After decades performing as a dancer on stages around the world, Gary Lang's body has caught up.
At 60, the choreographer moves with a slight hobble around his inner-city Darwin rehearsal room where he teaches his craft every week.
"The dancing body is broken but this isn't," Mr Lang said, pointing to his head.
"I have my scars from dance, but this is still creating."
For 20 years, the artistic director of NT Dance Company has taken his stories of living in Australia's frontier to the stage.
"I create dance on dancers and non-dancers, and I make them look beautiful," he said.
"It's like pulling it out, little bit by little bit — sometimes it's a bit of a shock to them but it's about trust."
Mr Lang has traversed the world as a dancer, and taught at some of Australia's top dance companies, including Bangarra Dance Theatre in the 1990s.
When he turned 40, caring responsibilities brought him back to his hometown of Darwin.
He said the time was right to "rest his soul" and start his own company.
"When I came back to Darwin, it just felt like I stepped back and was where I was meant to be," he said.
But starting a dance production company from scratch didn't come easy.
It's only now, after two decades in the business, that Mr Lang is drawing a proper wage.
It's a love story that has paid off.
Using homegrown dancers, his company has been involved in several major collaborations, including the 2018 production 'Milky Way' with the West Australian Ballet.
Mr Lang credits the world he travelled for shaping his art and said his inspiration as a choreographer comes from his backyard.
"It really helps with my artistry of choreographing, of creating."
Shaped by strong women and a seaside childhood
Mr Lang was raised by his mother Inez in the Darwin seaside suburb of Nightcliff in the 1960s, with his grandparents living around the corner.
As an only child, he remembers the "smells of the area" as a kid.
It was a blend of sea air, frangipani flowers and the aroma of his grandfather's blachan filtering down Aralia Street.
"You could smell it down the street and people used to come and say 'Dalph, Dalph, are you cooking blachan, can we have some?" Mr Lang said.
His late mother was his biggest role model.
Mr Lang remembers dancing around the kitchen table with her as a child listening to Nat King Cole, and the day she put the hard word on him when he finished school.
"After high school, my mum said 'you need a job Gary'," he said.
"I wasn't going to be a labourer, as in doing plumbing or carpentry, that sort of thing, look at me, so I ended up doing hairdressing."
After finishing his hairdressing apprenticeship, Mr Lang felt a "greater force" telling him to leave Darwin and take up dancing down south.
He booked a one-way ticket to study dance at NAISDA [dance college] in Sydney and spent two decades performing around the world, leaning on his hairdressing skills in between productions to get by.
Mr Lang said he has faced many ups and downs as a dancer and credits his mother for showing him how to be resilient.
Inez was a survivor of domestic violence, which Mr Lang said she "never showed" and did all she could to make him happy growing up.
"I watched my mother go through hell and back," he said.
"Watching the resilience of this woman, coming from a broken marriage, how she just kept everything together … that's what keeps me going."
'Twinkle toes' in a small town of football fans
Mr Lang's family on his mother's side hails from Darwin's large Cubillo family – a Territory surname synonymous with sport and athleticism.
As a teenager growing up, Mr Lang enjoyed going to Gardens Oval to watch his cousins play AFL.
But he said the grandstand became harder to bear when he came out as a gay man in the early 1980s.
"I used to go to the football with my cousins and go and sit down in the grandstand and I go and get called 'faggot' and 'poofter'," Mr Lang said.
"I look up and there's all these people laughing at me and I think 'that's ok, measure for measure, what you do to me will come back to you.'"
Mr Lang's experience of coming out in a small town is still raw but he said it's made him stronger.
"That's one of the hardest things, being a gay man growing up in Darwin, especially then because I come from a family of sports people and I'm twinkle toes on the world stage," he said.
Being back in Darwin helping the next generation of dancers grow and flourish is now his biggest motivation.
To his dancers, he's honest about the industry and what to expect, and leverages off his own experiences growing up to make them stronger.
"My advice to anybody is not to stop and don't give up," Mr Lang said.
"Once you know who you are, and you have the support as a soul, you just grow … you will get people who will pull you down, but you just have to keep going."
This story is part of a special Born and Bred series, celebrating the work of remarkable Territorians.
