Sarah Kalule on dance works at last year’s Sydney Fringe

Generosity, rigour and lots of potential, 4 dance works at the 2025 Sydney Fringe

Sydney Fringe Festival, 2-30 September 2025

Works reviewed

Tala Issaoui Once In a Blue Moon

Powerhouse Youth Theatre (PYT), Fairfield, 4th September 2025

Lucky Lartey The Ghana Road Show

Eternity Playhouse, Darlinghurst, 6th September 2025

Ella Watson-Heath Still Fall

Studio One, University of NSW, Kensington, 18th September 2025

Natasha Sturgis The Land of Her // Bruce

Neilson Theatre, Sydney Dance Company, Walsh Bay, 25th September 2025

Review by Sarah Kalule

The dance works I witnessed at Sydney Fringe Festival 2025 carried such high potential yet revealed the limited time artists often have to develop new work. I left each performance wanting more. I wondered what the experimental and emerging can do beyond a grind towards the readymade, the new, and the constant seizing of opportunity. For me, these works fell into that predicament where they seemed to be at the brink of unrealised potential. It will be interesting to see how things stack up in this year for dance when compared to last, as the Fringe begins a new phase with a new status.

Once In a Blue Moon

Tala Issaoui

Tensions between ritual, repetition and intimacy foreground Tala Issaoui’s solo performance, Once in a Blue Moon. Combining film, sound and live dance, all created by this self-described multidisciplinary artist, Tala takes us on a performance journey that is deeply personal and constrained. 

The work begins with the short film ‘Ode To My Soulmate’. We witness Tala in close and medium shots, framed by an aged yet sturdy tree, its abundant branches shading her on a sunny day. The film is overlayed with images of her body and the surrounding foliage, inducing a dreamlike slowing of time. Her movement here is paired back. With tender fingertips, she occasionally caresses the tree’s trunk, its visible roots and lush green leaves. As if mimicking a branch caught in the wind, her arms sway gracefully, reaching upwards and outwards. This filmed dance feels like a partnership with the tree.

For Tala this film symbolises her yearning to be “in a romantic connection…that is emotional, physical and spiritual.” (2022) We witness her intimate connection with the tree through her dancing, as if both bodies might merge into one entity. Yet the film leaves me wanting more. The embodied connections remain mystifying. She is held at a distance, captured through the repetition of her swaying body, rather than through a performed revelation unveiling meanings of her relationship and its significance, which may have offered another layer of the internal connections Tala seems to hold deeply.

Then we are transported into the live performance with the ‘real’ Tala on PYT Fairfield’s stage in sections called ‘Void…’ and ‘Once in a Blue Moon’. These sections merge seamlessly, blurring where one begins and the other ends. Tala presents herself centre stage amongst a cycle of found objects, reminiscent of expensive home decor: two golden goblets, one golden bowl and shear white tulle, all surrounded by a circle of stones. These objects echo the film’s personal themes of the relationship between Tala and objects. Tala begins to repeat movements from the film – slow swaying, high chest releases and yearning arm reaches towards something unseen yet real to her. Over several slowed minutes, she navigates through ritualistic movement scores: goblet toasting, water spilling, dress drenching and veiling her body. This interaction between objects and body evokes the rituals of special rooms: spaces of rest, solitude, communion or connecting to what might be a greater power. At times Tala circles the stage at an even walking pace, pausing only to present longing gestures through an expanded chest and lengthened arms, reaching into an imagined universe beyond the theatre’s walls. But her performing body rarely invites the audience in. Her trance-like gaze seems to resist us; she moves in her own world. The performance feels dramatic — a hypnotic trance.

Like the striking ring of a hypnotist’s gong, this ethereal state is disrupted by sharp bursts of flashy lighting and thunderous sound which Tala also composed. This snap between states repeats several times. Tala’s meditative, self-contained choreography now stands in stark juxtaposition to the lighting and sound effects. She seems unaffected by these striking disruptions, continuing her slow and steady movement score; body and objects in dancing partnership.

I wondered what Tala was generating through these contrasts: why pair the spectacular with the meditative? While her movement resisted the change of pace by staying in a continued quiet intimacy, the strobing lights and roaring sound occasionally broke the dreamlike quiet. These theatrical elements sometimes threatened to swallow her tender ritual, her engagement with the objects. The lighting and sound marked transitions between performed acts. These moments evoked a kind of double consciousness, one the performance world and the other ‘real’ life, reminding me that I was watching a performance in theatre space in the middle of Western Sydney. In a way the theatrical elements risked overshadowing Tala’s quiet inner world. Snappy special effects created distractions from Tala’s movement and created a distance between the audience and performer. This might have been the aim … a performance that carried a sense of isolation rather than invitation. With Tala alone on stage, in her own world and separated from us, we were made aware of her ability to keep us at arms length, stirring feelings of loss and contemplation.

Tala’s quiet strength held our attention with restraint and commitment. With further attention to how production design supports her world, Once in a Blue Moon gestures towards the possibility of a unique performance, one that merges the deeply personal and intimate, with the highly theatrical and deliberate withheld, an embodiment resisting the earthly realm of the personal.

The Ghana Road Show

Lucky Lartey

Lucky Lartey’s The Ghana Road Show is an ambitious variety performance where tradition meets contemporary flair. There was Senegalese drumming, Afro-contemporary dance, call and response games, head-bobbing polyrhythms, playful trumpeting, dish-spinning, balancing, juggling and friendly competition, all wrapped in the cheeky banter of *KMT* (kissing-my-teeth) — a diasporic gesture expressing playful annoyance or irritation by sucking air through puckered lips to create a distinct lip-smacking sound. In this case, KMT was used to playfully humble someone from showing off more than one should.

Driven by admirable talent and infectious energy, the performance was thrilling, with explosive delivery and ambitious promise. Running for 50 minutes, it featured artists from across the African diaspora, all of whom boast an assortment of talents. Lucky Lartey directed and choreographed the work. Lady Chika was a performer and DJ and dancer. Pedro Olympio a performer and trumpeter. Yacou Mbaye a performer and percussionist. Mutala a performer and street acrobat. Enoch Adjei Laryea a performer, pan spinner and circus artist.

As the work began, and audience members settled, a voiceover welcomed our arrival via Ghana Airlines to The Ghana Road Show—preparing us for the adventure to come. Lone trumpeter, Pedro Olympio, entered from the audience bank. Sustained musical notes echoed throughout the Eternity Playhouse as Olympio paced slowly down the stairs. The pace accelerated as he played syncopated rhythms. In a moment the remaining cast burst onto stage, each presenting their unique act. Lucky Lartey rolled in wearing bright yellow roller-skates, while Mutala was break dancing. Enoch Adjei Laryea spun dishes accompanied by Lady Chika’s exciting afro-pop music and Yacou Mbaye’s drumming.

The performance continued in this way, with several short acts offered with either one, two or all performers on stage. Road Show had exciting themes, reminding me of the joys of summertime backyard BBQs, full of community and fun. We were not only entertained by these performers but immersed in the action. On occasion they worked the crowd through audience participation, call and response games. With house lights bright enough to see everyone in the audience, one performer would play a rhythm, then gesture to us to clap and repeat. Another performer would chant, then gesture to us to do the same. This was looking like an enjoyable night full of circus, dance and musical skills.

But as The Ghana Road Show progressed, the performers’ stamina was tested. Each act seemed more difficult than the one before. They juggled while trumpeting and they drummed while dancing, which challenged the performers commitment to upholding the energy levels required to execute these multiple acts. Starting at such a full-speed-ahead, with high energy movement and intricate instrument playing, seemed to shake the performers’ ability to keep the currency going. Their currency? Athleticism and skill. Over such a long period of time their flagging energy reminded me that there is exhaustion as performance, where exhaustion can become choreographic. In Exhausting Dance, André Lepecki (2006) theorises that exhaustion interrupts or disrupts the usual in dance. But here, in Road Show, I’m not sure that exhaustion was a strategic critique. In Road Show exhaustion revealed the performers inability to divert their excitement at being on stage, over exertion in front of a live and very appreciative audience — they just couldn’t keep up the pace.

Later I reflected on the opening voiceover where witty jokes were made about the (in)famous jallof rice. It was up for debate as to whether one resonates with either Ghanaian or Nigerian rice, which is a narrative I would have liked to see revisited. Had this storyline been developed, it may have offered additional drama and perhaps provided the performers with some more levity in the show, as well as giving them a little respite.

Nonetheless, these artists are exceedingly generous, offering their dance with unapologetic confidence, grabbing our attention and being very entertaining. Even though it seemed their stamina was challenged, their excellence was evident in their show‘man’ship. They all had fun and their unwavering commitment to having fun allowed everyone to experience a night of real joy. The collaborators of The Ghana Road Show radiated excitement and generosity, showcasing the possibilities of contemporary African diasporic performance. Their outstanding skills and charisma certainly left me, and all the audience I imagine, in high spirits.

Still Fall

Ella Watson-Heath

Against a stark green backdrop, Ella Watson-Heath (director/performer) and Ashleigh Veitch (collaborator/performer) stand, eyes fixed on their hands, evoking the all too familiar gesture of screen tethered texting. Their flickering wrists and busy thumbs morph into abstracted variations: hands raised, lowered, separated and mirrored in multiple directions. One gestural score seamlessly blends into another, creating a robotic rhythm of alertness and control. Their costumes also reflect the present and anticipated digital themes. Ella wears a casual beige t-shirt, pants and sneakers. Ashleigh, a head-to-toe green body suit.

Still Fall tried to make sense of the digital age through the transition from finger-led fixations to a full body fixation through Contact-like choreography. In her book Contact Improvisation: An Introduction to a Vitalizing Dance Form, Cheryl Pallant (2017) describes physical contact as key identifier in this form, where touch rather than words is used to inform each dancer’s movement direction.

Vital information about the direction and quality of dance exchanges through this dynamic touch site… In place of words, the close proximity of bodies sharing weight and skin, bony and soft surfaces, firm and slack muscles all provide an endless stream of information about the physical condition of the dancers and where the dance can go. Tired or frail bodies may quickly fold down to the floor or maintain a feathery tough as they sashay across the floor. Muscled dancers with steady balance may ignite a high speed dance where the point of contact shifts swiftly. (Pallant 2017: 22)

Ella and Ashleigh mirror Pallant’s contact improvisation approach. Both standing, Ashleigh puppets Ella’s movement by placing her hands on Ella’s hips. On a horizontal plane, she swivels Ella repeatedly, side to side, left to right, controlling her speed and effort in a hurried pace. Beside them, televisions begin to flash anti-digital texts which appear and disappear rapidly. We witness one body feeding the other Pallant’s stream of information, while the other willingly receives and responds to that touch. For me, this brought up the imagery of one entity consuming another: Ashleigh controlling Ella, much like soul sucking hold of digital screens of humanity. This was perhaps a nod back to Ashleigh and Ella’s opening scene of screen tethered texting.  Through this puppet-like action the two performers were offering a comment on the digital age, re-affirming this through anti-digital texts on the accompanying screens and the accompaniment of jarring electronic sound design by Ella.

I noticed their movement score appeared rehearsed and safe, further reflecting the relationship between the pair throughout the whole work. I thought about this choice of pairing a sense of urgency with carefully curated Contact-esk choreography and if these contrasts were intentional in the performance.

The work then unfolded into more exciting interactions: two performers, two televisions and two cameras, showcasing live feed compilations of disappearing limbs, mismatched body parts, and sky-falling slow-motion action, backgrounded by stock cloud images. The atmosphere in this section was charged and climactic. But, just as momentum peaked, it was all over. The performance ended. For me, the work came to a close where it felt like it was just beginning to form and communicate ideas. We were left with resoundingly unresolved expectations.

There are exciting possibilities in Still Fall and in further developments I would be intrigued to know where Ella and Ashleigh choose to take the early ideas of friction between human and non-human into the post human cyborg-like mismatching of body parts on screens. But in this iteration of Still Fall these two accomplished dance artists commanded the stage with choreographic precision, experimenting with digital identities within themselves and the world around them. I am anticipating where this work will go in the future and I do hope it gets to go somewhere for these performer/makers.

The Land of Her // Bruce

Natasha Sturgis

Binaries between masculine and feminine, tenderness and brutality, humorousness and seriousness … the north south of magnetic polarities, formed the flip-side-coin of this double-bill: The Land of Her // Bruce.

In the first half, The Land of Her, Natasha Sturgis is the director/performer/sound editor and Isabel Estrella also performs. This is a considered relationship formed between the two female presenting performers. In the second half, a hefty, hearty relationship drove Bruce, performed by Romain Hassanin and Kai Taberner. Each duet sought to test gendered qualities, the feminine in The Land of Her and the masculine in Bruce. Natasha and Isabel showed confidence through their perfected technical lines, poise and control. Romain and Kai showcased trust, humour and strength through their duet, pushing each other beyond physical exhaustion and into exciting, risk-taking stunt work. In both pieces themes were tied together with gestural sequences merged with pure movement sequences — rotating spines, unravelling limbs, and pressing, reaching, and jumping across the dance floor with keen musicality.

The Land of Her immediately launches into hard hitting choreography — explosive expansions, taking up space with great force, lifting, dropping and then obstructing one another —it was almost as if the audience were an obstruction too as we sat on Sydney Dance Company’s Nielson Theatre’s stage, dangerously close to the action. This was a tense and competitive relationship between two feminine bodies.

They’re on all fours.

Face to face.

Neck cranked upwards.

They’re close

Within limb’s reach.

Eye to eye.

Both rock intensely

Forward and back.

Towards and inwards.

Jolting abruptly

Again and again and again.

Never touching.

A combative tug of war, neither are standing down.

On the other side of the coin was Bruce. Here masculinity made its way onto the stage in the form of a boxing match, making it strikingly clear why we were sitting in the round. Like two heavy weight champions, Romain Hassanin and Kai Taberner confidently entered. They established a sense of trust between each other and the audience, casually walking around the whole stage and catching the attention of various audience members.

One winks.

Enticing eyes.

A cheeky nod,

from the other.

Both grinning.

Now we’re grinning…

This display of mate-ship soon morphed into an attempt at dominance, quitely playful at first. But then arms are slashing across space; massive jumps executed with maximum effort, bodies ricocheting from one spot to another. Testing physical boundaries.

Near miss collision!

Bodies fling forcefully across the stage.

Close call!

Someone lands below my feet, nicking the air surrounding my personal space.

Vicious yet controlled full body action.

In other moments Romain and Kai are intimate with each other, more tender and supportive, their bodies gently leaning in, taking turns guiding one another through the space. They also lay down in harmonious in silence, as if in deep rest. I wondered about these choices. Were they testing our voyeurism and the assumptions we make about gendered bodies?

The Land of Her // Bruce offered us visceral choreography, but I was left wondering what else the work could do. While showing us excellent dancing, each work was most interesting when the duos navigated their binary themes of gendered relationships and challenged assumed presentations of the body. This is when we witnessed the performers’ depth, their thematic choices exploring the complexity of humanhood.

I enjoyed my Fringe in 2025, watching 4 unique dance works across this city— travelling from Western Sydney to the Eastern Suburbs, Inner City and Sydney’s CBD. Being out in the September excitement of winter’s end was fun. I imagined all those Sydneysiders like me, making their way across the city to see performances in our chosen art form, at the other 400 plus events I did not get to see. The Sydney Fringe Festival gives artists the chance to simply have a go, and even within a short season—each work played for between 3 and 5 nights—it becomes clear that even when you see a small sample of the dance on offer in this city, that the work of Sydney’s choreographers deserve more time and resources to keep evolving. Even within the great outcomes of Sydney Fringe (you’ve heard it before) we need more dance! More space to develop it, present it, and grow its audience. In each performance I saw, all the performers were generous and rigorous dance artists who deserve the chance to bring their dance to the stage more often.

I’m excited to see where Sydney’s dance scene goes next in the 2026 iteration of the Fringe which starts on September 1st.

It will also be interesting to also see what happens to the Fringe with its status as a Foundation Event under the NSW Government’s new framework, funded alongside Sydney’s Vivid and Sydney Festival. How will dance fare under this bigger, wider, higher Sydney Fringe Festival in 2026 and beyond?

Sydney Fringe Festival 2025

Once In a Blue Moon

Director, Lead Artist, Choreographer, Sound Designer: Tala Issaoui

Powerhouse Youth Theatre (PYT), Fairfield, 4th September 2025

Producer: Gabriela Green Olea

Film Editor: Marcelo Da Fonseca

Film Directors: Varónica Barac-Gomez, Tala Issaoui, Harsh Yalam

Presenter: PYT Fairfield (Fairfield)

The Ghana Road Show

Director/Choreographer: Lucky Lartey

Eternity Playhouse, Darlinghurst, 6th September 2025

Sydney Fringe Festival, Eternity Playhouse, Darlinghurst, 2nd-6th September 2025

Commissioned by Create NSW

Producer: Kiri Morcombe

Performers: Lucky Larty, Lady Chika, Pedro Olympio, Yacou Mbaye, Mutala, Enoch Adjei Laryea

Sound/Composition: Lady Chika, Pedro Olympio, Yacou Mbaye

Presenter: Eternity Playhouse (Darlinghurst)

Still Fall

Director/Performer/Sound Design/Costume Design: Ella Watson-Heath

Studio One, University of NSW, Kensington, 18th September 2025

Collaborator/Performer: Ashleigh Veitch

AV/Lighting Designer: Aron Murray

Stage Manager: Sarah Stormont

Presenter: UNSW School of Arts and Media (Kensington) with special thanks to Troy Reid, Mark Mitchell and Harriet Gillies.

The Land of Her // Bruce

Director/Choreographer/Sound Editor: Natasha Sturgis

Neilson Theatre, Sydney Dance Company, Walsh Bay, 25th September 2025

Dramaturg: Will Bartolo

Performers: Natasha Sturgis, Isabel Estrella, Romain Hassanin and Kai Taberner

Lighting Design: Topaz Marlay-Cole

Costume Design: Natasha Sturgis, with assistance from Linda Gamblin

Composer: Alicia Jane Turner

Music: 700Feel, Rival Consoles, Travis Lake, Lord of the Isles and Ellen Renton, LVDF

Photographer/Videographer/Marketer: Abril Felman

Venue: Sydney Dance Company Neilson Theatre (Hickson Rd, The Rocks)

Rehearsal Support: DUTI Dance Studios

Presenter: Sydney Fringe Festival, Dance Hub

References

Issaoui, Tala. Ode To My Soulmate. Directed by Marcelo Da Fonseca. 2022. Video. https://vimeo.com/769426052.

Lepecki, André. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Pallant, Cheryl. Contact Improvisation: An Introduction to a Vitalizing Dance Form. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2006.

Sarah Kalule is an artist and early career researcher working across performance, writing and contemporary art theory. Her practice draws on her diasporic histories, feminisms, sustainability science and theatrical jazz dance, exploring the body as material through bold imagery and experimental forms.

Tammi Gissell on TWO BLOOD by Australian Dance Theatre

The importance of listening (even when its hard)

Carriageworks, Gadigal Country Redfern, Sydney, 13th August 2026

Australian Dance Theatre (ADT)

Created by Daniel Riley, S. Shakthidharan and Jasmin Sheppard

Review by Tammi Gissell

Two Blood presented by Australian Dance Theatre (ADT), co-created by ADT artistic director Daniel Riley with guests S. Shakthidharan and Jasmin Sheppard is a moving evening of dance theatre centred around uniquely Australian experiences of belonging and identity. It is a timely and necessarily multi-cultural work conveyed through absolute emotional commitment from company dancers, Joshua Doctor, Macon Escobal Riley, Yilin Kong, Remy Rochester and Zoe Wozniak and guest artists Zachary Lopez and Carly Sheppard.

The story (in short):

A Tagalaka woman and Cantonese man embark on a forbidden love affair forged in the flames of a burning country. Centuries later, their remains are discovered in a forever embrace, setting into motion a sprawling exploration of belonging that pierces the core of our identity. Two Blood Online Programme

The memories which persist of ‘forbidden love’ between migrants and First Australians are not shared enough on our stages despite significant relationships, families and communities being fostered across generations of post-colonial Australia. Two Blood highlights the many struggles of sitting in a devotion to another person or place which defies cultural and chronological identifiers of selfhood which underpins so much of the mixed-blood Australian experience. Two Blood is an unsettling work as performers excruciatingly deliver through choreography and text what this experience does to mind, body and spirit in holding firm to what one knows to be true; and doing it in the face of open opposition under the ever-encroaching burdens of modernity. Two Blood does not offer a solution to any of this; it lays its wounds bare as bodies break down into trembling messes while words are half-spoken, whispered or spat. Any expectation of linear narrative or resolution is shattered as Two Blood collapses in on itself more than once through seemingly disparate vignettes of remembrance.  I believe this was the purpose – to evoke a tangible sense of disorder and discomfort. Whether intentional or not, I had lost all sense of what was going on and for some brief moments throughout, I imagine I experienced what so many of these forbidden lovers must have felt so far from home, clinging to anything at all that made sense among the ever-evolving commotion.

