From Football Fields to Footlights: Daniel Mateo’s Journey into Indigenous Dance
For Daniel Mateo and his eight siblings, the world revolved around sport. Growing up, the expectation was clear: follow in the footsteps of his athletic family, where tennis and football were the dominant pastimes. “My family are all sporty,” Daniel explains. “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.”
However, a chance encounter in Year 11 steered Daniel onto an entirely different path. Encouraged by a teacher to attend a dance workshop in 2018, he discovered a passion that would lead him to become a professional dancer with Bangarra Dance Theatre, even earning him the affectionate, albeit slightly teasing, moniker of his family’s “black sheep that left for the arts.”
An Unexpected Audition and a Love for Movement
The initial dance workshop was a revelation. “I did [the workshop] for a week… and they said, ‘Oh, you should go to NAISDA,’ the dance college which Bangarra stemmed from,” Daniel recalls. Despite admitting to a lack of formal dance training – he couldn’t even touch his toes and was unfamiliar with dance terminology – he auditioned. “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 shares.
Born in Orange, in New South Wales, to Gomeroi and Tongan parents, Daniel’s upbringing was marked by his awareness of, and often direct experience with, the negative stereotypes that have long plagued Indigenous communities. This lived reality became a powerful source of inspiration for his short film, Brown Boys. This piece is the second of three compelling performances featured in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s latest program, Sheltering.
Brown Boys: A Beacon of Hope and Healing
Brown Boys is more than just a dance performance; it’s a profound exploration of identity, trauma, and resilience. “So many stereotypes and stigmas fall onto my family by default, and my family is riddled with all of the atrocities of suicide, of incarceration, all of these kinds of heavy things,” Daniel confides. He felt a deep need to address these difficult truths.
“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.”
Directed by Daniel Mateo and Cass Mortimer Eipper, Brown Boys masterfully blends dance, narrative, and cinematic techniques to create a powerful and evocative experience. Alongside the other two productions in the Sheltering program, Keeping Grounded and Sheoak, Brown Boys serves as a poignant tribute to the late David Page, a celebrated composer and musical director of Bangarra Dance Theatre.
For Daniel, the film offered a vital outlet for expressing the deeply ingrained traumas that are part of his identity. He reflects on his time attending a predominantly Indigenous high school, where an unspoken understanding existed among his peers regarding shared traumas. However, these experiences were rarely, if ever, openly discussed.
Breaking the Silence: The Power of Conversation
“I think that’s just the shame factor that a lot of Indigenous communities have to not open these conversations,” Daniel observes. He shares a particularly poignant memory: “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.”
This profound personal experience has become a central theme in his artistic work. “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 Dance Theatre’s Sheltering program, featuring Daniel Mateo’s impactful Brown Boys, offers audiences a chance to engage with these vital stories and themes. The program is scheduled to be presented at the Sydney Opera House from June 3 to 13, and subsequently at Melbourne’s Arts Centre from June 18 to 27. This season provides a significant platform for Indigenous voices and narratives to be shared and celebrated.
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