Gulaga Dancers

The Gulaga Dancers, led by Warren Ngarrae Foster, are a respected cultural dance group from Yuin Country. Guided by Senior Cultural Custodians, the group performs on Yuin Country and across Australia, sharing teachings that centre the sacred mountain Gulaga, a place of deep Ancestral Law, ceremony and matriarchal strength for Yuin people. Through song, movement and story, the dancers hold space for intergenerational learning, bringing children, youth and adults together in cultural practice.

Their public work is not entertainment but cultural continuation. As Warren Ngarrae Foster explains, the purpose is to heal Country and community through the embodied act of Ceremony: “What we’re doing here is a healing, we’re reconnecting. That’s why we dance.” He also describes the contemporary urgency of this practice in a time of climate, fire and colonial disruption: “Gulaga still speaks to us, we have a responsibility to answer.”

The Gulaga Dancers have toured internationally to New Zealand, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Singapore and Canada. They have performed at community gatherings, openings, festivals and education programs including collaborations with various cultural organisations. Their presence creates conditions in which non-Indigenous audiences witness living culture on its own terms. For Yuin families, the group sustains language, protocol, kinship and identity.

In maintaining the discipline of ceremony in public view, the Gulaga Dancers affirm that Yuin lore is not past tense. Each performance is an act of return to land, to Elders, and to the continuing obligations carried from Gulaga into the world.