Two Blood spans across continents and flickers between inherited and present memory. It delivers an ache deeply set in the dancers’ bodies and dumps it out for the audience to deal with. The narrative terrain is hunted down, held together, pulled apart and remodelled over and again, reminding us that everyone has, and is entitled to their own stories; and should be encouraged to share them no matter how jumbled or mumbled they seem at first. The important part of any yarning is in the listening, and Two Blood was a stark reminder of this. We must always persist through discomfort and misunderstanding to reveal and refine the truths buried within both speaker and listener. The breathlessness and choppiness in recounting agonies were delivered amongst exquisitely precise movement which switched from languid to ferocious in a heartbeat. Performers seamlessly slipped in and out of full ensembles into solos and smaller groups, while every performer had their moment to shine and took that on with complete conviction. The remarkably intricate duets we've come to appreciate from choreographer Jasmin Sheppard are beautifully emphasized as the performers melted into and out of one another in endless mergers of hope and trust. They gifted us legs and arms for days, pulling and pushing one another, surrendering like corpses together, rolling like quicksilver across each other, raising the other to flight, over and over and over again until any sense of present place, person or time was lost.

The performers are to be congratulated for their unwavering commitment to unpacking these difficult personal yarns which underpin so much of our shared Australian histories and identities as a multi-cultural nation. Their performances were individually and collectively outstanding with every performer clearly offering so much of themselves and their own memories in the process. Two Blood is urgent, but it also delivers its yarning through generous physicality and breathwork both tender and brutal in its longing to be seen and heard despite its apparent narrative confusion. Pain is never pretty or straightforward, after all. I look forward to experiencing more provocative Australian Dance Theatre from this potent collaboration where so many vital aspects to the Australian experience can be amplified with real theatrical rigour and with a shared responsibility of cultural caring. A huge congratulations to Daniel Riley, artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre for bringing such a talented and diverse cultural and creative team together to share this vital yarning for our times.

Two Blood

Carriageworks, Gadigal Country Redfern, Sydney 13-15 August 2026

Produced by Australian Dance Theatre

Choreographers: Daniel Riley, Jasmin Sheppard and Brianna Kell in collaboration with ADT Company Artists

Directors: Daniel Riley, Jasmin Shepppard and S. Shakthidharan

Performers: Joshua Doctor, Macon Escobal Riley, Yilin Kong, Remy Rochester and Zoe Wozniak, Zachary Lopez and Carly Sheppard

Writer: S. Shakthidharan

Music: James Howard and Andy Qilong Chia of SAtheCollective

Choreographic and Directorial Associate: Brianna Kell

Lighting & Production Design: Matthew Adey from House of Vnholy

AV Design: Elias Nohra

Costume: Zachary Lopez

Tagalaka & Chinese Story Advisor: Jasmin Sheppard

Cantonese Consultant: Nicky Tsz Tung Li

Audio-visual: 宿 (stay) care of SAtheCollective

Chinese Translation and Cultural Consultant: Zhao Liang

Two Blood online programme

Two Blood Learning Resource

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. 

Lexy Panetta reviews That's Two, Thank You (FORM Dance Projects)

The art of duet

Eternity Playhouse, Darlinghurst, 10th April 2026

Producer: Form Dance Projects

Works in order of review

Merge Anastasios Repousi (Bboy Taz)

Please… continue? Remy Rochester & Angus Onley

Push and Pull Lai Hung-Chung, Hung Dance

Review by Lexy Panetta

FORM Dance Projects’ That’s Two, Thank You returned in 2026 for another celebration of duets, presented at the Eternity Playhouse in Darlinghurst. The triple bill brought together three pairs, creating three different worlds, by local and international choreographers.

FORM describes this event as “gladiatorial, playful and poetic” and the program made a compelling case for what two bodies in conversation can hold: the intimate and the epic, the comic and the melancholy, with a fusion of street dance and contemporary performance. That’s Two, Thank You was a reminder that partnering and creative collaboration, in all genres of dance, remains an engaging way to tell stories and explore creativity.

Merge

Choreographer: Anastasios Repousi

Performers: Naethiel ‘Tango’ Lumbera and Akuma Diva

We are gathered in the lobby; everyone mingling to the soft hum of foyer chatter as a dancer enters carrying a large speaker.  He squeezes past people in the crowd, leaning in to plug his phone into a power outlet behind me. The audience starts to gather something is about to happen. We read the format and organise ourselves around Naethiel ‘Tango’ Lumbera. The music starts, it’s a punchy beat.

Lumbera begins. He spirals and propels himself in holds and upside-down balances engaging the speaker in an embrace. He moves fluidly through transitions and produces a whirl up of energy and propulsion. His style is sleek and his transitions flawless, fusing seamlessly from spectacular stationary balances into pedestrian moves which bring him back to be just one of the crowd. He has an engaging, vibrant personality, occasionally slipping us playful expressions. I am certainly no expert in defining the elements of this street fusion style, but watching Lumera moving is joyous and hypnotic, he delivers an energy to the crowd. His was a skilful way to bridge the theatre space and the street space, shifting the predictable norms of the pre-show foyer. It brought the audience to-the-party and set the tone for a warm and inviting energy that sustained throughout this evening of duets.  Elements of Eternity Theatre’s own style—the polished concrete, mid-lobby staircase, and urban aesthetic layered onto the building's original 130 year old heritage character—worked well, making this blend of street and theatre feel authentic.

Like a pied piper Naethiel ‘Tango’ Lumbera led us up the stairs and through to the theatre. We jostled behind him to catch a glimpse of his smooth grove, eventually taking our seats. It crossed my mind that perhaps this was the duet, Lumera and us as we choreographed ourselves around him.

We were then met with a second dancer, voguing and waacking. The other half of Merge came into view: Akuma Diva. Diva began an RSVP, manifested in a highly stylised Voguing set. Sleek flicks of wrists and whirling arms paired with a charming sass as Lumera worked the space and the audience to various pop references and disco mash-ups such as Gloria Gaynor’s iconic ‘I Will Survive’. Like a call and response at Darling Square (where dancers gather to show off moves and share in the improvising awe of voguing and breaking), Merge attempted to scale the walls of a more formal space. Here a circular dance battle context, typically done in public spaces and in group settings for collective encouragement and sharing, brought responsive play into the theatre space where what seemed like two disconnected solos became a dance off; each performer continuing to build highly stylised mime, pantomime and funk—a playful mash-up that pulled in the audience, eventually inviting spectators onto the stage to engage in their own pop-culture party.

I enjoyed how Merge not only brought the dancers respective disciplines to this short work, but also got the audience engaged, showing off how dance can be enigmatic and joyous when shared.

Please… continue?

Choreographer/Performers: Remy Rochester & Angus Onley

I am familiar with the work of these artists, having written about Please Continue…? in 2025 for Catapult’s Outbound at the young and emerging performance hub PACT in Erskineville. Remy Rochester and Angus Onley had further developed and remounted the work for the Adelaide Fringe earlier this year. From the outset, as this Eternity outing, I noticed subtle changes from my first viewing. The most notable was the opening—the dancers were sitting in the audience before their work began. This was a fun transition as the audience was still buzzing and chatting about the playful elements of Merge. We were still catching our breath after being corralled up onto the stage as part of the battle. Rochester and Onley were disguised by their animated conversations with other audience members, until the lights caught them, drawing them up onto the stage to begin their work.

Please…continue? had the same energy and efficiency that I had previously noted in its partner work. Rochester and Onsley shift their bodies subtly and dramatically in and through each other. The work feels completely organic, a shared experience between the two performers. Their partnering exudes skill and clarity, they impressively flip and mould each other, acrobats leaving no gaps in their transitions, actors maintaining the consistency of their storytelling.

The added intricacies of the spatial orientation were well suited to the Eternity Playhouse stage that is anchored by a curved architectural recess at the centre rear of the space and with doors set symmetrically either side of the central feature (the layout and architecture offering a quiet historical resonance of the original church space). This was perfect for the work’s impromptu exits and entrances. The space seamlessly facilitated Rochester and Onsley’s hilarious use of the doors as they continually fling themselves in and out of the space, ultimately to miss each other. But the architecture also supported the way the dancers evoked something dark and uncertain, shifting their engagement with each other into something lonely and melancholic. Gestures of avoidance and connection, with hints of magnetism and revulsion, thread through the physical theatre-ly-ness of this work. The dancers’ interplay reveals a full spectrum of connection: they are alert and fearful, full of recognisable habitual behaviours and well-practised avoidances, building to a crescendo with a sophisticated sense of timing. The duet has emotional intensity, punctuated as it is by moments of humorous release and goofiness as Rochester and Onsley mimic conversations we all recognise, their romantic momentum quietly and inevitably building and collapsing. Whether the relationship is real, imagined, or somewhere in between, Rochester and Onsley navigate its chemistry, awkwardness, resistance and possibilities with remarkable fluency; getting closer, shifting each other's weight, swinging one another through the space to the excitable and chaotic score of Caravan by John Wasson.

It was a joy to see how far this work has come and the ease and fluency the performers have with each other on stage.

Push and Pull  Hung Dance (Taiwan / RIDCC)

Choreographer: Lai Hung-Chung

Performers: Wu Shin-Jie and Lee Kuan-Ling

This is the first time I have seen the work of Hung Dance live. I had seen snippets on Instagram when reading about this award-winning work which was previously present at the Rotterdam International Duet Choreography Competition (RIDCC), so I came with the expectation that I might be impressed. Push and Pull certainly lived up to the group’s social media inspired hype. It was spellbinding, mesmerising and tender, a display of abstraction and sensitivity between two performers who are ultimately celebrating physicality.

These dancers have intense skill. Their relationship in this work began with an artificial detachment, as one dancer lay limp in the centre of the stage whilst the other circled, pulling and manipulating the reclining dancer’s arms as though she could not feel. I felt the audience mumble and wince as the male dancer lifted the female out of her folded shape and spun her, holding on to only her wrist. These were physically dislocating movements, and the risk of each manoeuvre inflicted on the female dancer shocked viewers but compelled us to sit on the edge of our seats, fascinated but fearing for the female dancer’s twisted and contorted shape. We collectively relaxed as her partner moved her more tenderly, interweaving her limbs with his own.

As the work unfolded, this theme of shock and fear followed by tenderness and resolve continued. Deep trust and emotion featured in each sequence of choreography. The dancers, Wu Shin-Jie and Lee Kuan-Ling are intense. They maintained a hypnotic pull as they constantly recalibrated, with unpredictable speed and duration, spiralling, yielding in and towards one another.

As the name of the work suggests there is the push and pull of attraction, love, which continually referenced a real and imagined space where Wu Shin-Jie and Lee Kuan-Ling interact. The in-between becomes a physical manifestation, a place that the dances move in and through, creating zones that affect their physical and emotional state (and ours). It was impressive to see how these dancers engaged with this illusory world and created a realm around them, one that was imagined so clearly and gestured to continually within the choreography, yet without props and with minimal lighting.  

This work was so intentionally created. The dancers offered us a clearly divided place, with doorways, separated pathways that they moved through, bringing us into their imagined world: a maze that navigated us through tension and resistance and led us towards nurture, elation and freedom. They were connecting—lips, wrists, fingers, elbows, back—and each securely connected point of contact was loaded with immense power and intensity. The soundscape by composer Kuo Yu shifted the energy, creating suspense, ambiguity and uncertainty. This work kept me on the edge of my seat, eagerly awaiting the unpredictability offered by the emotively complex and physically virtuosic display, their actions let us peer into their world of love and turmoil. Wu Shin-Jie and Lee Kuan-ling were continually investigating the negative space between them, oscillating between limp, lifeless, weight bearing heaviness, instantly contrasted by soaring air and weightless action. They worked skilfully and intentionally with polarities—proximity and distance—with sensitivity and aggression. What resulted was a blending of movement that reconstructed their characters’ relationship in real time: fragments of metaphorical and literal tension, emotional and physical tremors, instability and intimacy. Push and Pull was loaded to the brim with emotional charge, yet without an outlet or specific climax. Rather, the work was made up of drawn-out sequences, climaxes creating a timeline or string of ongoing anticipation, each moment more precarious than the next. This work full of tension and impact and showcased its themes through sublime storytelling and choreographic complexity.

FORM’s program That’s Two, Thank You was joyous, bringing together (with their other duet programme Duels) a range of works that explored the potential of two bodies coming together in performance. While I enjoyed the programme, I found myself curious as to the criteria that could be used to assess one duet in competition with another. What do audiences (or in this case judges) see (and expect) when watching two bodies dance with one another. Are we inevitably drawn into story making when two people work together? Do we have a tendency to see (expect) narrative arcs when watching two bodies touch? I found myself looking for narrative intensions in each work, and wondered if we are drawn into this through the intensity of two bodies on stage? Are love, trust and betrayal, comedy, indifference and tragedy easier to feel (be impressed by) when we watch two bodies together? Is this the enduring success of the duet form?

FORM’s duet weekend provided a platform for this kind of speculation. It’s exciting to see young independent artists taking on the duet form, getting a chance to re-work and re-perform their pieces, and to offer local work alongside internationally acclaimed choreographers. FORM’s support for the independent dance sector is to be commended.

That’s Two, Thank You

Eternity Playhouse, Thursday 9 & Friday 10 April 2026

Works Presented:

Merge

Choreographer: Anastasios Repousi (Bboy Taz)

Dancers: Naethiel ‘Tango’ Lumbera and Akuma Diva

Please… continue?

Choreographers and Performers: Remy Rochester & Angus Onley

Lighting Design: Theo Carroll

Music: John Wasson Caravan & Caleb Arredondo Endo Sax Ascent

Push and Pull

Artistic Director & Choreography: Lai Hung-Chung, Hung Dance

Dancers:  Wu Shin-Jie and Lee Kuan-Ling
Music: Kuo Yu
Lighting Design:  Tsai Chao-Yu

Costume Concept:  Lai Hung-Chung

Producing Organisation: FORM Dance Projects

Producer: Tobiah Booth-Remmers

Creative Director: Paul Selwyn Norton

Alexandria Panetta (Lexy) is a Sydney-based artist, choreographer and academic with a strong interest in dance performance, improvisation, writing and film. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Dance), a Bachelor of Arts (Education) and completed Honours in Dance Studies at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). In 2022, she was awarded a competitive research scholarship to undertake a Master of Philosophy (Creative Practice) at UNSW. Her thesis, Enacting (Re)Actions: Affect Theory and Embodied Resonance in Improvisational Contemporary Dance and Compositional Pedagogy, examines the generative core of improvisation and its role in choreographic development, contributing new perspectives to dance education across NSW and Australia. Lexy teaches across dance and education faculties at the Australian College of Physical Education (ACPE) and is Learning Associate for Sydney Dance Company (SDC) and a Teaching Artist touring with the company, bringing her research into dialogue with industry training and practice.

Joshua Di Mattina-Beven on SUNCUT (Chloe Chignell) & Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal (Rhiannon Newton & Ivey Wawn)

Touching Language

SUNCUT Chloe Chignell

Critical Path, Drill Hall, 24-25 January 2026

Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal Ivey Wawn & Rhiannon Newton

Critical Path, Drill Hall, 23-24 May 2026

Review by Joshua Di Mattina-Beven

I had the pleasure of diving into the worlds of SUNCUT by Chloe Chignell earlier this year, as well as Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal by Rhiannon Newton and Ivey Wawn in May. Both supported by Critical Path, and the latter by Performance Space, they share a common interest in language as a choreographic tool and movement as a speculative embodiment of past and future. Critical Path, housed in a former navy hall on Gadigal and Birrabirragal land, positions itself as a choreographic research centre for development, criticality and experimentation. Whilst these two works have had formal audience encounters, they nonetheless carry this process-centred-philosophy, each attesting to their own continual re-composition. SUNCUT is rearranged each time it is performed, inhabiting the un-finished materials of a lesbian dictionary, whilst Premonitions… is framed as a durational solo, composed of 20-minute cycles each pre-empting their next iteration. The not-quite-theatre space of the Drill Hall lends itself to these experimental forms, as audiences come and go to experience glimpses of Chloe, Rhiannon and Ivey’s speculative visions.

SUNCUT Chloe Chignell

SUNCUT by Brussels based, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) trained dancer Chloe Chignell made its Australian debut at Critical Path in January this year. Performed variously in theatres, gallery spaces and museums across Europe, I was curious how this edition would translate to the Drill Hall’s cavernous interior. 2.5 hours in length, Chloe reconstructs 33 of the 366 entries from Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, originally published in French by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig in 1976. The story goes that Wittig originally declined an invitation to write a ‘Lesbian Dictionary’ from her publisher, before accepting the challenge in bad faith. She concocted the materials for a dictionary with her partner Zeig over 2 weeks whilst on summer holiday in Greece. I imagine them writing together between swimming, eating, sleeping and loving. Despite the story’s possible embellishment, its power on my imagination holds strong. Materials for a Dictionary similarly fabricates myths and histories related to the Companion Lovers, a group of fictional Amazonian women who reject society to live in a world without work, possessions, men or death. To quote Chloe, Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary

is not simply an exercise in lesbian-feminist world-building, though it is that too. It is a world that metabolises the violence of language and offers up a counter-discourse saturated with the pleasure and difficulty of disorientation and disidentification.

I attended a Summer Reading Group with Chloe over January. Here we read Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary and practiced bibliomancy: a non-linear method for collective reading which emphasises what the book wants to give you, rather than what you want from the book. Attending this reading group every Tuesday evening, I was primed to read the dance as it wanted to be seen, interpreting fragments like divination: beyond the sphere of the knowable, suggesting a future yet to come.

It is 35 degrees Celsius the day SUNCUT is performed. The Drill Hall windows are open, illuminating the space on all sides while Cicadas sing loudly, mixing with an ambient score performed by Mara Schwerdtfeger on the viola. Chairs line the edges of the hall, with piles of words on individual A4 pieces of paper dotted around each cluster of seats. In front of me sit the words EAR, PERFUME and HARPALYCE. Chloe is stationed at the other end of the hall, looking off to the horizon. She slowly lifts her heel before landing it heavy on the Tarkett floor. Perhaps it is the heat, but her movements have the quality of a mirage – smooth, like a video buffering. This collective hallucination is sustained, drawing us deeper into the unspectacular, yet hypnotising, repetition.

HALLUCINATION

The companion lovers go on frequent retreats to develop their individual faculties such as the faculty of exchange. They become able, for example, to exchange their hallucinations. Or better yet, they combine them with those of their companion lovers. (Lesbian peoples: Material for a Dictionary by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig, 1979, p. 69).

Chloe moves to a pile of paper across the room, reciting each word to the small group closest to her. The direct address generates a private audience for the dance which proceeds. Without hearing the dance’s textual reference, I attempt to decode the thing as it is made – is this a kind of prayer? Or summoning ritual? Her fingers form a matrix, raising a diamond to the sky before turning the shape in on itself. The sequence is repeated to each cluster of audience, like a magician showing off their trick. The clarity of Chloe’s movement is breathtaking. Like an alchemic reaction, simple movements are transfigured into fabulating, imaginative images. Their dense simplicity prompts my own interpretations: she is on horseback, hair blowing across her nape with landscape rolling beyond. Or tongue out, sprung like a gargoyle warding off bad spirits. These layered interpretations generate increasing disorientation. “I felt like I was missing something” my friend remarks after the performance is over. To what extent this ‘missing’ generates a desire to know more, or look closer, depends on the viewer. I wonder how the same dance performs in the gallery. Perhaps the expectation for narrative and coherence holds stronger in theatre spaces, in which case SUNCUT’s refusal to cohere may generate friction for the viewer (in the form of confusion, boredom or frustration).

SCIENCE

“In truth I tell you, chaos, all has been systematic chaos, obscurantism, falsification, mystification, since the beginning of writing. My beloved friends, do not say that there have been chaotic periods. As if we have known other times … My beloved friends, what is science? What are history, psychology, sociology, theology, archaeology, biology, ethnology, etiology, zoology, philosophy, botany, physics, geography, medicine, numerology, economy, mythology, semiology? I tell you, all is a lie” (Marie Isar, Invectives, delivered during a large assembly of companion lovers at the end of the Concrete Age in Flanders). (Lesbian peoples: Material for a Dictionary by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig, 1979, p. 138).

After a particularly jaunty prance across the room, Chloe quietly adjusts her Velcro pants before giving it another go. I am drawn back to reality, to the formality of the task and its quotidian execution. Owing to lineages of post-modern dance where everyday gestures are incorporated into formally experimental compositions, I read these small moments as signifiers themselves. A de-spectacular gesture. Use of juxtaposition and collage hint at these histories too. Chloe remixes dance’s lexicon into new sentences – sampling ballet, folk and punk styles. A rodeo two step hoedown is performed for the word Work, and I am endeared to the dance’s colloquiality. As someone who did not study dance formally, I assume there are conversations I am missing. Like a language I cannot speak, the dancing nevertheless works itself on me. I think about how communities use language to communicate amongst themselves. Or how I might use signs, words and gestures to signal my affinity with another when I can’t speak outright. The tenderness of a body in secret communion is untranslatable. It is the impossibility of this task which gives SUNCUT its drive: the right to opacity, the agency of a gesture to sidestep immediate comprehension.

