Bangarra Dance Theatre, home to the country's top-performing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander performers, made national headlines this month with the announcement of its very first main stage cross-cultural collaboration, Horizon.

Celebrating what is described as being a sacred realm, where the sun rises and falls and the light is new, Horizon sees leading Māori choreographer and arts laureate Moss Te Ururangi Patterson join forces with Bangarra choreographer Deborah Brown.

The duo presents a mainstage production that reflects stories that honour their mother countries and the spirit that calls them home. Acting as a double bill, Horizon will first open with the expanded iteration of Kulka by Bangarra alum Sani Townson, followed by the primary piece, The Light Inside, choreographed by both Brown and Patterson.

Horizon will further honour the First Peoples of the Oceania region, spanning across the continent now known as Australia, the Torres Strait Islands and our southern neighbour, Aotearoa. This story of resilience explores the cultural forces that bind us together, across oceans and eons.

Bangarra Dance Theatre artistic director and co-chief executive Frances Rings said Horizon is an exciting development for Bangarra and its dancers.

"I've been able to commission three choreographers for Horizon that have inspired me, that each have their own really interesting and powerful way of telling their own stories, their own methodologies and that have worked hard in their industry to achieve where they are today," she said.

"This is my first commission and I'm really excited to share with audiences and our communities these new storytellers for Bangarra and that it's different, but it's also a step in an interesting direction for the company."

Having been with Bangarra for 12 years as a dancer before transitioning to her current roles, Rings was delighted to have the opportunity to work with and spotlight international creatives through Horizon.

"A really important passion that I have is also how I connect my storytelling and that of the company with other international First Nations creatives and choreographers," she said.

"We've got three choreographers that have been commissioned for this work. The first choreographer is Sani Townson. Sani spent many years as a dancer with the company and is now the youth coordinator with our youth program. Sani did a work for our dance clan program last year called Kalka and Kalka.

"Our second choreographer is Deborah Brown. Deborah Brown is from the Meriam Islands in the Torres Strait. She spent many years as a senior artist for Bangarra and has worked in film and with other companies. She's got her own way of telling stories and her own incredible, powerful resonance of how she expresses culture through her movement and her work… she's been working with Moss Patterson.

"Moss is our first international First Nations Indigenous choreographer. He's from the Lake Taupō region and his ancestral lands are from the Ngāti Tūwharetoa."

Rings said Horizon is a work that is "inspired by our waters, our saltwater, our fresh water and our relationships to our islands and from the Oceania region".

"This work also is about generations of people who have lived and had deep roots and relationships and cultural kinship with water and also with sky, with navigating water and also what does home mean? What is that calling to home, whether it be your ancestral home, your urban home or home that you carry," she told Style Up.

"Horizon is also about the concept of home and what that means for Indigenous people, whether it be your ancestral home, your urban home or that sense of home that you carry with you when you're with your family and it doesn't matter where you are but you know who you are, you know that you carry your culture, your language and your law with you."

For Patterson, Horizon is more than a symbolic stage production, but rather a celebration of a new era for both Bangarra Dance Theatre and Australia's broader dance and creative communities.

"Horizon is an idea which draws from quite a deep place of telling story from an Indigenous perspective," he said.

"It is really about building relationships, building story together, it's an intercultural story… It's a story of connection. Connection to home, connection to my small village, my connection to Frances, my connection to Deborah, and in sharing those stories, we build a new story together… a story of hope, a story of an aspirational future where we lay a legacy for not only our current generation but for future generations.

"It's not just about the work, it's also about the process. It's about the way that we make the work. Sharing personal stories is always quite a vulnerable space to be in. It's important that we build trust, that we establish that trust through conversation, through dancing, through the sharing of very personal stories, and the dancers have kind of invited me into the world. And as I've shared my own story, we've been able to build that story together. It's a really organic process of being curious and finding the ways in which we connect both through story and through movement."

Patterson believes the dancer's ability to fuse their own culture with the one being presented adds to the production's level of depth and symbolism.

"The leadership that Francis has established with the company, I think, enables the dancers to have their own sense of leadership. I feel them dancing and moving in their own manner, which is from an almighty perspective means that they're working from a very grounded place, a very powerful place within themselves," he said.

"I'm mindful of what I'm bringing. I'm mindful of what the dancers are bringing to the space, the stories that they're bringing, their cultural stories, and how we fuse those stories as a very intimate process actually…and it requires a lot of care. The environment here at Bangarra, when I first arrived, I noticed there was already this incredible, incredible space of care and trust.

"I've felt held by the dancers in terms of them hearing my story, a very personal story of my grandmother's upbringing and this connection that I had with the matriarchs of my family," he said.

Having premiered at the Sydney Opera House 11 June, and now set to tour across Australia in 2024, this powerful new work from two of the world's most renowned First Nations choreographers is not only a celebration of international culture and craft but a testament to the rich talent and storytelling that comes from the fusing of cultures and creatives.

Please note that this production contains elevated sound levels, flashing lights, haze, smoke effects and voices of Tangata whenua, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have passed.