dance Reflections, joining some of the world's leading dance companies in a major city-wide festival making its Australian debut.

Celebrating the power and diversity of dance, the program showcases bold, boundary-pushing work.

Australia's leading intercultural and trans-Indigenous dance theatre company, Marrugeku is globally recognised for its distinctive artistic vision and exceptional calibre of work incorporating theatre, multimedia installations and diverse forms of dance.

For over 30 years, Marrugeku has forged powerful, interdisciplinary works that speak across Indigenous and settler communities and respond to local and global contexts.

Based in Rubibi/Broome, Western Australia, and Carriageworks Sydney, the company forges new choreoaesthetics through anti-colonial investigations exploring the complex realities of contemporary Indigenous life and the power of intercultural expression.

Ngurragabu is an evocative new work imagining a haunting future of great middens, toxic waters and transformed landscapes. Rooted in the deep time of north-west Australian land and sea Country, and the millennia of movement and relocation of maritime Peoples across the region, Marrugeku imagines a future beyond climate collapse, and embodies possibilities of relocation and radical adaptation.

"Out of the compassion, love and the gifts all life gives, Marrugeku and the artists direct light to, the terminus, of the darkness transition dynamic happening to all life itself," said Marrugeku cultural dramaturg Patrick Dodson.

"This production, Ngurragabur, raises questions about accommodations or disappearances of all life , including that of humanity, in a future, our new technology might control and design."

Developed in dialogue with Yawuru and Bardi custodians, the work connects Country and communities across northern Australia, Oceania and South-East Asia, asking what survival might cost - and what futures remain possible.

Led by Marrugeku co-artistic directors Dalisa Pigram, choreographer, and Rachael Swain, director, Ngurragabu draws on their signature fusion of fierce and moving physicality and political imagination.

Their performances play a vital role in raising international awareness of the diversity of Indigenous experience, and though their hallmark intercultural collaborations, advancing shared responsibilities for truth-telling and the possibilities of Makarrata.

"For Ngurragabu we have responded to Patrick Dodson's comment that artists have the capacity to show us the future and to give it form and manifestation," Marrugeku co-artistic directors Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain said in a joint statement.

"Ngurragabu imagines a future beyond the dark nights looming on all our horizons. With our incredible team of collaborators we have searched for ways to express the harshest of realities at play in our world now, the relocation of communities forced out by the polycrisis of conflict and climate.

"At the same time, we have attempted to release our imaginations from what it might mean to be human in the future by exploring the adaptative superpowers of plants and animals.

"Ngurragabu has led us to engage in new technologies to help visualise older ways of knowing and the endless interplay between ecological, human and spirit worlds. We hope that this, as Patrick has said, helps give our audiences connection to their own purpose and being, to help contend with what lies beyond the darkest night for all of us."

Ngurragabu also brings together an extraordinary ensemble of Indigenous and settler-diasporic collaborators and performers from Australia, South-East Asia and Melanesia, including Zachary Lopez, Gusta Mara, Stanley Nalo, Jada Narkle, Darci O'Rourke, Taj Pigram, Bhenji Ra, Syarifuddin Sahari, and Zee Zunnur.

Weaving physical and spiritual realms, audiences are immersed in a radically transformed landscape that asks us to reconsider our relationships with Country and with the planet.

Rewilding the future, a monumental petrified mangrove forest, created by acclaimed visual artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah draws inspiration from imagined past-future archipelagos connecting northern Australia with eastern Indonesia.

The installation is informed by collaborations with Yawuru and Bardi custodians and futurist predictions by landscape architects Realm Studios.

Pushing the boundaries of sustainable stage design, Ngurragabu presents Australia's first 100% recycled and recyclable set. This will see the set-up bring together computational design, circular research with Arch_Manu and 3D-printing innovations by Composite Studio, while immersive projections drawn from LiDAR scans of Bardi Country and a techno-futurist soundscape create movement and further entwine bodies, landscape and image.

"Ngurragabu scatters us beneath the looming arcs of an ancient Mangrove coast, subsumed by an environment driven by perpetual cycles of heat, water, salt and air. Humanity survives, changed by a world that no longer recognises the differences of plant, animal and spirit. We continue," said Ngurragabu set designer Abdul-Rahman Abdullah.

"Realising the set has been an intensely collaborative journey between the Marrugeku family and the team at Composite Sydney.

"Every inflection of form and function has been through an intensive course of cultural, dramaturgical and technical interrogation before the 3D printing process ever began in earnest. Each decision has been a balancing act of technology and radical optimism, expanding the possibilities of what we can create together."

Ngurragabu is commissioned by Sydney Festival, Perth Festival, City of Melbourne through Arts House and YIRRAMBOI.

Marrugeku present the world premiere of Ngurragabu at Sydney Festival as part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels - from the 21st-23rd of January 2027, at Carriageworks, on Gadigal Country/Sydney.

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