COMPANION LOVERS

The companion lovers are those who, violently desiring one another, live/love in peoples, following the verses of Sappho, “in beauty I will sing my companions.” The companion lovers gather from lesbians all of the culture, the past, the inventions, the songs and the ways of life. (Lesbian peoples: Material for a Dictionary by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig, 1979, p. 35).

The touch of a translator is registered in the material itself, the way it is delivered, the additions and variations of its second life. Over 2 hours of watching SUNCUT, this touch surfaces: articulate and playful, taut between declaration and whisper. Playing with the negative space within and without the archive, Chloe traces the desire to know and the surrender of never being able to. She lays on the floor and closes her eyes, holding her own body. Mara’s music swells in layered echoes and I am drawn into this two-fold space: the materiality of skin and the memory of its touch. Perhaps this gives meaning to the CUT: a singularity split in two – a half dancing its other. Or rather, the CUT as a rearrangement, a tool for editing and reordering of source material, allowing for its continual transformation.

******

Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal Ivey Wawn & Rhiannon Newton

Watching a dancer improvise can sometimes feel like being on the outside of an imaginative inner world. This can be an unknowable, internal place, a void for the watcher, as movement and energy appear like apparitions without provenance. Dancer’s Rhiannon Newton and Ivey Wawn are each firmly established in the Sydney-based field of solo improvisation. Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal is their first collaborative public presentation which took place at Critical Path in association with Performance Space. In a durational performance that cycled in 20-minute intervals “between premonitions and their fulfilment”, Rhiannon and Ivey were:

inhabiting dances that have already lived. Infesting the crevices of joints, nerve endings, cracks in the floor, and other dark interiors …

With Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal, Rhiannon and Ivey have cross-pollinated their choreographic histories to explore the ‘cave’ as an internal world of imaginative potential. Past dances become re-animated, blurring the line between life and death. But premonition goes a step further here, asking: what if the improvised form appeared not only as an accumulation of sources past and present, but also as a prediction for the future? A premonition can have a feeling of foreboding – a sense of what is to come. Amid climate anxiety and a ticking doomsday clock, the future haunts our present in endless perpetuity. The cave becomes the place where secrets are buried, shadows are cast and strange forms of life begin to take shape. If this is the cave at its most subterranean, we start this performance at its mouth – looking from the outside.

Small groups of familiar faces are gathering outside the Drill Hall in Rushcutters Bay. The tide is rising, and clouds threaten rain on the horizon. After a few minutes of waiting, the Drill Hall doors crack open. Walking inside, I let my eyes adjust to the darkened space. I take a seat on the floor amongst cushions in front of make-shift rows of chairs. Ivey and Rhiannon are seated on the floor too, flanking the audience on either side. Objects and mirrors dot the void – a smooth rock, limp plastic polymer fabric, a piece of coral (or is it a model of the inner ear canal?)  Before I can decipher this exhibition-cum-set design, Rhiannon rises from her seated position. Entering the space, her body begins moving with matter-of-fact precision. She jumps up and down, testing her buoyancy against the stable ground. Arcing and diving into the Tarkett, she slithers across the floor, as if trying to burrow into the earth. These impossible tasks, while striking my imagination, ultimately emphasise the materiality of the space. While Rhiannon performs, Ivey sits to my left writing in her notebook. I imagine this is what they do in the studio, watching each other and writing down what they see. It positions the dance as in-the-making – more than a rehearsal, not-quite rehearsed. I have the sense that anything may appear before me – that we are on the edge of a story unfolding itself.

When Rhiannon concludes she walks back to her cushion on my left. Ivey, to the right, reads her writing aloud into a microphone.

The dance will possess her with a flight of the pelvis …

Horrified by the dead weight of its frozen body …

Luck placed between big and middle toe …

Her words surprise me. They shimmer between speculative fabulation and anatomical description. The density of signs and symbols eschews any singular reading. Much of the writing is framed in future tense, ‘she will’, ‘the dance will’, become the site of premonition. This speaking generates a resolution to the short dance which preceded it, an interpretive comma which reorientates the audience toward the future. The loop, of dance becoming premonition becoming dance, is deeply satisfying. Staying for the full 2 hours, I recognise some recurring archetypes: the Dolphin Carcass, the Scorpion King, the Maggot Passengers, the Jewel and the Diamond. I am reminded of Eco-Philosopher Elizabeth Povenelli’s figures of ‘Geontology’: the Virus, the Desert, the Animist. Povinelli uses these figures, an extrapolation of Michelle Foucault’s four figures of Biopower, to question the governance of life under late-liberal capitalism. What has the right to life, and how can our cultural and political imaginaries gesture toward other ways of living/non-living? I think of the diamond, crystalising over 1 billion years.  I think of the maggot, the body within a body, turning death into life again. It takes an hour for me to realise I may not be watching a series of individual solos, but the same dance again and again. Not that any material is explicitly repeated, but something singular is accumulating. This is the same world along variating axes, the same gesture refracted through a jewel. We are deep in this dance together, watching movement resurface and plunge back into the collective imagination, like a dolphin coming up for air. It is such a generous invitation: to watch dance not from the outside but from within. 

Ivey and Rhiannon’s collaborator Del Lumanta is performing alongside the cyclical solos, building their ambient score through textural guitar looping across the 2 hours. As Del’s soundscape ominously thickens, Ivey and Rhiannon’s gestures border on ecological horror. Gouging out eyes, mouths and bellybuttons, I imagine a gutted fish spewing out its insides. Their shirts, Ivey’s ribbed down the middle and Rhiannon’s restitched along the diagonal, gently remind me of Frankenstein’s composite body. While Ivey and Rhiannon are capable of incredible virtuosity, nothing beautiful remains uncomplicated in Premonition… by an unstable or grotesque subversion. I recall a recurring image of Ivey and Rhiannon strung up into a stretched arabesque (I’m thinking of the “Scorpion King”), as their ungrounded foot lifts further toward the sky. The words ‘catch’ and ‘lure’ crystalise in my mind. As I am drawn deeper into the dance, hypnotised by Del’s looping electric guitar, I begin to wonder if I am the fish ensnared in their trap. Their premonition is not only speculative but sinister, and I am not sure if I should trust my interpretive guides.

During another cycle, Ivey uses her finger to trace the distance between her ear and her eye socket. Extending her arms out, she triangulates her limbs from one corner of the room to the other. This gesture catches and doubles in the mirror hanging from the rafters. Ivey and Rhiannon both draw attention to their bodies as measuring devices, using arms to scale space, tongues to taste edges and feet to stay balanced. I think about the processes of measurement, navigation and observation which foreground western knowledge-making regimes. The magic and witchery implied in the predictive power of the ‘premonition’ moves beyond what is easily measurable. The objective tools used to fix the world in place are destabilised in Premonitions…, which lends the process of improvisation another quality. Rather than an expression of an individual’s inner world, Ivey and Rhiannon harness their bodies as devices for understanding their own shifting orientation. While being framed as a ‘solo’, these individual bodies are sites of enmeshed relation – between the viewer and their watcher, the body and its environment, a dancer and the possibility of their movement.

Ivey and Rhiannon finish the last cycle of their two-hour descent dancing together. They do not acknowledge one another, instead allowing their individual offerings to overlap and contradict. Del’s score has built to breaking point – a pressure of sound and language echoing in an incoherent pool of symbolism, archetypes and premonitions. Rhiannon exposes her armpit and gives it a lick, salt crystals meeting tongue with a glint of humour in her eye while Ivey spins like a tornado in the upper right corner. The beauty of Premonition is its simple structure, able to contain the many wild offsprings of its untimely collaborators. I look forward to the next dance Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal anticipates.

SUNCUT

Choreographer and Performer: Chloe Chignell

Sound and Performance: Mara Schwerdtfeger

Sound Collaborators: Steph Holl-Trieu, Amina Szecsödy

Presented by Critical Path, 24-25 January 2026

The Drill Hall, Critical Path, Rushcutters Bay, Gadigal and Birrabirragal Country

Supported by Critical Path, Artspace, Dancehouse, GC De Maalbeek, n22 Brussels, Kunstendecreet, Cité des arts, Paris.

Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal

Choreographers and Performers: Ivey Wawn & Rhiannon Newton

Sound and Performance: Del Lumanta

Presented by Performance Space, 23-24 May 2026

The Drill Hall, Critical Path, Rushcutters Bay, Gadigal and Birrabirragal Country

Supported by Performance Space, Art Gallery NSW, Artspace, Critical Path and ReadyMade Works

Joshua Di Mattina-Beven (they/them) is a performance artist and writer currently working on unceded Bunurong/Boonwurrung lands. Joshua graduated from UNSW Art and Design in 2024 with a double degree in Fine Arts/Arts (Sculpture/Performance Studies), winning the Ross Steele Fine Art Prize. They have written alongside the filming of Deborah May’s Breakthroughs series in 2025 and published with Memo Magazine for MASS Memo in 2024.

Tammi Gissell yarns with Glory Tuohy-Daniell about Keeping Grounded

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. 

Phaedra Brown on Duels

It Takes 2 – 7 Duelling Dances

Eternity Playhouse, Darlinghurst, Saturday, 5th April 2026

Producer: Form Dance Projects

Works (in order of review):

Gust-age Georgette Sofatzis-Xuereb

Backshore Daniel Navarro Lorenzo

Platinum Avalon Ormiston & Molly Haringsma

The Scale Suan Kim

Entertain Me Eliza Cooper

The Object Hugo Poulet & Taiga Kita Leong

Nancy Duet Phillip Adams & Geoffrey Watson

Review by Phaedra Brown

That’s Two Thank You is a festival of duets presented by Form Dance Projects for the second year running. DUELS marks the competition portion of this event, for one night only at the Eternity Playhouse in Darlinghurst. This year featured vastly different work from choreographers, both emerging and more established, from New South Wales and further afield. Each work explored the form of the duet in a different way, some partnerships interacting directly with each other, others were on more individual trajectories. All the works, there were 7 in total, spanned the possibilities a duet might take: working in unison, partnering, and a more formulaic my-turn-your-turn structure. As Form’s Creative Director Paul Selwyn Norton’s opening remarks mentioned, the evening certainly “celebrated an appetite” for the exploration, and with all works around the ten-minute mark it will be interesting to see where they, be they winners or not, develop in the future.

GUST-AGE

Choreographer: Georgette Sofatzis-Xuereb

Performers: Stella Mackenzie & Malachi Sylvester

GUST-AGE was the first work of the evening. An alluring exploration of air as a physical sensation, this work featured floor fans that surrounded the dancers on the edge of the stage, buffeting them into movement. 

The work begins with one dancer upstage, feet planted, their arms flailing, torso bending, tossed around by gusts of air. The second dancer, downstage, stands steadfast, the wind in her hair. Each explore the variation in the air around them, finding where the wind hits their skin, hair, and clothing. Constantly searching for new stimulus, they seem to seek out pockets of warm, unmoving atmosphere with their extremities before being pushed in a different direction by the wind of the fans. The fans provide a real sensation that the dancers can search for in an indoor space that is stuffy and devoid of the natural ebbs and flows of air. With the dancers’ gaze directed inward, their search for the sensation of the wind is serious and introspective, but as their movements get larger in scale they find each other’s eyes and are drawn together.  

Once they reach one another it is as if the wind suddenly stops. Locked in an embrace, the air is sucked is out of their breezy exploration—the feeling of another solid body tethering them into stillness. They begin a unison phrase, their movement strong, purposeful, as if they’re holding steadfast in a storm. This work showcases the strength of these two dancers as they create a lush palate of falling and catching, and sharpness that contrasts their initial breathiness. GUST-AGE is a corporeal yearning for the support that the air provides when in motion. As a duet it shows how a breeze can be some indication of another affecting body, human or planetary, passing by.

BACKSHORE

Choreographer: Daniel Navarro Lorenzo

Performers: Kate Arber & Tara Gilmour  

This is the other work in this line up where I felt the choreography distinctly drew from sensation and landscape. Produced in collaboration with AUSTI Dance and Physical Theatre, Daniel Navarro Lorenzo’s choreography created a distinct environment in which the dancers, Kate Arber and Tara Gilmour, played.

A wide, shallow, silver bowl filled with water is carried on stage and placed on the floor in the centre of the stage. The performers sit either side and begin to ceremoniously drip water over their palms and heads. A sweet, plucky melody plays. Under the exposed heritage-listed dome of the Eternity Playhouse theatre, the light floral dresses they wear, and the water, give this work a sense of place: it has the feeling of a garden or greenhouse in spring—a setting from which the movement is drawn.

Circling the bowl and each other the dancers frolic like birds around a birdbath. Sweeping limbs, outstretched balances. Gazing out around the space, their eyes fresh and hopeful, discovering the world around them. They play a game, one trying to catch onto the other’s feet. There is an ominous change in music and the warm dusky lighting turns cold. The dancers manipulate each other, pulling and catching with moments of suspension. The movement is technical and balletic; with leg extensions, back bends, it has an ethereal quality. Facing each other they punch into the air next to the other’s head and chest before melting their arms back. This motif repeats again and again, like an embrace that never comes to fruition. There is a sense of a particular memory or place that the choreography is reacting toward. The work leaves me with a sense of a longing for freedom and play, and a heartbreak for lost games and rituals.

PLATINUM

Choreographer/performers: Avalon Ormiston & Molly Haringsma

This work takes us to a very different, alien world.

Avalon Ormiston and Molly Haringsma begin entangled under a mesh covered in platinum blonde hair. Together they make a blob that pulsates and crackles—a jumble of limbs, heads, and even more platinum blonde hair. To the sound of a thumping heartbeat, they emerge … writhing … dressed identically with black skirts, white collared shirts, and matching long, straight-haired, platinum blonde wigs. They’re two uncanny Barbie dolls, birthed of the alien hair-blob. These supernatural twins embrace, tenderly, their arms explore the air on either side of the other’s torso, jabbing and retracting like tentacles. As a poppy, catwalk song starts, they begin a robotic conversation, exploring how their bodies connect and come apart, like two halves of a whole, in and out of unison. As they dance together they are acutely aware of the other, but also self-aware of their appearance, constantly fixing their hair that is getting more and more unkempt.

In a strobe light there is a flash of a slow motion, hair pulling, fight scene. The light turns warm, the twins fix their hair. 

In the second part of this duet, the performers produce two square mirrors, that, when leant up against their legs, cover from their feet up to around the knee. In the mirrors we see the twins in quadruple – two identical creatures reflected in two identical mirrors. Their bodies become segmented by the mirror, doubling and obscuring parts of their bodies. This creates a different jumble of limbs and hair, a flat puzzle rather than a blob. They hold up the mirrors to each other in a final merging of their bodies and personas. There is one final embrace. One twin exits as the other is left alone, pining.

THE SCALE

Choreographer: Suan Kim

Performers: Suan Kim & Sojung Bae

This work looks at the augmentation of the body in a more human way.

The lights come up on a small wire skeleton, standing on a plinth at the back of the stage. The stage goes dark and when re-illuminated, the statue is gone, but the dancers have entered. A laser light is placed on the floor. When its red light hits the feet of the dancers it looks as if they are dancing on a glowing red line. As they move, whatever part of the body touches the floor is illuminated or outlined by the red line. One dancer picks up the laser and shines it onto her body, the red line moving up and down. When it reaches her throat there is a moment of suffocation before she is released. The red light dissects their bodies: top from bottom, right from left, one arm, one leg, the head, scrutinised by the red line. 

Facing, their arms cut across each other’s bodies, side to side, as if they are now dissecting each other. Here, and throughout the piece, their movement is intricate but broken up with the loosening of the body into trips and stumbles. The choreography is a mix of robotic and ragdoll. In one moment, they find the ground, collapsing, folding around each other, then just as quickly their limbs begin searching sharply, clinically along the ground. One dancer crumples to the floor while the other stands up on the plinth. With arms outstretched, she holds aloft two mannequin arms, duplicating the length of her own. She seems burdened by their weight for a moment before they become a true extension of her body, using them to reach further out into the space. In the final moment of the piece, as she drops her prosthetics; there is a sense of loss.

I think back to the wire skeleton at the start of the piece. Was this an aspirational symbol? A longing for a more efficiently designed type of body? Or perhaps it was a forewarning that the search for robotic perfection is more sinister than it seems.

ENTERTAIN ME

Choreographer: Eliza Cooper

Performers: Eliza Cooper & Xanthe Creighton

Another clever take on the relationship between humans and technology, ENTERTAIN ME looks at the consequences of and for dance that is increasingly viewed through our phones.

The two dancers, dressed in rhinestoned caps, long sleeved form-fitting tops and parachute pants, appear side by side. The first half of this piece is made up of dance that is classic Tik Tok. Sharp gestural bounces, bops, shuffles. A clawed hand shakes in front a gaping mouth. Nodding, teeth, tongue, and most of all an attitude of nonchalant playfulness that is a staple of viral Tik Tok dance trends – a weird mix of commercial Jazz or Hip Hop and a new, increasingly codified type of movement that is designed specifically to fit within the frame of a phone screen.

The performers mime taking a selfie and checking it, becoming so absorbed in their pretend phone screen that the rest of the work is performed with their faces into their palms where phones would be. Eliza Cooper and Xanthe Creighton perform a stepping pattern that increases with complexity. Running, skipping, shuffling, sharp changes in direction and even rolling to the floor, all with their faces glued to the would-be phone screen. This movement is underscored with an ominous drone. The performance is equally ominous. In stark contrast to the charisma of the first half of the work, the dancers are now vacant faced, not seeing each other or the world around them.

Given Cooper’s practice in Flamenco and other folk-dance styles, I begin to read their stepping pattern as a folk-dance. ENTERTAIN ME becomes a comment on the way that Tik Tok has become a place for community dance. However, witnessing the solitude of the dancers, it is devoid of real-life interaction, we are left to wonder what the consequences of this new, online, folk-dance might be.

THE OBJECT

Choreographer/Performers: Hugo Poulet & Taiga Kita Leong

Here we see a work that explores high-stakes physicality. The two dancers, dressed in black and dark grey jeans and hoodies emerge from one side of the stage. They cross right to left, then left to right. First slowly rolling and passing around each other, then in a broken walk, a run, then a strut. During one crossing a dancer falls into an outburst of tormented spirals, transitioning from floor to air in a series of whirling rolls and jumps. This repeats, and the other dancer has a similar break away from the crossing structure.

Next Hugo Poulet and Taiga Kita Leong circle each other, maintaining eye contact, getting closer, as if preparing to battle. They begin an exhibition of highly physical floorwork. An arhythmic phrase of rolling and falling. They remove their hoodies bookmarking a new section of the work.

In a flickering spotlight one dancer seems to power-down in broken fall to the floor. He lies breathing. The other performer attempts to lift him up one body part at a time. A leg is pulled up and it hovers in the air, then an arm, the head, the torso gets stuck in place so that the dancers is stacked from floor to standing. The dancer hovers momentarily on his own weight before he begins to slump again. Thus follows a phrase of falling and restacking, one desperately trying to make the other carry his own weight: carries, spins, catches mid-fall, a hoist of the ankle mid-roll.

In the final image of the piece the two are locked shoulder to shoulder, unsure who is supporting who.

NANCY DUET

Choreographer/Performers: Phillip Adams & Geoffrey Watson

This work stands alone in this line up for its maturity, brought to us by the individual and collective experience of Phillip Adams and Geoffrey Watson; a depth of research can be felt underneath the choreography of the NANCY DUET.

Adams and Geoffrey Watson enter the stage nude, with bandanas tied around their penises. My mind goes immediately to the Hanky Code (or ‘flagging’) : the use of bandanas to wordlessly communicate sexual preferences.

This minimal costuming places the work in a world of queerness, but also draws our attention to the way that bodies can so intimately connect to each other when moving together. NANCY DUET, of all the works in in this evening of DUELS, showcased the most finely tuned connection between the dueting partners. While the performers rarely looked at each other, they moved through their journey together with a deep, intuitive sense of where the other body had been and was going to be.

The performers stand side by side, heads turned towards the right, and pause. An emotional, tender piano underscores this initial moment and the piece that follows. The music is spacious with ebbs and flows. It beautifully compliments the poignant spaciousness also present within the choreography.

Adams and Watson walk to a new place on stage and lay, practically, down onto the floor, torsos raised and hands gesturing, caressing the air. They cross the space again, face down the diagonal holding hands aloft, their fingers barely touch in a moment of fragile connection. They walk and face toward the back, they gesture to the sky.

