Frances Rings - Harper's BAZAAR January 2023

Frances Rings is the first Indigenous woman to be named artistic director of Bangarra. It’s been a lifetime in the making

 There have been many full-circle moments in the life of dancer and choreographer Frances Rings. She began drawing the first circle in 1986 when at 16, she was preparing for her HSC. Rings, a Kokatha woman, grew up in Port Augusta in South Australia with a love of dance, dressing her siblings in costume and putting on productions in the backyard water tank-turned-cubby house her dad built. “I was always in this imaginary world, choreographing on my sisters, and I would roleplay and create scenarios and put on these productions,” she recalls. “It was a world where we felt safe. It was something that I used to make better sense of who I was and what the world around me meant, and how I could connect with it.”

The family couldn’t afford ballet lessons, so the backyard performances had to suffice until Rings was in year 11 and dance was introduced as a subject in the HSC. “That was the first time I was able to start ballet and contemporary dance techniques,” she says. But the class did more than teach her how to move; it also opened up the world of performance. “My dance teacher took us to see Cats at the Sydney Theatre Royal, and that was just a phenomenal turning point,” Rings says. “The shapes the dancers could make with their bodies — I was blown away. That affirmed this ambition to become a dancer.” 

Thirty-two years later, that circle closed when she created the award-winning choreographic work Terrain (2012) for Bangarra Dance Theatre, Australia’s leading Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance company. About colonialism’s impact on the environment and Indigenous peoples’ relationship with Country, in 2018, it was added to the HSC curriculum for students studying Dance.

The next circle — possibly her most significant — has taken almost three decades to draw. After high school, Rings did a five-year dance course at NAISDA, Australia’s premier Indigenous performing arts college, in Sydney. At her 1994 graduation performance, Bangarra’s artistic director, Stephen Page, invited her to begin a traineeship with the company. “I remember seeing Stephen’s first production with Bangarra when I was a student, and I’d never seen anything like it,” Rings recalls. “To see traditional dance and contemporary movement in the same space, that so perfectly captured these two worlds, [was something that] hadn’t been explored on a mainstream stage before.” Bangarra was in its infancy, but Rings could see Page’s vision. “It was a little company, but you could already sense the greatness that Stephen had, and I wanted to be around it because I knew it would be something special; you just felt it.”

Still, a year after joining Bangarra, Rings felt an irresistible pull to go out on her own for a while, so she moved to New York for a few months. “I knew my heart was in Bangarra, but I wanted to challenge myself and step outside my comfort zone,” she says. “I found it really inspiring, and I built up my toolkit and experienced other techniques and teachers, and it [gave me] the confidence that I needed to go, ‘Okay. I’m ready to tell your stories now, Steve.’”

At the end of 1995, Rings returned to Bangarra and spent the next 12 years with the company, performing at the Sydney Olympic Games opening ceremony and the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, as well as winning multiple awards, including six Helpmann Awards, a Deadly Award, the Australian Dance Award and a Green Room Award. In 1999, Rings choreographed her first work for Dance Clan, the company’s emerging creatives program that continues today. “I was so nervous because when you create a work, you’re so exposed,” she says. “You’re like, Oh no! I just opened my heart and people are looking inside and they’re going to be commenting on it! But you do get used to it. You grow the skin. You learn to accept criticism as an opportunity to grow.”

This circle will complete in January when Rings officially begins her new role as Bangarra’s artistic director. Page has held the position for 32 years, and Rings’ appointment makes her only the third artistic director and the first Indigenous woman to take on the title.

Bangarra’s very foundation is also based on full circles. Each work is inspired by a community, begins with a community visit where the team and dancers do their background research on Country, and ends with a performance for the community. 

For Rings’ first full-length work as artistic director, she looked to the community in which she grew up: Yuldea (Ooldea), a settlement on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain. “I’ve lived away from South Australia for many years, but it’s still no less inspired me and helped me become the artist that I am, the Aboriginal woman that I am,” Rings says. “I grew up there, and it’s imprinted in all of my creative language.” 

Yuldea is the story of the moment when industrial life collided with traditional culture at the town’s permanent waterhole — known as Yuldi Kapi and the Ooldea Soak. It was a sacred ceremonial site and later a camp for workers constructing the Trans-Australian Railway during the early 1900s. In the 1950s, the area’s Pila Nguru (also known as the Spinifex people) were forcibly moved from Country to missions, and the community relied on rations distributed by the Tea and Sugar train that crossed the desert. To create the work, Rings returned to Yuldea to ask permission from elders to tell their story. “Their hand is on the pen that writes the story; we’re just guided by them,” Rings explains. “We have to create the language that is distinctively from that place. We’ve got more than 500 language groups, and each one is different; the way each one of them tells their stories, their language, their customs, their dance and song, their oral traditions. You have to get that right. That’s something that we pride ourselves on. 

“Bangarra is bigger than all of us,” Rings continues, speaking to her vision for the company. “We need to nurture our next generation of Indigenous creatives and cultural leaders. They’re going to be the ones who care for our stories into the future. We need the branches of this tree at Bangarra to continue growing. The horizon looks strong — Stephen set it up, and I feel really fortunate and privileged to be entrusted to carry this forward.”

This article originally appeared in the January 2023 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Photographed by Daniel Boud.