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For Daniel Mateo and his eight siblings, sport reigned supreme at home. “My family are all sporty. My mum played tennis, my dad played football, and all my siblings played football. I thought I had to take the football route, but that wasn’t for me,” says the 25-year-old.
When Mateo’s year 11 teacher encouraged him to attend a dance workshop, in 2018, he followed a path that led him to become a professional Bangarra dancer ... and his family’s “black sheep that left for the arts”.
“I did [the workshop] for a week … and they said, ‘Oh, you should go to NAISDA’, the dance college which Bangarra stemmed from … I went to the audition, and couldn’t touch my toes, didn’t know any dance vocab and miraculously got in. From there I fell in love with dance,” he says.
Born to Gomeroi and Tongan parents in Orange, in central-western NSW, Mateo grew up learning about the negative stereotypes that beset his community – as well as facing them. It’s what inspired Mateo’s short film Brown Boys, which is the second of three performances in Indigenous dance company Bangarra’s latest program, Sheltering.
“So many stereotypes and stigmas fall onto my family by default, and my family is riddled with all the atrocities of suicide, of incarceration, all of these kinds of heavy things,” he says.
“I wanted this film to really be a beacon of hope for brown boys who had the same lived experiences that I had, and hopefully, they can be able to … start the conversations to define themselves.”
Brown Boys is a dance film directed by Mateo and Cass Mortimer Eipper that blends dance, narrative and cinema. Along with the other two shows in the program, Keeping Grounded and Sheoak, the performance will honour the late David Page, acclaimed composer and musical director of Bangarra Dance Theatre.
For Mateo the film provides an avenue to express the hidden traumas within his identity. Growing up and attending a predominantly Indigenous high school, he says there was an unspoken bond between him and his peers over shared traumas – but it was never openly discussed.
“I think that’s just the shame factor that a lot of Indigenous communities have to not open these conversations,” he says. “I remember going through my brother’s passing, and just the overwhelming feeling that stayed within our house for months and years, and that was because we didn’t speak about anything.
“I really wanted to try and use that also as a spine for my work, that it is OK to speak of these things, it is OK to come home to yourself, whether that’s coming back onto country, whether it’s speaking to people, whether it’s speaking to yourself, and try and heal it in that way.”
Bangarra’s Sheltering will be at the Sydney Opera House from June 3 to 13, and at Melbourne’s Arts Centre from June 18 to 27.