The choreography plays out as the performers repeatedly walk across the stage to arrive in postures like these. Simple but definitive gestures; sometimes statuesque, always with a precise attention to the hands and the gaze. It feels as though they are simultaneously the statues they see and visitors to the gallery they occupy. There is a reverence for the pathway taken to arrive and it feels as though they are revisiting these postures as artefacts. In turn they are allowing us, the audience, to be privy to important, pinpointed moments in time. Sometimes from their walk they fall into precise and unembellished movement sequences: a balletic plié that ends apologetically when the dancers drop their shoulders and walk away; a fluffing of hands in front of the chest; a spin out of nowhere across the stage; lying down facing the sky with a rock side to side, tossing as if wrapped in a bedsheet. In the soundtrack, intimate calls of pleasure can be heard, just over the swelling piano. The tenderness in this duet made it my piece of the night.

WINNERS & LOSERS?

At the conclusion of the evening the overall winner of DUELS would be announced, but we were also asked to vote for the audience choice award. Looking at my choices I couldn’t help but feel that each of the performances was so distinct, each drawn from such a different place of experience, style and purpose, that there couldn’t possibly any uniform criteria on which to judge each work other than personal preference.

In the end THE SCALE by Suan Kim was the overall winner and GUST-AGE by Georgette Sofatzis Xuereb took the audience choice award.

This kind of competitive process has been part of the dance landscape before— from the Keir Choreographic Awards, which ran for 10 years and is celebrated in the book Competing Choreographies, to TV franchise So You Think You Can Dance. But while this evening was framed as a competition, there seemed to be a real sense of camaraderie between performers on stage when the awards were announced. From the buzz in the foyer when the audience was given the opportunity to think about and discuss why we liked what we liked, the sense of community was also palpable. I got the sense that the real joy of the night was not who won or didn’t win, but the opportunity to watch performance; to see all these new works and wonder what might be next for them all.

DUELS

Eternity Playhouse, Darlinghurst, Saturday, 5th April 2026

Choreographers

Georgette Sofatzis-Xuereb Gust-age

Daniel Navarro Lorenzo Backshore

Avalon Ormiston & Molly Haringsma Platinum

Suan Kim The Scale

Eliza Cooper Entertain Me

Hugo Poulet & Taiga Kita Leong The Object

Phillip Adams & Geoffrey Watson Nancy Duet

Lighting Designer: Theodore Carroll

Lighting Operator: Marissa Argyris

Producing Organisation: FORM Dance Projects

Producer: Tobiah Booth-Remmers

Creative Director (FORM) Paul Selwyn Norton

Phaedra Brown is an independent dancer, choreographer, and producer. Her current practice draws on a collage of elements from movement, choreography, writing, and curation.

Bianca Yeung on side.step

side.step – a glance into eight new works IN PROGRESS

Producer: Ella Watson-Heath

Works (in order of review):

Joan Jack Tuckerman

Slip Niamh O'Sullivan

untitled (-rupt III) Alice Weber

The Hind Sabrina Muszynski

Flop Phaedra Brown

Vessel (Working Title) Ashleigh Veitch

DUSTY: Chapter 2 Madeleine Harms & Riley Fitzgerald

Tell Distance Nasim Patel with Louie Wisby

Balmain Town Hall, Friday 14 November, 2025

The inaugural side.step, an initiative of dancer & producer Ella Watson-Heath, excelled as a platform for championing independent dance, with eight short works split across two one hour programs. Audiences were thrust into the distinctive worlds of ten choreographer/performers, who transformed the cavernous, high-ceilinged Balmain Town Hall into an intimate performance space for three consecutive nights in November 2025.

Balmain Town Hall is one of seven venues that the inner west council has offered to individuals and groups with a creative practice at a reduced or waived fee. Eligible recipients include Not-For-Profit Organisations “delivering creative projects with community benefit” and emerging artists requiring space to develop and showcase new work.

Ella Watson-Heath began side.step with the help of Critical Path, who provided twenty hours of free studio space at their Drill Hall in Rushcutters Bay or at the Balmain Town Hall for the artists chosen through an application process. The performances at Balmain followed. Watson-Heath’s stated objective was to offer “free studio space for choreographers to test their ideas and to provide a platform for these early experimentations to be presented to an audience in a low-stakes performance setting.”

The venue, with its federation-era stage, shining deep-crimson curtain and expansive wooden floor was an apt setting for a series of works-in-progress that traversed the grandiose and the mundane, the past and the future. Balmain Town Hall is renovated to meet today’s needs as a community venue while maintaining its 1888 stately charm. For side.step roughly forty five chairs were arranged in a U-formation that hugged a 5x5m expanse of wooden floorboards extending from the foot of an elevated stage. Proximity to the dancers made for a great study of the dancer’s faces—the power of the performers’ gaze becoming a common thread binding all eight of the works.

The evening was split into Program A and Program B. Jack Tuckerman’s work JOAN opened Program A on the night I attended. Audiences entered the hall to find Tuckerman propped up on the floor at the foot of the small proscenium arch at the back of the space. He was facing two mirrors leaning against the rise of the stage, cross-lit by red par cans. As we took our seats, we watched each other watching Tuckerman in the reflection. The mirrors were angled so that from my seat, I couldn’t see myself but rather the face of someone across the room. Tuckerman was naked save for a g-string made of imitation chainmail, and we watched as he dressed himself in the dim, moody light. He emerged in a matching chainmail bikini and coif-like bondage mask, with skin literally glittering, and turned away from the mirrors and walked forward to face the audience.

Tuckerman’s movement began from a standing position, with arms wrapped around his chest. A deep breath activated the sensuous expansion of his arms, which reached to the corners of the room before drifting back by his sides. A ripple through his torso brought him into a balance with arms and one leg outstretched. Tuckerman’s soft, careful movement was then accented with a series of isolations, arms and wrists bending at sharp angles, torso being held rigid before melting into frictionless fluidity once more. The stilted movement was paired with the sounds of clicks and whirs evoking the manual photo development process, he was in the photography darkroom referenced in the program note: “Looking for redemption in the darkroom, I put on my armour.” The soundscape brought us on the journey, out of the town hall and into an intimate space where we are invited to look, really look at the artist. In JOAN we question which parts of Tuckerman’s identity we are observing through a body that is simultaneously naked yet clad in armour.

Niamh O’Sullivan’s Slip explored “the weight and wonder of intergenerational womanhood through memory, movement and material” (program note), and it masterfully transported the audience between time and place.

For an extended period at the start we hear only O’Sullivan’s voice, a spoken text recording played over speakers. Her body is on the floor of the proscenium stage, turned away from us and covered in swathes of shining material in earthy, burnt umber tones. The words paint portraits of mothers, grandmothers, friends, “women who weave me, hold me”. A sister who appears as “white butterflies, living between worlds”.  The words lap over O’Sullivan and lap over us: gentle, heartfelt, traversing lightness, heaviness, tender with touches of grief, “to soften is not to surrender”. Lost in the words, this text of vulnerability and strength, I forget O’Sullivan’s physical body until she begins to rise from the floor, slowly, her back to us. She wears a floor-length dress with short sleeves, the bulk of it crafted from a tan, sheer material, with a ruffled tier at the bottom in brown silk that catches the light. Throughout the piece we see the many ways this costume can be worn:  the outer layer pulled up to obscure her face, like a wrapped robe, or turned around to be open backed.

As the recorded voices leave us, O’Sullivan begins to cycle through a series of repetitive, sweeping movements from her stance in the centre of the stage with her back to us. Long hair swinging, she remains on a flat plane, passing through deep plies, head dropping to one side, torso following, then scooping up to standing to complete the circle. There’s a sense of ritual, of familiarity shared with us as we are lulled into a pattern of weight transference, acceleration, deceleration, heightened by the rhythmic tones of Romanian band Shukar Collective’s track Verbal Fight. When O’Sullivan finally reveals her face, I let out a small gasp. Having felt the presence of all the beings O’Sullivan has played vessel to, it is immensely gratifying to meet the artist face to face, in a body described in the program as “shedding and remembering, embodying the strength that came before”.

There is a short wooden stool placed, upstage centre. O’Sullivan stands on top of it to hang her gown on a hook high above. It drapes down, a memory shed, transformed into a set piece that feels distinctly historical with its sepia tones. Now stripped of her layers, clothed in just a simple skin colour slip, we re-meet O’Sullivan whose lone tantalising leg teases us as she re-enters from side stage, slowly bringing the rest of her body as if drawn on by invisible forces. Playful and mystical, now the soundtrack is by Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya, O’Sullivan traverses the stage, unfettered and weightless before vacating the stage, leaving us with only the memory of what she shared.

Alice Weber’s untitled (-rupt III), the second work in Program B, involved a different experience of undressing. Early in the piece, Weber stalked the perimeter of the performance space, both in front and behind the seated audience. I found myself pinned by Weber’s gaze as she bore down toward me like a possessed ballet teacher in a black wrap skirt and character shoes. I scrambled to classify the expression on her face. It was fiery, yet hollowing, rendering me exposed and spooked. It is the power of the past.

Weber described untitled (-rupt III) as “Drawing on old vocabularies…Like a ghost, choreography is a collapse of time, and time passes through you or it passes you by.” This work was ritual-like: at times Weber dancing in bare feet and flowing culottes, making and unmaking haunted classical ballet moves; distorted, staccato port de bras; domineering second positions; one hand in typical port de bras and the other forming the shape of a gun. The gun hand commanded our attention – where did it come from? Who or what is it aimed at?

Weber is spectre-like, forcing you to see something that isn’t there, confronting you with a feeling of being emptied, passed through, by a spirit that shows little regard for anything but her own will. She effortlessly extends into the wider hall space – her otherworldliness is emphasised as she lifts the sturdy, painted window frame on the left side of the hall. I am struck by the haunting beauty of Weber’s profile, gazing out into blackness. What does she see?

Weber returns to the main floor with cupped hands. Did she catch a moth. It takes a moment to work out that she is holding a dandelion-like, moth vine seed – it’s fluffy, soft and fragile and drifts along the length of Weber’s outstretched arm. Haughty and imposing, Weber was mesmerising to watch and did an inspiring job of filling the cavernous Balmain Town Hall space with fleeting, haunting energies.

Sabrina Muszynski’s The Hind was the second work in Program B and investigated Muszynski’s personal relationship with Highland dancing re-imagined; taking the traditional Highland arm positions of the male stag and subverting them to embody the image of a female red deer.

Muszynski addresses us directly, in an unwavering, unfaltering voice, contextualising the Highland dance world that we are about to encounter. In lulling, dulcet tones, she gives us a crash course in the complex role that gender plays in Highland Dancing. Despite its 11th century origins, women were forbidden from performing publicly until the late 19th century. We learn of the enormous competitive elements of Highland dance and the firm divide between male and female competitors. But Muszynski also tells us stories of mothers, grandmothers, and facts about female red deer (the ‘hind’ which names the work).  I had seen Muszynski work with this theme before, exploring her ties to Highland dancing with pointedly dry humour combined with deep earnestness as she commands the stage. Muszysnki’s script is aways direct. There is nothing subtle in the way she interweaves facts about the hind with statements about the complex gendered nature of this competitive dance form; but that is why it works, and I can’t help feel that in receiving Muszynski like this, direct and to the point, we are also meeting the women who have raised the artist to speak frankly and without fear.

Muszynski offers us a length of family tartan and describes its paternal origins. In the fabric alone are generations of questions around culture and gender roles. To wear it is to ask where did we come from and what does this mean for me now? Muszynski tells us: “the answer lies in three generations, one tartan and a circle of hinds.” We mull on this while Muszynski performs the dance of the hind – introducing the forgotten female counterpart to the stag that inspires some of the best known movements of Highland Dancing. Muszynski’s hands form two ears above her head rather than the traditional outstretched arms resembling male antlers. Her movements are quick, energised, she bounds across the floor, intricate hand and foot positions painting a homage to tradition and embodiment, a representation of what the future could be. The Hind ends with a recording of a conversation between Muszynski and her mother. Their words linger as Muszynski disappears from view. “It’s about the who. Who we are and where we’re going.”

Muszynski’s word-filled work provided a counterpoint to Phaedra Brown’s Flop, which takes place largely in silence or in response to a stuttering, umming, ahhing recording of Brown’s disembodied voice. Third on Program A, Phaedra is dressed like a Dirty Dancing era auditionee in high-waisted black underwear, a fitted black tee, sneakers and socks. She puts on an epic display of how the body can speak whilst words, minced up and aimless, can prove futile. Posing upstage right at the invisible threshold to the floor/stage, Brown executes her moves with exacting quality. She is a dancer who questions every move, breath, extension, contraction, right down to the minutiae of how a toe is placed or where an ear is pointed.

Traversing the diagonal toward downstage left (where I was seated), I marvel at how I am transformed from chuckling empathising audience member (the doubting dancer is such a familiar character) to a witness feeling genuine sympathy and concern for the performer. As Brown contorts under the eye of the invisible, critical, disembodied voice in the hall’s back right corner, I fear that her persona will combust under a desperation to please, to get it exactly right.

Under the guidance of the voice, Brown then returns back to the corner she began from, but not before retrieving a tote bag, chair and cardboard box overflowing with items from a storage cupboard. The tower of objects, awkwardly wrangled, slow her down with every step. The audience laughs, sometimes with discomfort as Brown makes the journey, seemingly through a series of decisions that only make her task harder—such as clamping a notebook with a pen trapped in its pages between her teeth, while dragging the upturned chair with her wrist.

I feel relief when Phaedra Brown re-emerges, beginning a hilarious interlude of repeated falls, unexpected, humour-filled motions that are signature modes of her practice. Her body becomes lolloping and, yes, floppy, a boulder with corners rolling slowly down a rocky mountain, a piece of cooked spaghetti held upright then left to the fate of gravity. This all happens to the yodel-y, rollicking track ‘Rather Low’ by Nick Shoulders. It's fun. But the conclusion of Flop embodies the performer’s worst-case scenario: what if one were literally to flop during performance? Fall on their face, three times over even? It seems the answer lies somewhere for Brown between boneless liberation and euphoric exhaustion via strenuous cardiac exertion.

Ashleigh Veitch evokes a similarly otherworldly quality in Vessel (Working Title). The opener for Program B when I saw it, we first meet Veitch as a humped figure draped in a large piece of lightweight, red tulle. As she begins to move, the tightly netted fabric forms a shifting veil that catches and refracts the light, such that Veitch’s face and body are obscured and revealed interchangeably.

Veitch’s movement quality is as textured as the tulle that covers her. Watching I cannot help but feel that this is an artist who has found her voice and developed a fluency in her self-authored language. Veitch has an impressive list of solo works behind her, and it is exciting to see this new development as a clear extension of her existing body of work to date.

I am entranced by another powerful gaze as Veitch peers up at us from beneath the tulle. At one point she lays on her back with knees bent and feet planted before arching up out of the floor. The movement reveals Veitch’s upside-down face, insistent eyes that cut through the reddish covering that separates us. She seems to convulse but with control. I am mesmerised as she transforms, moving in ways that seem so alien while conveying a yearning that is very human.

It is some time before she transitions to standing, still veiled by fabric, and begins to raise her arms in ways that evoke Greek sculpture, but the neglected sort, draped in fabric and accruing dust in some private collection. Eventually, Veitch abandons the fabric, crawling precariously on all fours past the red mesh that is pooled by her feet. It inspires a sense of triumph, that at long last she has escaped the net that enclosed her.

But maybe that’s just my take – studying Veitch, nothing has shifted in her expression. Her body holds tight to constraints of its own, even with the fabric long left behind.

The closing pieces for both programs require audiences to leave their seats and reposition themselves. DUSTY: Chapter 2 by Madeline Harms & Riley Fitzgerald was the closing act for Program A, a follow on to DUSTY: Chapter 1 which was developed with the support of ProFound and DUTI Studios

We sit again in a U-shape but at the other side of the hall, our back to the proscenium looking at a detailed, lamp-lit living room set, in front of closed balcony doors. A pair of black leather boxing gloves sit on a square of astro turf, ringed by lengths of wired fairy lights on the left, while an armchair, narrow side table with drawers and a record player, standing lamp and vase of orange roses are on the right. What follows is an extended narrative reminiscent of a mid-century cowboy film but centred on stories that unfold in the home. Harm and Fitzgerald’s work is subversive from the get-go, placing bodies in distorted forms that have us leaning in to decipher what exactly we’re seeing.

The pair enter as a mass of conjoined limbs held together with heavy-duty silver duct tape – Harms taking laboured steps with a wide stance while Fitzgerald clings to her front like a child. Harms is dressed like the Man of the House in slacks and a button up while Fitzgerald wears a butter yellow, cap-sleeved summer dress which pokes out from between the reams of silver tape that keeps him bound to Harms. It’s a sight that takes a moment to process. At first it’s a blob of human-ness. Harms invites an audience member to remove her from her carrier, with scissors (they’re in the top drawer). An audience member stands, walks over and begins the task.

As the work unfolds, we hear Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, and observe a story of gendered co-dependency and violence. There are solos and duets, each holding us with rhythmic displays of athleticism. It’s a multi-sensory piece of storytelling that seems to live at the edge of contemporary dance, cinema and theatre.

Although there are no screens involved, for me the work feels intensely cinematic. It’s intimate, often shocking, infused with intensity and love, but there’s also something darker, a power struggle that rumbles throughout and culminates in a final debauched scene where Harms’ character reigns supreme and triumphant over Fitzgerald. The latter is reduced to an unprotesting, debased plaything, wrists and body crudely bound in fairy lights. He stands before the balcony doors like a Christmas tree gone wrong. Ending in a blaze of glory, Harms yanks down his boxers and spanks him with the bunch of roses before kicking him unceremoniously into the night while orange petals rain down.

The final work in side.step Program B was Nassim Patel’s Tell Distance, which offers up a simple anecdote that slowly unravels into a time warping, giddy precursor to existential dread. The story is, I think I’ve got this right, that Patel’s mum and dad “once flipped their car then had a cup of tea”. To clarify, they flipped their “big, red car …. melted into sand” and a couple staying in a caravan park across the road sat them down for a cup of tea. I may not be remembering this correctly, but then again, as audiences none of us probably know what is left or right or up or down in Tell Distance, as Patel recounts this story over and over again.

For this work we’ve been asked to move, guided to stand at the foot of the stage where Patel sits on a chair, mirroring his position in a video of himself projected to his right. The video has choppily editing and inspires joy when we realise that the live Patel’s purpose is to replicate his projected self in perfect synchronicity, right down to the glitches and awkward pauses, detailed gestures and minute shifts in posture of his videoed self.

We hear the story of the car flip retold to the point where each detail has rearranged the chronology. It is immensely satisfying to watch Patel parrot himself so exactly – but my mind battles the desire to piece together the logic of his words with the equal and opposite desire to switch off and let play this uncanny display of independent dance posing as brain-rot. This dilemma is only amplified when Patel’s collaborator, Louie Wisby, arrives on stage. Everything happens again but now there’s two of them! Four of them! And a new conversational retelling that is innately poetic:

LW:        We were just watching our shadows extending along the horizon.

NP:         How far did it go?

LW:        We never found out because the sun set.

Patel plays into our uncertainties. One of his repeated lines is “I think I might’ve got parts of the story wrong”, while Wisby speaks for us: “did you make that up or is it real?”.

Tell Distance is hilarious, witty and incisive. Patel shows us how a simple formula can create a complex network of questions, and the work embodies the questionable nature of truth and the inaccuracy in digital storytelling and 21st century identities.

Ella Watson-Heath’s side.step was a powerful reminder of the breadth of skill, knowledge and talent that is present across Sydney’s the independent dance sector. One hopes that this will become an ongoing platform for developing and presenting independent dance by independent dance makers in the city’s inner west. Watson-Heath’s care and craft in developing side.step was obvious, evidenced in the very smooth running of the evening which she operated alongside Kieran Clancy. There was also another essential element to side.step and to the initiatives of the Inner West Council in collaboration with Critical Path: there is a true sense of community already palpable in this new venture and its new home.

side.step

Balmain Town Hall, 370 Darling Street, Balmain, 14-16 November

Artists PROGRAM A

Jack Tuckerman JOAN

Niamh O'Sullivan Slip

Phaedra Brown FLOP

Madeleine Harms & Riley Fitzgerald DUSTY: Chapter 2

Artists PROGRAM B

Ashleigh Veitch Vessel (Working Title)

Alice Weber untitled (-rupt III)

Sabrina Muszynski The Hind

Nasim Patel with Louie Wisby Tell Distance

Producer: Ella Watson-Heath

Sound/Lighting: Ella Watson-Heath and Kieran Clancy

Stagehand/Front of House: Kieran Clancy

Support from: Critical Path & Inner West Council

Bianca Yeung (she/her) works across dance, film and writing. She is interested in combining unlikely perspectives to tell stories that are surprising, funny and deeply moving.  

