Glory Tuohy-Daniell’s KEEPING GROUNDED is part of Bangarra Dance Theatre’s SHELTERING, touring across Australia May—July 2026
Gadigal Season @ Sydney Opera House, 3–13 June 2026
This text is based on an interview with Glory Tuohy-Daniell conducted by Tammi Gissell, Thursday 21 May, 2026
Bangarra Dance Theatre has long supported the promising choreographic voices of its company performers, and their current touring season of Sheltering continues this tradition throughout Australia with performances in the ACT, NSW, VIC & QLD between May and July this year.
I was blessed to yarn this week, ahead of their Gadigal season at the Sydney Opera House, June 3-13, with Indjalandji Dhidhanu and Alyewarre woman Glory Tuohy-Daniel.
Glory’s work Keeping Grounded features in the Bangarra program alongside Brown Boys by Daniel Mateo & Cass Mortimer Eipper, and a remount of Sheoak by Bangarra Artistic Director Frances Rings, first created in 2015. It’s been deeply moving to hear of the freedom that Glory Tuohy-Daniell has been afforded in discovering and defining her ideas and creative process over the past three years since her first company choreograph, also called Keeping Grounded, premiered.
Keeping Grounded was conceived & created for Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Dance Clan in 2023. Glory describes the initial invitation as an opportunity to explore the things that keep us all grounded mentally & physically; viewing both the ongoing development and performances as:
an offering … an invitation to notice … to consider how small, almost forgotten actions can create an effect through the body and mind ... a step barefoot, a moment of stillness, a return.
Originally created with 5 dancers and crafted into in 6 short sections, Keeping Grounded concentrated on intricate and at times urgent fleshliness. The movement navigated and negotiated, within and without, a hovering net sculpture, constructed by Shana O’Brien for the dancers to inhabit; helping produce a sense of simple tenderness and implied threat. It is a set and a situation that speaks powerfully to the inter-relatedness of all spaces and the many bodies and voices that resonate for Glory and the dancers within them across time.
Keeping Grounded was later taken to NAISDA Dance College in 2024 where Glory trained. There she remounted the work for 6 NAISDA developing artists in ‘the trees have voices, the feet have ears’. Glory shared that the NAISDA dancer’s openness greatly informed the expansion of her ideas about what connection can feel, look and move like for others travelling a similar but unique pathway. She was uncovering more and more instinctual processes at play and had a willingness to allow them to guide her in her choices. Glory is quick to acknowledge the blessing that Frances Rings provided in inviting her to create the work and allow its evolution over the past three years.
For Dance Clan Fran really let me do what I want, and she did it so I could learn. She wasn’t putting too much influence on us. It was ours to create, and we got to learn and know and be ourselves…. we could step back and see what didn’t work and go, ah ok this is what I will do. It was great!
Reflecting on the inter-generational threads of caring which are at the heart of the Sheltering program, I find it a powerful affirmation that the responsibility to hold Keeping Grounded was extended to the developing artists at NAISDA before it come back to the company. Glory acknowledges that opportunities to work with Bangarra dancers and the Bangarra repertoires while studying at NAISDA herself were instrumental in encouraging her to take on the immense legacy of shared caring with Bangarra once she graduated and joined the company in 2016. The preservation of cultural choreographies is achieved through safeguarding them in several bodies across many generations. This is at the very heart of Indigenous Australian dance methodology and is as true today as it was for the Ancestors. It was NAISDA Dance College which affirmed this traditional practice as vital to the Australian dance landscape and consciousness almost half a century ago, allowing for Bangarra Dance Theatre to be born. It is this shared custodianship of cultural skill and story which continues to express what our living archive of over 80,000+ years can achieve choreographically & theatrically.
Now in its third iteration, it is unmistakable that Glory’s Keeping Grounded has been surrounded by generous and supporting collaborators in bringing this piece to the stage. Every aspect remains rich, hopeful and warm, but Glory also wants the work to make people think and experience what keeping grounded means. She wants us to take our shoes off. To remember what the sun feels like on our face. She wants us to see our neighbour; not because it all feels good but because it recognises that we were once all connected.
This Keeping Grounded is made in collaboration with 8 dancers from Bangarra, Daniel Mateo, Maddison Paluch, Kassidy Waters, James Boyd, Roxie Syron, Tamara Bouman, Zeak Tass, Donta Whitham. It has evolved for Glory.
I’m not the same person, we’re not the same people. It’s a very different work now because we are bringing new perspectives and experiences. I’m totally guided by what the dancers bring to the story, and I’ve been free to find that and own it.
This Keeping Grounded has been extended to 25 minutes and features a new netted suspension, again created by Shana O’Brien but now three times larger than the original. Glory remarked:
it was something that we all had to really give into – the new immensity of the net, it was so much bigger, we had to trust and let it hold us. She’s like an Aunty… like Country…..she holds us.
Playful, sometimes wistful and potent in command and communion with the set, the space and the choreography, Glory herself describes this work as “somewhere in between being hopeful and being told off - like a reminder”. For Glory it shifts focus from the who and the where, to the me, you and there. Its purposeful delivery layers perspectives for dancer and audience as memory and place intertwine and overlap, as we remember what we have and haven’t done. With Keeping Grounded Glory is asking us all to look at our individual connections to Country, and to each other, through Ancestral and modern-day concepts and experiences of connectivity. By simply asking “so when was the last time you walked outside barefoot?” Glory jerked me back to the stark reminder that I honestly can’t remember. This work, and this yarn with its creator brings me to consider what a progressing disconnection to Country, time, place, self and community will ultimately yield if we do not seek to re-connect. I’m deeply moved that we have emerging creatives so affirmed to respond to these vital matters; and that there are increasingly more opportunities for the development and presentation of their necessarily experimental works where these connections can re-awaken and fortify beyond the theatre. Most importantly, I acknowledge that meaningful space, time and resources have been dedicated to providing Glory with a chance to emerge unhurried; to claim her place within the broader Australian contemporary choreographic sector without any imposed determination of subject, tone or aesthetic. Like Glory so beautifully put it – “I’m working on 100% instinct”. My instinct tells me she is right on track and keeping totally grounded on her path.
Keeping Grounded
Choreographer: Glory Tuohy-Daniell
Bangarra Dance Theatre Dancers for Keeping Grounded: Daniel Mateo, Maddison Paluch, Kassidy Waters, James Boyd, Roxie Syron, Tamara Bouman, Zeak Tass, Donta Whitham
Composer: Brendon Boney
Set Designer: Shana O’Brien
Costume Designer: Clair Parker
Lighting Designer: Karen Norris
Original Rigging Consultant: Katie McDonagh
Original Mentors: Jacob Nash & Matt Cornell
Tammi Gissell is a Murruwarri-Wiradjuri performer, theorist and collections coordinator, First Nations at The Powerhouse. As artist and arts worker she is deeply committed to creative acts of truth-telling. Tammi has written for Australian and New Zealand Journal of Arts, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum, Lagoonscapes: Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities, Archives & Manuscripts and Performance Paradigm.