The Other Side of Me

New dance theatre production The Other Side of Me is the primary output of a multidisciplinary practice-led research project led by Northumbria University Assistant Professors Dr Laura Fish and Liz Pavey. The project When Words Fail Us, Expressing the Unspeakable: The Other Side of Me, combines contemporary and traditional Indigenous Australian dance, literature and physical theatre to explore ways to communicate a story of personal trauma that sits at the limits of linguistic expression. Dr Laura Fish and Liz Pavey have worked collaboratively on the production with Gary Lang, a Larrakia man, Artistic Director, Northern Territory Dance Company (NTDC), an Indigenous-owned Darwin-based dance company.

The Other Side of Me is inspired by the life of a young First Nations man of Gurindji heritage, born in the 1960s in Australia’s Northern Territory, adopted by a white English family and raised in the English countryside. His story is inseparable from the Australian federal and state government policies (1910 until mid-1970s) to wrongfully remove children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent from their families and culture – the Stolen Generations. At the project’s core is a collection of approximately 30 letters and poems written by him to Fish between 1990–1994.