Lillian Shaddick on Amy Zhang's [gameboy]

The serious play of [gameboy]

Review by Lillian Shaddick

Sydney Dance Company’s INDance 2025, 16 August, 2025

Choreographer: Amy Zhang

Performer/Collaborators: William “Billy” Keohavong & Ko Yamada

Two men in black underwear drop onto a dark stage through beams of light. Like avatars entering a virtual world they must now navigate, their knees bounce, and their arms and torso momentarily fail from the impact of the fall. What follows are the trials these men subject themselves to as they follow the rules of some game they instinctively seem to know and inevitably obey.

They put on absurd protective gear – one in sneakers and a motorbike helmet, the other in ski googles and gumboots – which become unusable or only serve to disadvantage them as they compete in a series of absurd games: carrying an apple without using their hands; walking barefoot over Lego scattered across the floor. At the end of each mini competition the loser walks to the back of the stage with obedient neutrality where a table draped in a white cloth holds two toothbrushes and a tube of what appears to be (judging by its bright green hue and the performers’ painful reaction) wasabi. The audience quickly learns that this is the loser’s punishment and we respond with grimacing laughter as William “Billy” Keohavong  and Ko Yamada take turns at vigorously brushing their teeth with the bright green past. It is kind of funny as their neutral faces turn quickly into pained expressions and they desperately spit into a bucket and rinse out their mouths. Their suffering is silly and our reaction disturbingly familiar. We are a culture well-accustomed to watching pain turned into spectacle. As the tasks grow harder, Keohayong and Yamada’s pain becomes more apparent, but still we laugh. Without ceremony or tutelage, we adapt to the discomfort—normalise it, expect it, some even seem to revel in it.

[gameboy] is Amy Zhang’s first full length dance theatre work which premiered at Brisbane’s at DANCE24, presented by Metro Arts. The work was inspired by Japanese game shows, video games and internet culture where we can exist as avatars but are “put through the ringer and tested” as Zhang explained in the Sydney Dance Company InDance show notes.

In each scene the dancers move in different ways, produced in different worlds. In the opening they cycle through a sequence of controlled technical movements – bows, plies and lunges that slowly magnify with both performers working hard to maintain their carefully timed technical positions as the music shifts through various genres: stripped back syncopated percussion that turns to hip-hop then electronic beats. Later, near the end of the performance, Yamada and Keohavong become one. Their bodies entwine. They are indistinguishable from one another. They work together but also attempt to gain control over one another as their limbs wrap over and around and they use swift floor work to a minimal electronic soundtrack.

But it was the middle scene in this hour-long work that stayed with me.

Under dim light, the dancers sit on black metal chairs, expressionless. On a stage still strewn with multicoloured Lego bricks from the previous section, their hands hover in front of their stomachs, fingers gently splayed in a soft grip and twitch sporadically – they’re playing video games. With barely noticeable movement their bodies transform, shifting away from their neutral sitting positions. But I only notice this as my gaze drifts across from one dancer to the other. When I return after looking at one, I notice the other’s posture is different; each have moved to become just slightly more contorted. Then the choreographer Amy Zhang enters the stage like a casual stagehand and begins cleaning up the Lego. This mundane act draws my attention and distracts me from the gamers’ transformations. When I look back again, their bodies are bent in physically improbable positions – spines arched over the hard edge of the chairs, limbs extended to push the boundaries of what seems to be physiologically possible, and yet they continue to ‘play’, hands still gripped around imaginary controllers, eyes locked on the imagined monitor in front of them.

During this section I felt myself lose sight of their bodies. Each shift in posture was so minor and only slightly more extreme than the previous, but their final positions were dramatically distorted from how they began. We, the audience, had to accept their new distorted normal as it slowly crept up on us with each alteration only slightly more extreme than the previous.

Later that evening, I scrolled through my phone: scenes from the genocide in Gaza; an AI-generated deepfake of a street interview; an ad for sunglasses with a built-in camera; a clip of a man proclaiming women should not be in the workforce. I move between images—horrible, fake, promotional and shameful, in seconds—a parade of technological spectacle and social decline, terrible and absurd, all interwoven. While [gameboy] made no explicit reference to this kind of experience, the way Zhang explored different forms of gradual, imperceptible descension, distortion and alteration reminded me of how personal and societal change can occur; not necessarily through a sudden volcanic eruption but a kind of creeping lava spill. That middle scene of [gameboy] encapsulated this. When shifts are gradual and distractions sufficient, we struggle to see how far we have moved from where we began, normalising suffering, on stage and in life. It’s not sudden but steady, even when it’s happening to us or to others right in front of our eyes, it can be hard to recognise.

 [gameboy] ends with what appears to be a light-hearted romp: a bouncy K-pop track plays, and Keohavong and Yamada perform a perky, tightly choreographed routine on loop under a nice warm, colourful, active light. But their neutral faces slowly morph into exaggerated smiles— mouths turned upwards, and teeth bared in a forced performance of joy. The audience laughs and cheers. I smiled too—you cannot help but respond to the layering of ‘happy’ signifiers. It feels like a fun, light way to end the performance. But there is something eerie about it too. [gameboy] reminds us of how easily we are distracted, how we are able to overlook and to turn away from disturbing truths often hidden behind fake smiles and one swipe away from a funny cat video.

[gameboy]

Sydney Dance Company’s INDance 2025, Week 1, August 14-16, 2025

Neilson Studio, Hickson Rd, Sydney

Choreographer: Amy Zhang

Performer/Collaborators: William “Billy” Keohavong & Ko Yamada

Sound Design: Jackson Garcia

Contributing Composer: Maxwell “The Flood” Douglas

Lighting Design: Theodore Carroll

Lillian Shaddick is a freelance professional dancer and teacher, an active participant in various Sydney based dance scenes. Her Masters investigated the commercialisation and appropriation of samba no pé in Australia and her PhD looked at the embodied experience of learning and dancing flamenco; both were completed within the discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies (University of Sydney). 

Phaedra Brown on MSTM (Martin del Amo, Sue Healey, Tra Mi Dinh, Mitchell Christie)

CRAFTING COLLABORATION

Campbelltown Arts Centre, 7 November, 2025

Choreographer/Performers: Martin del Amo, Sue Healey, Tra Mi Dinh, Mitchell Christie

Review by Phaedra Brown

MSTM is a collaborative creation between four artists: Martin del Amo, Sue Healey, Tra Mi Dinh and Mitchell Christie. This work asked questions. “What happens when four distinct dance artists create a work from scratch, each moving fluidly between the roles of choreographer and performer? How do they retain their individuality while forging a collective presence?” All performers contributed equally as choreographers and performers and their challenge was to convey to an audience the process and mode of the exchange of knowledge between them. During the process of development they were intent on making space for their individual ways of working and to foster the practice of non-hierarchical teamwork. To quote the programme notes:  

In the current cultural climate, opportunities for independent dance artists to develop and present new work are increasingly rare. Against this backdrop Campbelltown Arts Centre’s extraordinary invitation almost sounded too good to be true: four dance artists from different generations and distinct practices creating a full-length work together from scratch. Of course, we jumped at the opportunity.

From the outset, the project felt both radical and expansive. It offered us a non-hierarchical space to exchange, transmit, and share authorship. Spread across three intensive development periods within a single year, we were able to keep the momentum alive while allowing ideas to mature — a rare luxury in the fast-paced and often fragmented world of independent practice.

This work achieved all of the above, and throughout we experienced the product of this generous collaboration. As audience we came to understand the similarities and differences between the performers, but saw both celebrated. Martin del Amo, Sue Healey, Tra Mi Dinh, Mitchell Christie are refined performers in their own right, but I was stuck by the way they were able to not only capture the essence of their own movement, but the way they were able to search for the essence of each other’s.

This was a unique and very special work of choreography. It took a simple idea – to collaborate – and turned it into a show that was crafted with complexity and performed with sense of play and discovery. 

To begin we were taken on an unusual journey into the theatre at Campbelltown Arts Centre. Heading outside into the garden surrounded courtyard we were ushered into a small holding room and met there with multiple screens and the four performers.

Martin, on one side of the room, was continuously re-arranging four square boards showing the letters M, S, T and M, the first initial of each performer and the name of the work. He changes one letter out for another and gives us a glimpse of what was to come– all the combinations and relationships these four performers had to play with. Tucked into the opposite corner of the room Sue was manoeuvring a projector which she shone onto Mitchell and Tra Mi, superimposing close-up footage of their filmed bodies onto their real moving bodies. Two large rectangles, side by side on the wall above us, featured whole body footage, the performers traversing both screens—walking, falling, running, and dancing in and out of view. It was as if they were chasing each other across frames.

We were then ushered onto the stage, passing Martin who was grinning ear to ear, welcoming everyone to the world of MSTM. We paused backstage for a moment behind curtains, in a holding state of anticipation for what was to come, before the curtain opened and we all walked across the stage and to our seats.

Once seated, we find Mitchell downstage in a slow, controlled rotation, forming and retracting from shapes, guiding the air around him with his hands. He is soon joined by Martin, and in the same state they cross arms and bodies, navigating their intersecting pathways hands-first. As they shift to the centre of the stage Tra Mi and Sue circle them with contrasting movement that is sharper and faster, but just as precise. The four join into one group for just a second before swapping partners. Two split off and re-join, then a different pair break out of the group. Then they are all together for a second, before the group continues to split in choreography that fractures almost as soon as it unifies. They leave and arrive in and out of poses – gestures referring to each other and the space around them but elongated through the arms to become choreographic. Each performer begins to flow in their own timing.  The essence of the movement becomes their own and they each begin to find an individual trajectory. Poses meld together into a phrase of movement. Strict detail is lost as the speed increases.

The flow between duet, quartet and solo, unison, near unison and opposition gives a cyclical, methodical feeling. This beginning section of the work spends time highlighting what seem to be all the combinations and links that can be drawn between the four performers. Satisfyingly, we then see these relationships play out in the solos and duets that follow, which are interspersed throughout the work.

In a well-oiled duet, seen previously in development for Tra Mi’s 2022 work, And, Again, part of DirtyFeet’s Out of the Studio 2022, this revisited combination between Tra Mi and Mitchell brings us intricate isolations with a gentle tone. They move in and out of sync with expertly coordinated moments of throw and weight shift. They are on top of the movement and perform together with the same mix of calmness and confidence I remember from And, Again.

Sue and Martin performed a duet together that was full of joy and ease. They file around each other, feet shifting in a kind of game: a danced conversation about space, rebounding with cheeky interruption. This section inspired a sense of comfort and relief, the kind to be found when two people speak the same language, or at least dialects of the same, to each other and with us in their audience.

The sections continue. Duets, solos and group moments arise – each unique and exciting but melding effortlessly together to create the unified collage that is this work. 

The curtains close behind Martin, posing regally in a spotlight. A solo follows that is masterfully and unequivocally del Amo. He moves from position to position at increasing speed. His body pulling in many directions, interjected with shakes and shudders. His feet shift calmly beneath his energetic body. At the conclusion of his solo he turns to walk back through the curtain, but only to find that he can’t find the gap, and must search all the way to the side wall in order to finally duck backstage – the performer caught out—a classic trope—and a classic demonstration of Martin’s personal brand of tongue-in-cheek action and his innate sense of theatrical timing.

We later see two duets arise at the same time, one between Martin and Tra Mi, and the other between Mitchell and Sue. Together Martin and Tra Mi have an intensity and focus to their performance. Poised and precise they move close together inspecting each other and the world around them. Mitchell and Sue’s duet gives us the most graceful exploration of being off centre. Their long spines sway and tip.  I feel like I can see the air buoying and catching them in their suspension. These combined duets create a poignant moment, showing that their process of collaborative making, the weeks they spent together, revealed common ground between them. They seem to have been able to pinpoint shared essences or movement qualities in a way that feels visceral and energetic, rather than something that had been discussed and decided upon.

Tra Mi performs a solo in, what is rapidly becoming through her growing body of work, her signature style. She bounces between soft and sharp, precise and melting, mechanical and tender. Tra Mi is an incredibly human performer, able to move through many textures with a sense of practicality and without losing her personal body language. During her solo the others watch. In fact, throughout the piece, the four performers really get to see each other, and in this moment it’s as if they’re reading each other’s movement. Sue begins a version of Tra Mi’s choreography, in her own style, then Mitch and Martin do the same, translating Tra Mi’s movement onto their own bodies in real time. This time the choreography reveals a process that has pinpointed each performer’s sense of individuality and allowed us to see each of their distinctive approaches to movement creation.

The major innovation of this work is its use of all the spaces available, with the choreography inhabiting all of the theatre’s corners and crannies. The performers made the theatre their own in a clever display of interaction, not only with backstage, but with the periphery of the room. The choreography played with perspective, using the foreground and background of the stage simultaneously.  The walls were used to hang off, hang out on, be stuck up against; the back wall in particular serving as a home-base. At one point we find the four performers nestled into a far corner. Lighting designer Frankie Clarke skilfully tucked them into a square of light, up against a wall, creating a smaller room within the large room of the theatre. Like four flat mates living in close proximity, Mitchell, Sue, Tra Mi and Martin shift around each other. It’s like we’d stumbled upon an awkward conversation about shared space.

The white backdrop and black curtains that ran along the back wall, as well as a second set of curtains halfway down the stage, were also used to frame and change the space, create exciting transitions and disappearances, or even being used at times by the performers to disrupt their collaborators. The black curtains became sometimes asymmetrical or very narrow, sometimes moving swiftly, and interrupting, nudging, cutting off, and manufacturing focus to grab our attention. This was true in one of Sue’s solos in which she plays with perspective, making her way along the back white wall, pausing in the centre, with the back curtains closing in and framing her from either side. It seems like they’re after her, but just as she’s about to be engulfed, she springs off the back wall and the centre curtains rush in placing her in just a narrow rectangle. Tra Mi and Mitchell walk forward, powerful and ready for action … that is until Mitchell’s trajectory is promptly cut off by a rogue curtain leaving Tra Mi to fend for herself. At another point the performers pass between the narrowed curtains. As one exits from view another takes their place. Like magic, they transform into each other. Suddenly we see only Sue’s feet on the floor, the rest of her concealed behind a curtain. She’s dragged back out of sight and we are left to imagine Martin, Mitchell and Tra Mi conspiring behind the curtain about where to hide her body.

At all times, the character of each performer in MSTM remains present, even when they aren’t on stage, and this is often done via the animation of the curtains. I always felt aware of them all and had a palpable sense of their behind-the-scenes machinations.

The use of the curtains also placed an emphasis on framing that carried the filmic images from the work’s introduction into the theatre space and was wonderfully telling of Sue’s rich career in dance film. There was an importance placed on what was seen or hidden in the framing of theatre’s architecture, the bodies, and the relationships between everything present and hidden on the stage. At every point our attention was directed, and this made the work feel seamless.

The concluding section of MSTM was a walking and weaving pattern with Martin, Sue, Tra Mi and Mitchell striding the stage all together. As they pass each other they smile. This was a fun negotiation, and a joy to witness as the curtain closes on their party.

Again and again in this work we have seen the joy in spatial conversation and collaborative negotiation. The performers seem to have a genuine interest in each other and in the cause of collaboration as the purpose of this work. Together they have created a work that feels momentous in its representation of intergenerational wisdom and in its love and care for the craft of choreography.

MSTM

Campbelltown Arts Centre, 6-8 November, 2025

Choreographer/Performers:

Martin del Amo

Sue Healey

Tra Mi Dinh

Mitchell Christie

Lighting Designer: Frankie Clarke

Sound Design: Gail Priest

Costume Designer: Aleisa Jelbart

Production Manager: Alejandro Rolandi

Operator: Darcy Catto-Pitkin

Creative Producer: Anthea Doropoulos

Photography: Wendell Teodoro

Phaedra Brown on Long Sentences by Rhiannon Newton

Our Sentences Enmeshed

Choreographer, Writer, Performer: Rhiannon Newton

Carriageworks, Performance Space, Liveworks Festival, 25th October, 2025.

Review by Phaedra Brown

From the deep blackness, the sound of breath transforms into a whisper. Gradually we make out words, then phrases, then the start of a sentence. “This is a long sentence, which begins from the utterance ‘this is a long sentence’, which begins from the utterance ‘this is a long sentence’…” Rhiannon Newton is describing a sentence, a long sentence, that is caught in a loop of itself. She is uncovering the double meaning of the word sentence, “a long sentence, which finding itself caught in a loop, notices that it has in fact performed the action of a sentence, of sentencing itself to being a long sentence”*

Long Sentences is a work that connects the here and now of us humans to deep time and space. It connects us to the molecules and moments that make up the past, present and future. This work, equal parts movement and text, plays with how “language and sensation move us beyond ourselves” to speak on something difficult to fathom, and even harder to articulate.

Together words and movement weave a dance of cycles in Long Sentences, and the liveness of both forms performed, create a work that is sharp, urgent and uniting.

To begin Rhiannon emerges from the corner of the space into the light, speaking and dancing. A jumble of limbs fold and stack, her arms and gaze search. The movement shifts through textures and atmospheres, punctuated by stillness and sudden jolts into new sensations. Rhiannon speaks, accompanying the movement, sometimes casually—standing and addressing the audience—at other times precariously upside-down, or from the middle of a sequence of jumps and quick directional changes. As her movement becomes more precise, her voice grows stronger. The movement works alongside, and sometimes in contrast with, the compositional rhythm and assonance of the text. A repeated SSssss sound holds us in a hypnotic cycle. Rhiannon performs her text in a way that emphasises the physical feeling of the words, their texture is part of a whole-body awareness. Her voice is unwavering, as is her attentiveness to the content of the text. She holds the audience firmly in the present, imploring us to understand.

In a spotlight we find Rhiannon sitting on a circle turntable. Coiled up, arms wrapped around herself. She spins herself on this turntable and lets it slow, the sound of the spin is recorded and looped. She begins to speak and her words also loop. The looped voice, and an accompanying rumble, create a sense of unease. Something in this sentence has gone awry and we are turning back around to face its consequence.  The sound, created by composer Peter Lenaerts, is beautifully atmospheric. Throughout the work it supports Rhiannon’s performance, changing the weight of the space; sometimes making it light and fluttering, other times heavy and ominous, as it is here, underscoring Rhiannon’s looping voice. Her words overlap more and more, getting strung together in a blur of imagery, time, scale, and reference to the ongoing sentence. The spinning gets faster and the spotlight pulses, the voice reaching a cacophony. I can pick out only some words and phrases. I try to make meaning, grasping on to fragments of text as they whiz past:

“…life…day…breath… downstream…divided up by heartbeats…toxins…processes…these are sentences lived by the Earth…”

Faster and faster, the text reaches a boiling point. It has a sense of the distant past and distant future, both a memory and prophecy. Evocations of environmental death-sentences, human interference and inevitable correlations. The spinning slows and the lights fade to black, but the voice continues to play out the remaining loops.

A smooth, light-coloured rock, slightly larger than a human skull, is set in a spotlight. It has sat there for the duration of the work as Rhiannon’s companion in liveness, and she now draws our attention to it. No longer on the turntable but with remnants of its centrifuge, Rhiannon rotates herself towards the stone. She takes it in her hands, slowly and precisely negotiating its weight on the structure of her body. She brings the rock to rest on her lap. She rises to kneeling, holding it to her. Arranging her weight to be underneath it, raising it to her shoulder, she then returns it to the ground. She spins the rock. The importance of this image is twofold. It imprints. Replicating Rhiannon’s own spinning body, this rock is part of the same sentence, but it also serves as a reminder that this rock is part of its own sentence, with a longer-than-human scale of time, and this moment of shared time is just one point in our respective cycles.

Stepping back from the rock, Rhiannon’s movement becomes blustery. Impulses come from all over the body as she filters through many thoughts, places, times, and sensations. The interspersing of gesture in the movement alludes to more of a here-and-now humanness than the similar movement at the start of the work. She is speaking again, this time a sentence that connects us to our present physical reality.

In this final section Rhiannon draws our attention to the physical make-up of everything around us. She speaks to the sensations her body moves through – breath, skin, the feeling of the floor. She speaks of the materials of the room we are in at Carriageworks on Gadigal Land; the water making up all of our bodies that has likely flowed from Warragamba Dam in the west of Sydney. This direct address brings us cleverly into the present and into direct contact with our own prophecies and consequences – the shared history of the particles that make up me, you, her, us, the room, and the smooth rock still resting centre stage. This work is made, not for us, but about us, in a deeply tangible and collective way.

Throughout Long Sentences Rhiannon has played expertly between the philosophical and the physical. The movement and text speak to each other, their combination allowing a live conversation in which the movement seemed to shake loose the perfect phrase, and the text led the body to definitive action. This work gave us a portal through which to hold compassion for things very far away and very unlike ourselves. It left me thinking about the connection of my matter to the matter around me, and my responsibility to care for what this matter might transform into.

