![Dylan Van Den Berg has two plays premiering this week. Picture: Sitthixay Ditthavong Dylan Van Den Berg has two plays premiering this week. Picture: Sitthixay Ditthavong](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/hU74HdTxzzWB78D7znDAb9/97fbdea2-36a6-4868-a8dd-6d2edc52d5f6.jpg/r0_511_5000_3333_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
This week may just be the biggest of Dylan Van Den Berg's career.
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And that's saying something. In his short career, the Canberra playwright has already won the Griffin Award, the Rodney Seaborn Playwrights Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for drama and the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards.
But this week sees not only the premiere of the Belconnen Arts Cente-commissioned piece Ngadjung - which Van Den Berg wrote and directs - but it also sees the premiere of his play Whitefella Yella Tree, with Sydney's Griffin Theatre Company.
And while these plays are very different, both explore the First Nations' experience in ways rarely seen on stage - if ever.
"I'm always thinking about different ways to tell stories," Van Den Berg says.
"I think for a long time, First Nations writers were expected to write a certain kind of story. We're expected to mine our own trauma, we're expected to write about very specific things to do with our communities. And I think we're approaching a time now where there are no limits on what we can talk about.
"We can talk about our experiences, we can imagine other spaces and other worlds. I think that there was this thirst for authenticity for so long and finally, we're acknowledging that First Nations people have imaginations, and we have [different stories we want to tell ... we want to be funny and we love sci-fi, we love being able to really expand and extend the kinds of stories that we tell."
![Lisa Maza and Kylah Day, who star in Ngadjung, with artwork from Life Source exhibition by Leah Brideson. Picture: Supplied Lisa Maza and Kylah Day, who star in Ngadjung, with artwork from Life Source exhibition by Leah Brideson. Picture: Supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/hU74HdTxzzWB78D7znDAb9/35733354-48f9-4f94-a70f-4843f0ae13ce.jpg/r0_177_3325_2046_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Now showing at Belconnen Arts, Ngadjung is set in the not-too-distant future, in a time when the sun burns through skin, and water (or a water-like substance) only comes in bottles. It's an environmental drama - named after the Ngunnawal word for water - that sees two women unpack the past and spar over the future.
Cass (played by Kylah Day) is from the city; she's young, smart and reckons she can fix it all. Flick (played by Lisa Maza) who is inexplicably digging holes in the river that no longer exists, is older and fiercer with history running through her veins.
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The production has seen Van Den Berg step out from behind the pages and into the director's chair. For the first time, he says, he's not only thinking about how words sound, but how they can be paired with action to tell a story. It's a role that's created a new relationship between the playwright and his work. And it all began two years ago with a request from Belconnen Arts Centre to create a work set on Ngunnawal land, with the title Ngadjung.
"They said to write something about water, human connection to water, First Nations' connection to water," Van Den Berg says.
"So I took that away, and I was thinking a lot about the climate. And I thought what better way to talk about the climate than the future [and] where we could be headed?
"But I just had this image of a dry riverbed and we've lost it all. For First Nations people, our waterways don't just hold water, they hold our stories, our connection to ancestors and the past. So how can we remember anything without water?"
![Guy Simon and Callan Purcell in rehearsal for Whitefella Yella Tree. Picture: Brett Boardman Guy Simon and Callan Purcell in rehearsal for Whitefella Yella Tree. Picture: Brett Boardman](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/hU74HdTxzzWB78D7znDAb9/6cb92e27-62f4-4ee3-bc57-1a4b2e6bb125.jpg/r0_0_1920_1280_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
While Ngadjung is set in the future, Whitefella Yella Tree travels back in time.
Set to take to the Canberra Theatre stage next month, the production is a response to Anthony Mundine's 2013 comments regarding Indigenous culture and homosexuality. Talking in regards to the television series, Redfern Now, the boxer posted on his social media that homosexuality was not part of the Indigenous culture.
And so Van Den Berg used those comments to fuel Whitefella Yella Tree, a piece set against the backdrop of colonisation, about two First Nations boys (played by Guy Simon and Callan Purcell) who fall in love under a strange tree that bares yellow fruit.
"They have to reckon with the white fellas arriving and that white fella knowledge and ideas and morality and religion are infecting the way that they relate to each other," Van Den Berg says.
"It's trying to fill some of those gaps that were left by the white fellas who assumed that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were heteronormative and that queerness didn't exist. We know that there were roles within the community for queer people. And that's always been the case. But we've forgotten because the written record doesn't reflect that."
Ngadjung is at Belconnen Arts Centre until August 27. Tickets from belcoarts.com.au. Whitefella Yella Tree is at Canberra Theatre Centre from September 28 to October 1. Tickets from canberratheatrecentre.com.au.
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