Long Sentences

Track 8, Carriageworks, 22-26 October, 2025

Choreographer, Performer, Writer: Rhiannon Newton

Composer: Peter Lenaerts

Lighting Designer: Karen Norris

Outside Eye: Martin del Amo, Nikki Heyward

Costume Design: Aleisa Jelbart

Understudy: Emma Riches

Presented by Performance Space as part of Liveworks Festival, 2025.

* Rhiannon Newton (2025) with Kate Britton, Chloe Chignell, Megan Alice Clune, Martin del Amo, Ira Ferris, Benjamin Forster,  Angela Goh, Nikki Heywood, James Hitchcock, Simo Kellokumpu, Peter Lenaerts, Emma Riches, Lizzie Thompson, Ivey Wawn and Katie Winton. Rhiannon Newton, The First Sentence, in Long Sentences: a collection of long sentences & The Long Sentence script, Aburra Press

Phaedra Brown is an independent dancer, choreographer, and producer. Her current practice draws on a collage of elements from movement, choreography, writing, and curation.

Phaedra Brown on DirtyFeet’s Out of the Studio

Out in Space and Back through Time

Out of the Studio, DirtyFeet, Neilson Studio, Sydney Dance Company, 19th September 2025

Works:

Pull Me Closer Choreographer Cassidy McDermott Smith

Girmitiya Created and performed by Shyamla

Review by Phaedra Brown

DirtyFeet’s Out of the Studio (OOTS) is a platform for emerging artists to share new work. It has been running since 2014 and is one of the few programs for contemporary dance in Sydney that supports work with in-studio development time and a performance outcome. OOTS is described by DirtyFeet’s Director and Co-Founder Anthea Doropoulos as a “vital space for risk-taking” and “a place where choreographers can share the raw, in-progress drafts of their work.”*

The impact of OOTS’s end to end support is seen in the intricately designed and beautifully performed works that were presented this year. Both Cassidy McDermott Smith’s Pull Me Closer and Shyamla’s Girmitiya are pieces of tender and seamless storytelling. Placed together, these works took us on a journey of scale, moving through time, place and space, exploring the impact that histories, both human and planetary, have on our relationships and trajectories.

The evening begins with Pull Me Closer. From the darkness, side light gradually reveals a solitary dancer. We see a forearm, then a knee, shifting buoyantly, arcing around a stationary body. Catching the light, the limbs appear to be floating, unattached to a torso. A ring of light emerges from above, encircling the dancer, revealed to be Madeleine Backen, and projecting a circle onto the floor around her.

The other three dancers Mitchell Christie, Frances Orlina and Remy Rochester, one by one, have joined Madeleine. They are moving now on the outside of the ring of light that is pulsing, slowly increasing and decreasing its range. Present through most of the work this circle serves as a reminder of otherworldliness—a tractor beam, a crop circle, one of Saturn’s rings, a connective path between the dancers.

The dancers fall in circles. They are affecting the space around them with purposeful gathering and swiping, stirring the air up with their spirals. But they are also being affected, at times pulled through the air by invisible forces. They fall into a line that breaks and then reforms. They seem like planets, orbiting on differently timed trajectories.

They pause on the four sides of the stage—the black box of Sydney Dance Company’s Neilson Theatre. Then, a stumble, a crawl, a stroke of the side curtain, a jump from one of the dancers that signals the beginning of a cycle that repeats over and over. Another stumble, another crawl, another stroke of the side curtain, then a series of leaps. Within these repetitions the dancers weave through each other, passing without meeting each other’s gaze. We see relationships and stories forming and being torn apart without any affectation from the performers. There is only happenstance, the meeting of one body with another, planetary rather than purposeful collision.

The same phrase repeats, this time the dancers facing the back. Each time the orbit begins again the dancers take on the phrase another has just performed. We become familiar with the pattern, yet I’m excited to see the dancers in a different place each round, passing each other in a new configuration every time. It gives the feeling that the dancers are being swept up in each-others gravitational pull and spat out somewhere else in the solar system, only to be pulled into a new orbit.

There is craftsmanship ins this choreography. Cassidy McDermott Smith has constructed connections that seem like coincidence but which are of course purposeful. This illusion of coincidence means the piece melts between choreographic structures without us realising. Patterns unravelling with breaks, surprises and syncopations keep the world of the work moving, changing, and fresh, despite its cyclical nature.

Pull Me Closer is underscored by atmospheric sound. The composition Tuning the Wind by Grand River crackles and blusters. It uses wind recordings and synthesisers, tuned and layered, and synthesisers to give the sense of wind that is itself dancing and shuddering. The lighting, designed by Frankie Clarke, is dark and pulsating, interjected with flashes, resembling lightning. Together these elements create a world that feels like it has its own weather, a storm rumbling, alive and constantly shifting.

As this storm passes over the theatre and the dust seems to settle, the dancers find each-other in a line with arms linked, in the back corner of the stage, beautifully backlit. They seem to see each other for the first time. As they thread through each other’s arms, their movement is more tender and they seem aware of the affect they have on one another. They begin to traverse the stage: falling and dragging, collapsing but continuously catching each other, ending up at the front, very close to the audience. The group tightens. They find each other with an embrace as the space storm still rumbles in the distance. They meltslip in and out of comforting shapes, leaving the resonance of themselves in the arms of the other. They slip away off stage, but return, creating shadows of spinning orbs, projected large on the back wall. Looking closer we see that they are reflecting handheld lights off spinning CDs. This design has a nostalgic touch, bringing back a child-like instinct to gaze out at the stars.

The lights then bounce around, creating a solar system, flickering stars in space storms. The lights cast shadows of the heads of the dancers, now part of the solar system themselves.

The connection between us and space has always inspired expansive exploration and intimidating awe, and Pull Me Closer captures that, but it also makes us think about celestial bodies on a more personal level; as we spin through the solar system at a planetary scale, what of the orbiting, colliding, and collapsing bodies in our vicinity at a human scale?

Pull Me Closer ebbs and flows seamlessly, creating an atmosphere of serenity and inevitability. It is a work full of circularity and centrifuge. Cassidy McDermott Smith draws connections between astronomical orbits and human trajectories. The same collisions, coincidences and near-misses that occur in space also appear in our human world. 

Shyamla’s Girmitiya roots us back down on Earth. It is an exploration of embodied lineage, labour and resistance. It uses spoken word (English and Hindi) music (recorded and live) and choreographed dance sequences mixed with gestural and object symbolism to tell the story of Indian indentured labourers, including Shyamla’s own family, who were “forcibly removed from their homelands under colonial rule and shipped to Fiji to toil on sugarcane plantations.”**

This is an ambitious and detailed work. It swings across time and place with multiple characters and forms. It tells a story that is specific to Shyamla’s family yet reaches much further into comments on colonial resistance and the experience of first and second generation migrants to (so-called) Australia. “Girmitiya transforms ancient traditions rooted in land, rhythm, and resistance into tools for storytelling. The body becomes both a vessel and portal for truth-telling and reclamation.”** The notion of the body as portal or vessel must be an incredibly cathartic feeling as a performer, and I felt Shyamla capture the essence of this deeply personal transformation throughout Girmitiya.

Drums send a pulse of energy through the theatre. Two musicians, playing live, are revealed as choreographer and performer Shyamla, and percussionist and performer Janakan Suthanthiraraj. In the program Shyamla give us the Tamil name for this drumming form: Parai, Importantly naming things for what they are and setting the scene for a work that deals with truth telling and retaining language. Throughout the work this live percussion propels a sense of action and urgency. It is fast paced, driving and responsive to the movement on stage. 

Along with the beat, lights begin to pulse in time, and we hear the recorded sound of the ocean. We also become aware of objects spaced out along the front of the stage:

a sugar cane plant, a bowl next to a bag of CSR brand sugar, and a tin with rocks jumbled around it. The drumming stops, a stillness falls. Shyamla stands, wraps a white scarf around their head, then stamps their thumb on a piece of paper. This symbolises the recording of Shyamla’s grandparents’ immigration details and the beginning of the family’s treacherous journey. As Shyamla performs a Surya Namaskar Yoga sequence, a voice-over lists the personal status and attributes of first their Grandfather, then Grandmother: “marriage … height … age … caste … village … scars … chest measurement.” They are bound for a steam ship “Madras to Fiji, 1912.” The white scarf is now wrapped around Shyamla’s wrists, a signifier of the chains on the wrists of the sugarcane labourers. The voice of a CSR sugar advertisement plays in the background describing an exotic and sun-drenched land in which their product, the sugar, is tenderly produced. Set against this up-beat advertisement, Shyamla’s tied wrists tell a different story, a simple yet poignant juxtaposition.

Shyamla then offers a detailed, embodied enactment of the true labour and conditions for those producing sugar during this time. Moving between the sugar cane plant and an invisible opponent. Squaring up to the plant, plucking one cane from the bunch. Stepping away, swinging the cane gracefully and with impressive swiftness, punctuating the movement with sharp strikes and thrusts. These actions are based on Silambam, an ancient Tamil staff-based martial art. Silambam, along with other traditional Indian martial arts, were banned during British colonial rule over India (1858-1947), in an imposition of western modes of combat and an erasure of traditional artforms.

Shifting focus multiple times between the production of sugar cane and the opponent, symbolic of the colonists that had forced this labour upon their family, Shyamla draws the connection between the practice of Silambam during this period in history and in their family’s story, both acts of resistance and of holding culture. We learn that conditions were hostile and sugar cane labourers fought to keep their culture alive and their physical selves safe.

The mood shifts.

Shyamla re-ties the scarf around their waist while Janakan drums a playful beat. A cheeky, child-like joy overtakes Shyamla’s performance: playing a game, collecting stones in the tin, placing the stones in a pattern on the ground and jumping around them. Shyamla speaks in Hindi. Janakan reprimands like a schoolmaster: “Speak English!”, yelling again and again while Shyamla runs laps as punishment; the generational process of losing language shown in a matter of minutes.

Then we jump through time.

We hear sounds of a pedestrian crossing and a tram. Shyamla is back in the city, and in their own body. A monologue explains that they were the first in the family to speak only English: “shamed, punished, erased and whitewashed”. This is the story of many children of migrants where the hope of ‘fitting in’ negates the continuation of language and other homeland practices. Shyamla comes to sit centre stage, laying the stones in a diamond shape, then delicately, expertly, traces the lines with sugar around the stones, a weaving of beauty and pain. The objects tethering them to family and culture, but they are also a reminder of a suppressed and fraught history.

Shyamla is a shapeshifter in this work, and  moving expertly between forms, across characters, time periods and places, is not an easy task. And yet the spoken word, the props, the choreography and the music take us on a far-reaching journey. The collage of movement forms, gesture, text and sound allowed this story to be played out in a way that I found easy to follow, but it was not didactic. Girmitiya still required us to connect the dots for ourselves and it made me think about all the untold stories that migrant communities hold.  In a work with so many important threads, I was always clear who and what we were engaging with. This piece could easily be many works. It was so rich with history and had the depth of many generations—it will be interesting to see where Shyamla takes it next.

OUT OF THE STUDIO

DirtyFeet

The Neilson Studio, Sydney Dance Company, Wharf 4, Walsh Bay Arts Precinct, Hickson Rd, Sydney, 19-20 September 2025.

Pull Me Closer

Choreographer: Cassidy McDermott Smith

Dancers | Collaborators: Madeleine Backen, Mitchell Christie, Frances Orlina, Remy Rochester

Mentor: Rhiannon Newton

Lighting: Frankie Clarke

Music Credits: Tuning the wind by Grand River and The Dream by John Tejeda

Producer: Anthea Doropoulos

Assistant Producer: Emma Riches

Girmitiya

Choreographer | Performer | Sound Direction | Music: Shyamla Eswaran

Live Percussionist | Performer: Janakan Suthanthiraraj

Soundtrack Voices: Mohini Eswaran & Shyamla

Sound Design | Music Production | Mixing: Dyan Tai

Dramaturg: Pratha Nagpal

Mentor: Christopher Gurusamy

Lighting: Frankie Clarke

Producer: Anthea Doropoulos

Assistant Producer: Emma Riches

* Anthea Doropoulos, ‘Welcome Note’, Out of the Studio Program, 2025

** Shyamla, Out of the Studio Program notes, 2025

Phaedra Brown is an independent dancer, choreographer, and producer. Her current practice draws on a collage of elements from movement, choreography and writing.

Phaedra Brown on RERUN Xtended by Ashleigh Veitch

THE GIFT OF REPETITION:  RERUN Xtended

Choreographer and performer:  Ashleigh Veitch

Air Space Projects, Marrickville, Saturday 13th September 2025

Review by Phaedra Brown

Ashleigh Veitch’s RERUN Xtended is durational study of repetition and the staying power of both body and mind.

The two-hour long work was performed at the Marrickville Airspace Projects in their Deep Space room. This is a small concrete room with a low ceiling, no windows, and a fluorescent light. It’s deep in the gallery, the perfect sensory deprivation tank to cut us off from the outside world. Here in this space Ashleigh ask us to “rebel against hustle culture,” and truly focus our mind and body, as she does the same.

RERUN Xtended is designed so that audiences can come and go as they please. I sat and watched the first hour and found this exploration of repetition and duration rich with detail and full of ever evolving and engrossing movement.

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Entering the gallery space, black tape frames the otherwise blank walls and floor. This creates a geometric grid of overlapping shapes, reminiscent of a city map, or the lines on a basketball court. Ashleigh is in the centre of the room.

Facing away from us, caught in a gentle rock, she begins shifting her weight from one foot to the other. The first thing I became aware of was how much I was able to notice within this holding pattern: the minute movement of stabilising muscles in Ashleigh’s legs; her breath and gaze; the cold air in the concrete space. The anticipation created from this ongoing rock gave me the time and space to search for clues as to what was about to happen.

One foot slides just a small distance along the concrete, then slowly returns to its original position. Then the other foot slides. This motion repeats, gradually increasing in size, while Ashleigh remains on the spot. With the textural scraping sound of sneaker on concrete we can hear the work of each repetition. The performance is also underscored by a low rumbling tone, designed by Ashleigh herself, that was constant throughout.  

In the vacuum of the room it was easy to get hypnotised by Ashleigh’s movement. So much so that outwardly all of a sudden, but actually over the course of several minutes, she had shifted the slide of her feet into walking on the spot—thus beginning the cycle of action that made up the bulk of the work. Foot slides back, weight shifts, the knee pulls through in front of the body, torso ripples upright, foot floats down, toe of sneaker hits the floor, foot relinquishes into the floor … and begin again. A simple walk is so rigorous that it draws us into its detail. With each step the angle of Ashleigh’s body changes slightly so that she is moving in a slow circle.

Small things seem so significant. One foot unexpectedly hovers. It takes a moment to register what has changed. We glimpse an alternate pattern. Just one cycle in which Ashleigh reverses her step before returning to the same forward stepping pattern. About a third of the way through the first hour, this was a smart variation as it broke our trance state and offered the audience a treat that refreshed our brain for the repetitions to come.

Having completed close to a half circle and facing most of the way towards the audience by now, Ashleigh’s hands begin to tense at her sides. As legs continue their walking loop, arms begin to raise, finally reaching for the ceiling. Ash is looking to the low roof that is close to her head and even closer to her fingertips—again the small gallery space forces us to zone in on the specifics of her movement.

RERUN Xtended is certainly a game of concentration. There is a play between the repetitive actions that continue as if caught in a slipstream, and the assertiveness required to begin a new action—to move against the momentum of an existing loop. Ashleigh’s poise in controlling the ebbs and flows of this interchange is impressive.

As her arms rise her torso gently rotates, creating a second loop in opposition to the legs that are still stepping on the spot. The upper and lower body split into their own repetitive actions. This made me consider what other loops were working within Ashleigh’s body: blood and air circulating, synapses firing, and one can only assume the brain drifting in and out of sharp attention.

By now Ashleigh’s arms and gaze have seamlessly lowered and she is turning the corner away from the audience again. Remnants of multiple loops remain, and the body still twists atop the stepping legs for a while. As Ashleigh turns to face the wall, completing her circle, she has returned to the gentle rock. The cycle is about to begin again, marking the half-way point in the two-hour performance.

In a work without dynamic shifts and changes such as this, Ashleigh’s choreography remained enticing. It contained peaks and troughs, moments where we could be intently invested or could let our thoughts wander, and it was incredibly detailed. While we were able to move away from the performance, I was hesitant to miss the slight changes that occurred, or risk losing the overall impact of her repetitions. With RERUN Xtended Ashleigh Veitch has created a world in which the minute shifts are the most riveting and the most important. She wants audiences to “test our attention” by focussing in on the minutiae of a repeated movement. This is a gift in today’s world of distraction and constant stimulation. To slow down, to hone in, and to attend to one task taking the time it takes, has become a rare luxury and this piece, RERUN Xtended, gives us the time and space to do just that.

RERUN Xtended

Air Space Projects, Marrickville NSW, 5-21 September 2025

Choreographer, performer & sound designer:  Ashleigh Veitch

Phaedra Brown is an independent dancer, choreographer, and producer. Her current practice draws on a collage of elements from movement, choreography and writing.

Lillian Shaddick on Rebecca Jensen's SLIP at INDance

Slip: movement, sound, and sensorial trickery

Neilson Studio, Sydney Dance Company’s INDance 2025, 14 August 2025

Choreographer and Performer: Rebecca Jensen

Composer and Performer: Aviva Endean

Review by Lillian Shaddick

I walked through The Rocks on my way to Sydney Dance Company, surrounded by the usual bustle of the city but unaffected by it. It was cold, loud, busy – trains, ferries, buskers, chatter filled the air – but I was inattentive to any of it. My attention was elsewhere, turned inward, muted by routine and anticipation. I wasn’t seeing, hearing or feeling my environment, I was watching the time, reliving the path I’d walked so many times before for casual evening dance classes.

Now I’m seated in the Neilson Theatre, second row from the back of the intimate raked seating. We are obscured in darkness, looking down onto a large, deep performance space. A woman throws herself onto the stage, landing on a mattress covered in an earthy printed sheet.

She rolls. She is wearing a velvet brown dress, braided blonde buns, a white head covering and chunky brown knee-high boots: a kind of medieval cosplay that looks out of place in the sterile white floor and bright artificial light. As she rolls, her bum lingers, suspended mid-air before her body collapses into itself with calm control. Each rotation draws her closer to centre stage, where a black backpack waits.

She reaches into it. A loud rustle accompanies her rummaging, followed by the plasticky slap and tear of a Doritos packet opening. The sounds seem exaggerated, and the source of that exaggeration is revealed as our attention shifts from the woman on the floor to the cluttered sound station on our left – an array of wires, sound boards, microphones, and equipment spill all over a white workshop table. Another woman, focused and deliberate, commands the area and its apparatus, eyes tracking the movement centre stage to time her sounds with precision. She only glances away momentarily to pick up or place down an object. Her intense focus contrasts with the dancer’s strong yet detached gaze, held steady out toward the audience.

Seated cross-legged on the floor now, the bun-headed woman lifts a chip from the packet and begins to munch. The crunches are loud, crisp, and slightly delayed. As we glance back to the sound table, the woman at the wires is taking measured bites into a large stick of celery held close to a microphone.

Initially, the sounds are heightened but convincingly synced. Gradually, her timing becomes less precise – intentionally mismatched? Surely: a gracefully extended arm is now paired with the sound of water pouring.

This is one of the opening sequences of Slip. It gently attunes the audience to what will follow: perceptual deception, dream-like scenes, and abstract escalation. Here, ASMR-style pleasure collides with sensory trickery, keeping us darting between the actions and sounds performed by these two women: our bun-headed performer/choreographer Rebecca Jensen and musician and composer Aviva Endean.

Slip was the first hour-long work in Week 1 of the annual INDance program, presented by Sydney Dance Company and held at the Neilson Studio. The piece began development in 2022, originally performed as a 20-minute performance for the Keir Choreographic Awards, before expanding for its 2023 showing at FRAME: A Biennial of Dance in Melbourne.

Slip is a dance performance. Jensen’s contemporary dance training is evident in sequences with barrel jump turns, deep back bends, and carefully choreographed movements that appear reversed. But there is nothing that is conventionally satisfying here. Jensen plays with dance as a means of provoking thought and feeling in nontraditional ways. What makes Slip affecting isn’t capital-D Dance, but the interplay of dance techniques with the practice of ‘foley’ – the art of recreating sound effects for film to enhance immersion. As noted in the programme blurb, the pairings of sound and movement here are “pulled apart and abstracted, entanglements are simplified, severed, and rewired to the point of absurdity”

Just as we start to delight in the seamlessly complimentary movements and sounds, this alignment unravels. What we see, hear and believe are thrown into question, not only through the sonic-visual mismatches, but the lighting and visual design that join to mangle our perception. Jensen dances with, and independently from, an animation behind her: water-formed bodies that echo her movements. Sometimes she’s perfectly in sync with them, other times slightly out, and the varied synchronisation keeps us attentive and uncertain. Diachronically, the lighting gradually advances our sensory deprivation: we are introduced to Jensen in a brightly lit, clinical space with visual clarity – only to end in near-complete darkness, with nothing but Jensen’s dancing hands glowing blue.

For me, this sensation of skewed perception recalls my experience watching AI-generated videos that attempt to mimic reality – near authentic, yet just ‘off’. There’s something compelling and uncanny about them. They seduce the senses even as they trigger our internal alarms to look and listen closer. Slip is in this vein as a work – at its best it challenges our senses, urging us to refocus and question reality. Like a deep-fake AI generated clip, Slip draws us in with the familiar, recognisable and satisfying, but then unlike such videos that unintentionally cause us to question what we see, Slip purposefully but subtly curates this feeling.

As I left the theatre that Thursday night, my senses felt unusually activated – attuned to textures of sound and light that on my way there had dissolved into the background of the city. I was stopped in my path as the train stormed overhead on the Harbour Bridge. It rattled connecting structures, disturbed the air and I felt jarred by its presence. The headlights from a car as I crossed the road stung as I tracked its movement – perfectly pacing my strides with its approaching speed. As chatter and laughter spilled out of a pub, I analysed its varied qualities – bellowing forced laughter, English accents, and a mixture of hollering voices both deep and squeaky in pitch.

After an hour immersed in Slip’s perceptual distortion and its sensory misdirection, these familiar stimuli rang out with immediacy. No longer passive, quotidian background noise, they called me – they were real, and I was deeply attuned to their qualities. In that moment, I was reminded that our perception is not just a way of processing the world but a way of being in it. The body does not observe from a distance; it lives through perception. Slip made this clear: by disorienting my senses, it returned me to them.

SLIP

Neilson Studio, Sydney Dance Company’s INDance 2025, Week 1, August 14-16, 2025

Performer and Choreographer: Rebecca Jensen

Performer and Composer: Aviva Endean

Visual Design: Romanie Harper

LX Design: Jennifer Hector

Outside eye: Lana Šprajcer

Animation: Patrick Hamilton

Technical Operator while touring: Jordi Edwards

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Lillian Shaddick is a freelance professional dancer and teacher, an active participant in various Sydney based dance scenes. Her Masters investigated the commercialisation and appropriation of samba no pé in Australia and her PhD looked at the embodied experience of learning and dancing flamenco; both were completed within the discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies (University of Sydney). 

Lexy Panetta on Catapult’s Outbound at PACT

New Dance Works from Emerging Makers

Producer: Catapult

Presented in collaboration with PACT Centre for Emerging Artists

Performances by

Remy Rochester & Angus Onley

Maddison Fraser

Review by Lexy Panetta

Catapult is a choreographic dance hub located in Newcastle that provides support, opportunity and residencies for contemporary dance and multi-disciplinary artists (both mid-career and emerging) across the Central Coast and the Greater Hunter Region.  

Their Outbound initiative is an extension on their Propel choreographic residency program that is designed to amplify regional dance voices and provide young artists with a metropolitan platform for performance. Catapult’s Outbound is not only the opportunity to mount performance in a theatrical space with stage design and live audiences but it also offers a site for experimentation, artistic inquiry and support for makers in the emerging and independent sector.

Catapult launched this initiative this year and presented a double bill at Sydney’s PACT Centre for Emerging Artists in Erskineville: a new work by emerging choreographers Remy Rochester and Angus Onley, and another by Maddison Fraser.

Rochester and Onley were up first with Please… continue?  a playful, theatrical, nuanced piece that hurtled into the shifting terrain of the human connection and relationships with a blend of absurdity, tenderness, and sophistication. Maddison Fraser’s solo Palyku Ngurra Dance was deeply personal, grounded in cultural memory and feminine strength, a solo journey of reconnection to heritage, land, ancestry, and identity.

Please… continue? Remy Rochester & Angus Onley

Remy Rochester and Angus Onley’s Please… continue?  begins with two chairs and a table placed centre stage, the dancers enter from opposite doorways either side of PACT’s black box space. These minimal props evoke an office, a waiting room, or any number of banal shared spaces we all regularly occupy. The dancers, dressed in blazers which further indicates we are in an office or at least some kind of professional setting. They skilfully utilise these jackets as an adjunct to the action, to indicate emotions in an astute manner: shuffling impatience as each dancer interrupts the other’s flow of action; unbridled competition, glancing and diverting each other’s gaze as they awkwardly try to take a seat at the table. The energy between them is palpable, and paired with their subtle dancerly gestural exchanges, they successfully confuse the audiences’ (and their own) perception of their relationship—is this attraction and repulsion. The gestures shift from avoidance to connection but there are hints of magnetism too. As the intensity of their interaction builds, their separateness fades and a shared desire to be closer grows.

Rochester and Onley’s complex duet navigates the awkwardness, chemistry, resistance, and possibilities of a relationship; be it real, imagined, or somewhere in between. The performers’ interplay reveals a spectrum of connection. They are alert, fearful, full of recognisable habitual behaviours and well practiced subtle avoidances, which build to a crescendo with a sophisticated sense of timing. The duet escalates in emotional intensity with moments of humorous release and goofiness as the dancers mimic conversations we recognise as their romantic momentum builds. This work is full of carefully choreographed partner work as they get closer, shifting each other’s weight, swinging one another around the space to the excitable and chaotic score of Caravan by John Wasson.

The build of playful intensity made me think that what is at play here is a series of wandering thoughts or a glimpse into the imaginary interactions of these two characters, what they would like to do rather than what they actually can do to each other. They perhaps offer more than their real relationship can allow to transpire. This is a dance of life in fast-forward or a kind of life tango. The contrasting scenes flicker like a movie as the performers show us their ever-changing relationship conundrums through intense choreographed partnering. I was impressed with how they continued their tango as they tumbled and rolled around without breaking intimate connection or embrace. They coiled around one another without sacrificing the speed and complexity of the choreography, which gradually spiralled them away and then again toward each other, whirl-winding in and out of each other’s embrace. Their bodies melt into and reject one another, we pass our time with them in shared movement, drama, stillness and silence.

The simple but effective use of lighting, designed by Theo Carroll, plays a crucial role in amplifying the chaos in this work. The dim red hues and a swinging light overhead conjure intensity while highlighting moments of comedy and fuelling the emotional gravity when there are sudden shifts in energy. A sheet becomes a powerful prop reflecting a comfortable connection or repellent barrier, changing meaning as the duet evolves. The movement continually rebounds from pedestrian, to poetic, abstract, to emotionally raw.

At the end Rochester and Onley untangle themselves and loosen their hold on one another, dissolving their connection. They depart through opposite blacked-out doorways, the same one’s through which they entered. Perhaps they’ve returned to the ‘real world’, leaving behind the fragmented dreamscape of what could have been. Whether romance, memory, projection, illusion or all of these at once, Please… continue? offers a multitude of stories that illustrate and question the absurd possibilities and expectations embodied in the vulnerable emotional uncertainty in our connections with one another. A sophisticated tale to tell for young makers such as these experimenting with ways to perform nuanced and complex stories.

Palyku Ngurra Dance Maddison Fraser

The second work was choreographed and performed by Palyku and Yindjibarndi woman Maddison Fraser. Palyku Ngurra Dance was a deeply personal work, grounded in cultural memory and feminine strength, a solo journey of reconnection to heritage, land, ancestry, and identity. Fraser’s long long hair is a feature, a central physical motif in the choreography and a symbolic extension of lineage, DNA, maternal bonds passed down from her mothers, and a conduit of cultural knowledge.

From the outset, Fraser moves slowly and deliberately arriving at centre stage. She’s accompanied by an atmospheric soundscape that she made herself with the assistance of Wiradjuri performer, choreographer, composer and mentor Amy Flannery. Fraser is dressed in a singlet and denim shorts. In her hands she holds an abundance of petals and flower stems, carefully dropping the flowers in a crescent formation that eventually forms a circle around her. Each flower is handled with care, as if a story or a memory is being planted back into the earth. Her hair ripples and sways as she encircles the space, and the movement of her hair drapes over her shoulder like a curtain, encasing her in her concentrated attention, introspection and focus toward something that seems very personal and sacred. I can see the feminine strength and nurturing that both her hair and the flowers evoke.

Within the flower circle Fraser kneels, performing, gentle careful movements then rising with intention to collect from all parts of the floral circle. It feels as if she tends and feeds energy into the stems of her flowers, and as she moves it looks as though the flowers are equally feeding energy into her as well. Her movements are sculptural and hypnotic: fluid undulating arms, spirals, and gestural phrases; arms wrapping in hair, and hair and arms wrapping her up in soft embraces.  The floral circle becomes a vessel of protection and comfort.

As Palyku Ngurra Dance builds in intensity and speed, Fraser’s movements become more erratic, spiralling out of control. Her hair, sweeping in large circular pathways starts to break the flower shelter around her. Her movements become wider and more powerful as she whirls upwards and outwards, swift motions destructing the circle, crushing petals underfoot and chaotically catching stems in her curls. This hypnotic state transforms Palyku Ngurra Dance from gentle and nursing fluidity and spirals into grief, release, and transformation.

Fraser’s floor work is layered with strength and softness. The interchangeable uses of her hair to house and sweep and mop, to bind, release, shield and expose her to and from us. Her hair is polysemous, telling the complexity and emotive layers of her story.

A costume change shifts the tone of Palyku Ngurra Dance. In her new attire—high-vis vest, socks, and work boots—Maddison Fraser is industrial. She’s on the move, angular, transforming the space. Her speed becomes more frantic, manic even. Flowers scatter. She walks with busy-ness and intention, storming about, pacing back and forth. She seems to be marking a collision between herself and labour, between the confines of industry and everyday life, between masculine and feminine energy and the conflict and longing for her traditions and heritage that previously surrounded her.

Exhausted, Fraser finally begins to descend to the floor close to the front row of the audience. She looks defeated, tired and vulnerable and slowly crawls backwards through the debris of the petals and stems. As she moves, objects appear, almost like she is coughing up the artefacts of her journey. These little objects are lined up, each one placed on the floor as she withdraws from the audience. A child’s sock, shells, bottle caps, pins, a truck are objects that she brings up to evoke the inherited chaos and turmoil of memory, trauma, and resilience.

By the end, Maddison Fraser has gathered everything together, flowers and objects, and she sits atop them, wrapped in high-vis like a sentinel of stories. Here she embraces all stories shared and embedded in her world. As she sits she is reflective, and the image of her cradling her past, embodying the tension of all her stories gathered beneath her, is very powerful.

This work skilfully grappled with Fraser’s personal identity, story and connection to her womanhood and kinship. Palyku Ngurra Dance embodies histories and truth telling, ultimately reflecting on strength, resilience and empowerment passed down through maternal bonds and shared history.

It was a joy to experience Catapult: Outbound, to watch courageous artists share their unique works with the city community. With thoughtful mentoring, and excellent production support, Outbound presented these emerging artists very well, celebrating their personalities, their histories, their differences and their potential.

OUTBOUND

Producer: Catapult

Presented in collaboration with PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, June 20-21, 2025

Works Presented:

Please… continue?

Choreographers & Performers: Remy Rochester and Angus Onley

Outside Eye/Mentor: Martin del Amo

Lighting Design: Theo Carroll

Music:

John Wasson Caravan  

Caleb Arredondo Endo Sax Ascent

Palyku Ngurra Dance

Choreographer & performer: Maddison Fraser

Cultural Consultant: Aunty Nat Stream

Music:

Maddison Fraser with mentor Amy Flannery

Didgeridoo: Wirrin Sam-Garlet

Dramaturg: Justine Shih Pearson

Alexandria (Lexy) Panetta is a Sydney-based independent artist, choreographer, and academic with interest in dance performance, improvisation, choreography, and film. Lexy also works part-time as a tutor at the Australian College of Physical Education (ACPE), is the Learning Associate for the Sydney Dance Company (SDC), and tours as a Teaching Artist for SDC.

Phaedra Brown on Happy Hour Plus

Dancing PLUS

Curator: Jane McKernan, ReadyMade Works

PACT Centre for Emerging Artists June 13-14, 2025

Performances by:

Ivey Wawn

Mitchell Christie

Valdi Yudibrata & Will Mak

Review by Phaedra Brown  

This rich evening of dance was described by Jane McKernan, Director of ReadyMade Works (RMW), as “Dancing plus… Dancing made more visible”. The ‘plus’ refers to the extra production support that PACT Centre for Emerging Artists in Erskineville provides, with their well-equipped theatre space, but it also refers to the ‘plus’ of RMW’s regular Happy Hour that, across the year, makes more visible the vast array of weekly goings-on within the walls of their studio in Ultimo. RMW is a place known for its essential contribution to the maintenance of dance in inner city Sydney. This artist run space offers various programmes and residencies that support the deep investigation of dance practice by local artists. Happy Hour’s guest curated short works-in-progress program is a “platform for encountering the diverse and uncompromising work being made by local dance artists”. Happy Hour Plus ups the ante and is curated by Jane McKernan.

At this year’s Happy Hour Plus, the third presented by RMW with PACT, three works by a wonderfully varied group of choreographer/dancers were offered: Ivey Wawn’s Feeling in a Triangle, Mitchell Christie’s Off the Map and Within by Valdi Yudibrata and Will Mak.

These works were vastly different in approach however all spoke to a very personal interrogation of each artist’s practice and a deep study of dancing.

Feeling in a Triangle Ivey Wawn

Ivey Wawn’s work Feeling in a Triangle began the night’s performances.

The lights snap on, revealing that Ivey has arrived on stage already, fallen into place in the darkness. After lying face down, breathing for a moment, different body parts begin to gently lift and lower—a shin, a shoulder, and eventually Ivy’s head lifts before she rises out of the floor, and comes to sit at a microphone placed at the front of the stage. A mirror is on the floor reflecting the microphone and Ivey, casting light and shadows up onto her face.

She prepares, taking in air as if about to speak. Waking up the breath in her mouth. Chuckling as the microphone falls out of place. A bird chirps in the rafters and she considers it part of the performance. She stares into the audience searching for faces in the darkness; a single note comes out of the silence. Then it comes again, in the same tone. Ivy begins to sing a broken melody. We hear “Falling is a feeling…Failing is a feeling.” She plays with the length and pitch of each syllable, searching for the right version of each note in real time, pressing the breath out of her lungs, nearing the end of their capacity. You can imagine how each note feels to produce.

An extended sung note plays over the speaker. Ethereal yet comforting vocalisations, music created by Megan Clune that shifts the previous spacious silence as Ivy sits.

She begins reaching her arms for the sky and the sides of the room. Shifting from position to position, she arrives in a shape, taking a brief pause to consider where she has landed before moving on. Her body is searching for something in these pauses – a feeling? a connection? perhaps a memory? This unhurried searching is interrupted by small quakes and falls.

Ivy kicks off her shoes and socks. Laughing, smiling occasionally. Catching, releasing, interrupting her own movement. Considering her task deeply then discarding it. Playing then urgently investigating. Purposeful and sporadic. She pauses on all fours, one arm reaching back towards the mirror, then resumes her dance of falling and feeling.

Oscillating through sensations, Ivey’s consideration is infectious. She moves through either knowing and understanding, or seeking to know and understand. I was desperate to know what she was looking for but at the same time took so much joy in watching the humanness of her search. Ivey works with a deep sense of curiosity that made me want to also experience the sensations she was moving through.

The music fades out. Snapped out of her investigation, she puts her socks and shoes back on quickly before leaving the space.

Throughout the work Ivey wore a white t-shirt that in bright bold letters read ‘GAZA’. Whether directly related to the work or not, this shirt is an important frame through which to view a work that called its viewers to empathy.

In Feeling in a Triangle, we get to see a body, but also very much a human, working through sensation. If we are in an era of disassociation and numbness, this piece was an exact antidote, drawing us into a world of urgent feeling and acting.  

Off the Map Mitchell Christie

Pink and purple light shines on Mitchell Christie who is caught in a shifting rhythmic groove. He stares straight into the audience and repeats a pattern of small shifts in the pelvis, knees, and heels—a small, serious, boogie.

As this groove continues, one hand raises to his belly and then snakes behind his back. The pattern in his legs changes to a gentle rock back and forth. He follows the threading arm to turn around and the pattern resumes facing the back. A more complex pattern arises, repeated rhythmic placing, holding, folding, and falling in a zig zag across the stage. The movement becomes more complex again, the repeating structure now dropped. Limbs reach on beat, the body falls and suspends, movements get extended and interrupted. Mitchell ties himself in knots before expertly and gracefully unravelling, like he’s engaged in a pre-meditated game of Twister. There is a task at play: constructing and deconstructing shapes, building then disrupting sequences.

The choreography requires Mitchell to continuously go further than expected: further coiled, further reaching, squatting all the way to the floor and suddenly standing to his full height. The movement is not robotic, but it is human-oid, almost uncanny when set alongside the groovy, driving music by Vatican Shadow. The sound begs for freedom and fun, and the strictly designed movement is resisting at every turn.

Mitchell’s face stays emotionless throughout. Even through the most precarious balances he seems to remain unphased. We can see his background in and allegiance to Cunningham Technique. He’s a passionate Cunningham teacher and in this work we are watching that influence: movement itself as subject and object of enquiry and performance. As Merce Cunningham explained: “It’s when dancing gets awkward that it starts to get interesting” and this is where the thrill in watching Mitchell’s precarious movement lies.

Structurally, the work begins with contained restraint, but it branches out to take up more space, then is reigned back into the same small, serious groove at the end. Save one difference, perhaps. At the end almost imperceptibly (to the point where I may have imagined it) I thought I saw Mitchell’s lips moving. Maybe he was counting, or reciting a sequence, a gloriously tiny glimpse into the human behind the dancer and the rules behind the patterns?

Within Valdi Yudibrata & Will Mak

In this three-work evening the audience moved for the final piece by Valdi Yudibrata and Will Mak. For Within we were seated in a circle on the stage, looking in at the performers from all sides. From the outset this created a sense of collaboration and camaraderie that was felt throughout the piece. This is indicative of the street dance background shared by Valdi and Will, and indeed of many cultures that prefer to witness and contribute to dance in the round.

Valdi and Will begin in silence, facing each other. They are both watching and waiting for the other to move. Small shifts begin in their shoulders and fingers. Their impulse to move is based on cues from the other. Gradually learning from each other, they begin to build a shared movement vocabulary of isolation and syncopation. They circle each other.

Still in silence, the sound of their feet on the floor, the movement of their clothes and their breath creates the first soundscape. This dancer-created-sound is maintained throughout and propels the piece forward. It creates a great amount of silence and stillness amongst flurries of activity. 

They part and then meet each other again, face to face and closer together. As they circle we start to see the similarities and differences in their movements. Are these people two sides of the same coin? Friends or competitors?

A stamp signals the breaking of the circle.

Now next to each other, Valdi rubs his hands together, generating a rhythm. He continues this rhythm, hitting his body, then clapping. He plays with timing and the emphasis of beats. Will showcases his Popping expertise, playing with speed and intensity. They swap roles. Throughout this section the body percussion and movement correlate, but sometimes one dancer takes licence to move outside the bounds of the rhythm and through the beat.

Valdi unfolds a scarf and ties it around his waist. Valdi is a student of traditional Indonesian dance, as a way of exploring and reconnecting with his personal heritage. In this work he is exploring the meeting points between his Indonesian dance and street dance lineages.

Hitting the fabric of his trousers that stretches between his legs, slapping his forearms, jumping and stamping in a grounded shifting around the space, Valdi creates powerful punctuation to his movement that, while different to what we have seen, is reminiscent of the previous sections in its rhythm and syncopation.

Will echoes the sounds of Valdi’s solo as he picks up a shirt and hat. He uses the brushing of the fabric and the pulling taut of the hat to replicate Valdi’s percussion with a softer tone.

Throughout Within, elements of costume become symbolic of the dancers’ exploration of identity. In a poignant moment, Will meets Valdi on one side of the circular audience. Will offers Valdi a cap. Valdi seems at first reluctant to receive this symbol of street dance lineage, but eventually puts in on. It seems to signal a combining of style and culture, but also acceptance and solidarity. A way of showing that these two have joined forces. As their programme note states, Within is exploring identity “beyond birthplace, tracing the layers of history, memory, and movement that inform who we are. Through the language of street dance, we embody this shared journey—merging movement with existence”.

As the work concludes sharing becomes weaving, in and out of each other’s space, rising and falling; sometimes in confinement and conflict, sometimes in spacious and mutual support. After what has, up ‘til now, been a very structured investigation of each dancers’ individual identity, we finally see their shared forms woven together.

The final moment is a celebration. Music blares and both dancers let loose. They call friends from the audience to join them up on the stage, and Within concludes the night’s performances on a note of, above anything else, community.

Happy Hour has a long tradition within the programming of RMW. It began in 2016, and each iteration in the RMW studio shows the range of work being made in Sydney—from contemporary dance to street dance to the myriad of other forms that make up our Sydney based dance community. The plus of this Happy Hour Plus asked the audience to invest in three very different pieces as studies and to witness these dancers deeply at work. This was a night of dance that not only made the diversity of our local performers’ artistic investigations visible but allowed us to witness the earnestness PLUS rigour PLUS curiosity PLUS joy with which they created their work.

HAPPY HOUR PLUS 2025

PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, June 13-14, 2025

Curator: Jane McKernan

Works Presented: 

Ivey Wawn Feeling in a Triangle

Mitchell Christie Off the Map

Valdi Yudibrata & Will Mak Within

Sound Designers:

Megan Clune

Vatican Shadow

Lighting:

Theo Carrol

Nick Vagne  

Phaedra Brown is an independent dancer, choreographer, and producer. Her current practice draws on a collage of elements from movement, choreography and writing.

"Everyone’s a critic, they say. But most people aren’t filing on Tuesdays"

This is the first line of a recent piece in The New Yorker. For Joanne Imperio, Senior Photo Editor at The New Yorker, criticism “isn’t a hobby or a sideline or a way of sounding off. It’s a vocation, in the fullest sense, complete with deadlines and word counts and occasional moments of grace.”*

This is both true and not true for the dancers who write for Dancing Sydney. They do not, like those who write for The New Yorker, have to file on Tuesday. Timely-ness is not our intention or expectation—most things we ask them to write about have very short seasons so timeliness is not an issue. Their writing is also not a vocation, it’s a side hustle, and we don’t really pay attention to word count either. But we do hope for moments of grace in their writing.

We also encourage our (mostly) young writers to do other things that the New Yorker professionals apparently do: “attend not only to what something is but to what it almost is or might have been”. Like them, we encourage our writers to pay attention, as “really paying attention—is their stock-in-trade.”

As we move into spring and Dancing Sydney awakens from its winter hibernation we also agree with Imperio, that doing the above is “harder than it sounds.” These writers are asked to “linger” and sometimes to “poke”, to “turn things over like a suspect avocado.”

Some of these writers produce criticism, in its traditional form. Others report, profile, annotate the culture as it drifts by. Many do all of the above, sometimes in the same piece. […] What they don’t do is march in step. Some incline toward Olympian detachment, others missionary zeal. If they share anything, it’s a disposition: curious, alert, unsatisfied with the obvious, and mistrustful of what goes without saying.

And putting your hand up to be a critic “calls for nerve and an instinct for what deserves scrutiny and what’s better left alone.”

It’s easy to skim culture, to riff, to slot things into trend pieces. It’s harder to look closely, think carefully, and say something illuminating. To name what hasn’t been named yet. To craft lines that echo in people’s heads, or get under their skin.

Our young dancing writers might not always manage this, but Dancing Sydney hopes you enjoy reading them try.

Look out for new writing on Happy Hour PLUS (ReadyMade Works at PACT), Catapult’s Outbound (also at PACT), on dancing at the Sydney Fringe, Sydney Dance Company’s INDance, and Dirty Feet’s Out of the Studio.

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* The New Yorker is sometimes hard to get for free. But you might be able to link to the whole piece @ The New Yorker, August 25, 2025, Portfolio. Critical Distance: Photography by Richard Renaldi.

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Sarah Kalule on Illume

Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Illume: a culturally grounded testament to the potential of dance.

Frances Rings : Choreographer & Artistic Director of Bangarra Dance Theatre

Darrell Sibosado: Artistic & Cultural Collaborator

Gadigal Country, Sydney Opera House, 4th June 2025

reviewed by Sarah Kalule

A visually striking, splendid combination of visual art, music and dance, Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Illume debuted at Sydney Opera House’s largest theatre, the Joan Sutherland. After two decades in the smaller Drama Theatre, this was Bangarra’s time to grace the larger space—a venue long reserved for ballet, opera and other Eurocentric offerings; and I would say about time. Artistic Director Frances Rings marked this milestone with a work that affirmed Bangarra’s deep reverence for the continuity of Indigenous knowledge and cultural storytelling. With assistance from Artistic and Cultural Collaborator Darrell Sibosado, this reverence was evident in every aspect of the work. From the melodic chimes and sustained chords that gently underscored the audience’s arrival, we were taken on a carefully curated journey through Bardi and Jawi stories accompanied by symbolic patterns, textual set design, and the mystic intangibility of light. Dancers and design elements intertwined, stood apart, circled near, rearranged and settled. The choreography articulated the importance of Country, history, kinship and connection. It was a stunning performance, each section felt finely tuned and richly layered.

Illume was divided into eleven sections. In Shadow Spirits percussive rhythms and electronic techno synths filled the room while dancers stomped into the ground. In Mother of Pearl (Guan) a smaller group surveyed the geography of place while hands swiped heavily across arms and chests. In a transitional moment, a soloist made considered rotations of their spine and pushed a grand développé through thick air. In Manawan, velvety costumes caught glimmer as they passed under beams of light. In Blood Systems, patterns projected in stark blue-white light, fluorescent ropes wove into part-crosshatching, part-parachute, blinding the audience and exposing our witnessing gaze. Throughout the sections of Illume the dancers seamlessly flowed between unison, improvisation, solos and full ensemble sections. The spirit-filled choreography charged the space. It was highly detailed, sensorially overwhelming.

While awed by these fascinating elements, I left torn between the dazzling intensity of lights, action and sound, but yearned for a sharper assertion of urgency. The programme spoke to themes of climate change, displacement and the platforming of marginalised voices; but for me the message felt disrupted as I found myself lost in the spectacle. But perhaps this tension was the point, the work’s ambiguous manner was intentional, inviting the audience to do the work, the searching, and the reckoning with Illume’s themes. If this was the intention, then the unresolved friction between spectacle and narrative may have mirrored a significant relationship to Country—the importance of asking and being permitted. This was made clear through the work’s floor-to-ceiling partition which raised and lowered, at times veiling the performers and separating them from the audience. At other moments this partition was obscured by dark projections so we couldn’t see what was taking place, then it became transparent so that we questioned whether it was raised or hidden in plain sight. This blurring between the seen and unseen ensured it was only on the work’s terms that the audience was permitted to bear witness. Through this theme of permission, the partition symbolised a clear performer-audience divide, establishing a controlled gateway to accessing the work. The messaging I received was a reclamation of power, of narrative, of what is shared and what is kept sacred. Amongst the layering of many themes, one moment of difference stayed with me:

A physical and spiritual unveiling.

A quietening.

A firepit ignited.

Smoke rising.

Ash falling onto a circle of six.

Tender bodies bathing one another with smoke’s remains.

A collaborative couple rearranging red-brick plinths. 

Smoke swelling through the crowd.

Hot air embracing the highest point of my forehead.

This potent and poignant moment, Gajoorr into Middens, resembled a ceremony, or perhaps a remembering. I kept thinking, how lucky are we, the audience, to be invited into this sacred space. We are reminded of our visitation, here, on Country. We are asked to pause, to listen and to reflect.

After an abundance of movement that felt like it reached into the universe and burrowed deep into the earth, this moment zeroed in.

The spectacle dialed down.

The technical dancing ceased.

A communion commenced: gathering, clothing, stillness.

In contrast to the other sections filled with flashing lights, pulsing sounds and complex choreography, this quiet moment held dramatic weight, counterpointing the work’s overall flow. It offered a different pace, a different depth. Here, the simplicity of bonding around fire became a threshold into tens of thousands of years of practice, knowledge and ancestry. I could have watched this for hours. It could have been the entire work, and I would have been satisfied. This moment was a well performed take on less is more, and an impressive contribution to the overall work.

Illume is a testament to the potential of dance theatre that is both visually captivating and culturally grounded. Despite the first night jitters (a point that Rings mentioned as it was their first time presenting with all production elements combined) the standing ovation was well deserved. Frances Rings, Darrell Sibosado, the dancers of Bangarra Dance Theatre, and the entire creative team of Illume are to be commended for their immense dedication and their unwavering commitment to truth-telling through dance, theatre, music, visual art and light.

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ILLUME Bangarra Dance Theatre

Gadigal Country, Sydney Opera House, 4th-14th June 2025

Choreographer: Frances Rings

Artistic & Cultural Collaborator: Darrell Sibosado

Performers: Lillian Banks, Tamara Bouman, James Boyd, Eli Clarke, Kallum Goolagong, Daniel Mateo, Maddison Paluch, Edan Porter, Courtney Radford, Roxie Syron, Zeak Tass, Jye Uren, Kassidy Waters, Donta Whitham

Set Design: Charles Davis

Costume Design: Elizabeth Gadsby

Emerging Costume Designer: Rika Hamaguchi

Lighting Design: Damien Cooper

Video Design: Craig Wilkinson

Composer: Brendon Boney

Cultural Consultants: Trevor Sampi & Audrey (Pippi) Bin Swani

Rehearsal Director: Rikki Mason

Production Manager: Cat Studley

Bangarra Company Manager: Joseph Cardona

Bangarra Artistic Director & Co-CEO: Frances Rings

Online Programme

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Sarah Kalule is an artist exploring choreography, literature and experimental performance. With a strong interest in contemporary art theory, her current practice delves into her diasporic histories, theatrical jazz and presenting the body in space through bold imagery.

Zain El-Roubaei on Happy Hour #19

HAPPY HOUR #19: The Many Pockets of Sydney Street Dance

Gabriela Quinsacara: Guest Curator

ReadyMade Works, Ultimo, 5th & 6th April, 2025

Performances by:

Dechen Gendun with Genevieve Craig  

Patrick Huynh with Leon Endo, Takuma Takemesa, and Jeremy Iskander

Momoka Nogita with Vincent Kyle Garcia

Valdi Yudibrata with William Mak

review by Zain El-Roubaei

I got to watch ReadyMade’s Happy Hour #19 twice, both nights on a warm weekend in April, and it taught me that street dancers are generous witnesses. The show was an incursion of a sort, maybe even an infiltration of street dancers into ReadyMade's quarters, with its black floors always generating slightly too much heat, its wooden balcony terrace, a table donned with fruits for free, beer and wine for purchase, its lines for a bathroom tucked away in the corner, and its capacity to generate sweet conversation. Expanding what is meant by the ‘contemporary’ in dance, director Jane McKernan has made street styles a regular fixture at Happy Hour; in fact, six of the last eleven have involved street dancers. But during this one, Happy Hour #19, I understood something that felt true in my bones. I wrote it down: street dance is a gathering. One could say instead that street dance unifies, but I think that implies we are all similar and united among a shared vision. It’s not that. No, unify is too loaded a term: street dance does not unify; it gathers.

Gabriela Quinsacara curated this season’s Happy Hour, and it’s hard to imagine a better fit: her experience with various street styles—and more importantly, her experience with various street dancers—is extensive. This is someone who has danced, judged, taught, cyphered and shared with many pockets of the Australian dance scene. This is someone who has been a core part of the Sydney street dance crew Riddim Nation, a group that, among eight members, covers pretty much every street style—from waacking to breaking, from hip hop to Afrohouse and vogue femme, from popping to dancehall, extending even as far as headbanging and ska. Gabriela’s rigorous eclecticism, a playful traversing across street dance cultures at the highest level, is mirrored in her curation. We got to see Dechen Gendun, Sydney’s house & hip hop veteran; Patrick “Preemo P” Huynh, an explosive, unique and charismatic breaker; Momoka Nogita (Momo), a waacker relentless in refining her approach to her style and the stage; and Valdi Yudibrata, carrying within him a near-intimidating blend of krump, popping, choreography, and Randai, a dance from the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra.

In the first of these four mini-performances Dechen Gendun collaborated with Genevieve Craig. What shines immediately is Dechen’s detail, poise, subtlety; and it seems her dance refuses to be couched in the terms of any one style, despite being so strongly rooted in those styles. In just a few short solos, here’s what we are given: hip hop grooves, micro-isolations (reminding me so much of the techniques of animation); flirting with house footwork here and there; seamless transitions between dancing up-top and on the floor, likely inspired by the recent surge of contemporary-influenced floorwork among house dancers; a focused gaze toward the corner spotlight or eyes darting along the large hall of readymade. These, and so much more, made Dechen’s performance a highlight.

This piece was split into a few vignettes, the first with poet Genevieve Craig, the middle two solos by Dechen and Genevieve respectively, with Genevieve utilising her background in slam poetry, then another solo by Dechen that culminates in her moving, trance-like, to her collaborator’s poetry. With such a short amount of time, the switch between vignettes was abrupt, and it became difficult to feel into the connection between Geneveive’s lines and Dechen’s movement. Perhaps it was a difference of scale. Craig boldly uses many broad, hard-to-define concepts: peace, culture, history, justice and, of course, truth, the latter repeated multiple times to close the act. But how exactly do these terms relate to the idiosyncrasies of Dechen’s performance, the very idiosyncrasies that made her freestyle so enchanting? How exactly do these terms—peace, culture, history, and so on—relate to each other? What is the symbolic potential of truth here, and how does it animate what Dechen has accomplished in her dance? The textuality of dance and the dance of language are intersections that can furnish a life’s worth of work; and how truth can be expressed in a dance piece is another, related question. I look forward to seeing how Dechen and Genevieve can continue to inhabit those connections together.

The second performance, by Patrick “Preemo P” Huynh and his collaborators, in many ways peers into the truth of breaking. The form is rigorous, unforgiving; breakers can be siphoned off from the rest of the world, somewhat unique in their blend of creative, athletic and technical obsessions; mentors can be ruthless (sometimes problematically so), their respect for the artform outweighing the kindness afforded to a newbie. For better or worse, this is how skilled breakers have been made.

The work begins from the perspective of Leon Endo (Bboy Leon) the youngest of the group, as he struggles to follow his elder, Preemo P—sloppy footwork, crashes, poor transitions. Preemo and Leon eventually start to exchange rounds. Their talents are quickly revealed. Preemo’s top rocks are earthy yet effortless; he's fond of sweeps, tracing a semi-circle with the off leg; and a well-placed arm—on his leg, on his face—gives his dance a little extra flair. Leon, by contrast, utilises power moves done slowly; his growth from rookie to seasoned is highlighted. This all happens over some lo-fi beats, with lush piano chords and ethereal strings. Later, two more breakers join in: Takuma Takemesa, better known as Bob CC, whose elegant and graceful footwork was a highline; and Jeremy Iskander aka Faldeeze, a forceful breaker dressed in all black. Faldeeze continually antagonises the other breakers, pushing them, pulling at their leg to force a crash. Unfortunately, this presence as a force of antagonism went a little underexplored. Perhaps breaking is being likened to a fight, or even chess (Wu Tang's Intro to Shadowboxin'—"the game of chess, is like a sword fight"—is the opener to one of the group’s sequences)? I found this connection between breaking and other, similarly unforgiving art-forms to be curious and compelling—more so than Leon’s coming-of-age story, which at times felt like a forced narrative imposition to get the work going. This group I think have an ability to explore and communicate the darker sides of creative discipline, the psychic costs of training at the highest level (a level this crew has so much experience with). This shadow element of discipline was a subtle presence throughout their show—bringing it to the fore, making it more explicit, could be immensely generative.

Power and vulnerability are the subjects of Momoka Nogita’s piece, performed in collaboration with Vincent Kyle Garcia. This third offering begins with voice over interviews, each dancer taking their turn to respond to the same set of questions: What does power mean to you? If you had all the power in the world, what would you do? At what moments in your life did you feel vulnerable? What can be achieved through vulnerability? On a chair in the centre of the stage, Momo and Vincent dance to their responses, their gestures often a literal translation of what’s being said.

The interview responses are at times whimsical, at times serious, and at times a subtle glimpse into the dancers’ interiority. But the interviews and their inclusion sometimes fell flat. Again, when broad, all-encompassing concepts like power and vulnerability come into play, it becomes difficult to feel into what’s being said. In performances of this length it’s a risk to rely on lofty concepts, hoping the audience will know what you’re referring to. Perhaps by altering the scope of questions, or by cutting down the number of questions to be answered, or even by expanding this into a longer piece, Vincent and Momo could genuinely and effectively make their talk just as evocative as their dance.

And how evocative their dance! With a brief break over a hot drink, where Momo and Vincent chat quietly, maybe discussing their responses, Donna Summer's ‘Melody of Love’ kicks in. It's a party, and these waackers get to replicate Summer's gorgeous lyrics and silky voice with grace, poise and, of course, power. The dancers split apart and come together again, freestyling on their own and eventually connecting for a brief and hard-hitting choreography. Their waacking technique is undeniable: fast, clean, and sharp stops; beautiful circles traced with their forearms by hinging at the elbow; playing effortlessly with their arms overhead. Vincent has a penchant for level changes and struts across the space, and Momo is graceful in the way she melts before springing back to life. The two harmonise beautifully.

There’s a way that the closing act, offered by Valdi Yudibrata and collaborator William Mak, is also a meditation on power. But here it’s more explicitly the power of belonging to a tradition, be it by blood or by association. Though not from West Sumatra specifically (his background is Sundanese), Valdi’s power is ancestral; his voice quiets the room, alters its feel. Rhythms he’s picked up from the body percussion of Randai become a sonic articulation of that power. Technically speaking these rhythms mix well with the two dancers’ backgrounds in krump and popping, as both styles are uncompromising in their use of muscle contractions, sharp and sudden expressions of strength, and quick changes in velocity. You can use your pop to show a rhythm; you can create a rhythm with your stomp and jab. Will and Valdi explore this with maturity, allowing the play on rhythm and style enough time and space to breathe. All this mirroring is enacted at the level of costume, too. Valdi’s Destar—a patterned fabric that he would later tie around his waist—becomes the centrepoint around which the two dancers revolve: copying each other’s movements, finding their own unique expression while connecting with the other—Will does this in Nikes, Valdi without shoes. It’s hard not to experience the Destar’s centring as symbolic, for attention is continually drawn to Valdi’s expression in and through Randai. How Will can enhance this symbolism without detracting from his own voice, history, and movement is something I think still needs working out. Why, for example, is this not a solo act? (This is not at all to say that it should be a solo act, but that, in asking the question and others like it, Will and Valdi can make good on the collaborative potential they very clearly exhibit).

Krump, Will and Valdi’s shared language, finishes the show. While every dance style is communal, insofar as it involves some kind of shared set of movements or worldviews, krump is almost never a solo act. Krump needs hype. Krump feeds off energy. Will and Valdi bring their intense and impactful play on rhythms, claps, pops and stomps to a head when a krump remix of Kendrick Lamar’s (by now overplayed, surely?) ‘Not Like Us’ comes in. Every krumper in the room had a chance to jump on stage and get off, audience and performers alike, and the cheers, the hype, was infectious. Readymade was witness to how krump effortlessly collapses regimented separations between performer and audience, and therefore how important the embodied presence of the audience actually is. Even if you’re not performing, street dance teaches us, you have the agency and therefore responsibility to alter the energetics of the space.

It’s a testament to Gabriela’s curation that she chose to end with Will and Valdi. For by the end, at the zenith of hype and volume and energy, it seemed that everyone—the performers, with their irreducibly different skillsets and backgrounds; and the audience, coming with their own histories and expertise; both, with almost nothing left to give—deserved an applause. Exhausting yes, imperfect always, but in a gathering of street dancers there’s always room for magic.

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HAPPY HOUR #19

ReadyMade Works, Ultimo, 5th & 6th April, 2025

Guest Curator: Gabriela Quinsacara:

Performers:

Dechen Gendun with Genevieve Craig  

Patrick Huynh with Leon Endo, Takuma Takemesa, and Jeremy Iskander

Momoka Nogita with Vincent Kyle Garcia

Valdi Yudibrata with William Mak

Tech: Sarah Stormont

ReadyMade Works: Director Jane McKernan, Studio Manager Ashleigh Veitch, Communications Manager Chanel Cheung.

“Happy Hour is ReadyMade Works’ signature short works program showcasing the practices of Sydney’s independent dance artists. Initiated by Linda Luke and Samantha Chester in 2016, Happy Hour is the platform for encountering the diverse and uncompromising work being made by local dance artists.”

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Zain El-Roubaei is a dancer and graduate student @ USYD. Contact: zain.elroubaei@gmail.com

Phaedra Brown on High Octane

HIGH OCTANE: A RELENTLESS PUSH TO THE START LINE

Campbelltown Arts Centre, 28th March, 2025

Emma Harrison: director and performer with performer/collaborators Emma Riches & Frances Orlina               

review by Phaedra Brown

Racing helmets, leaf-blowers, and smoke machines galore—Emma Harrison’s High Octane melds evocative staging and seamlessly executed choreography to explore our experience of competition, success and above all, resilience. It’s a work that pushes relentlessly forward but takes the audience along for the ride.

Entering Campbelltown Arts Centre we were met with remnants of last night’s burnout on the forecourt. Others have told me it was pretty spectacular, a shame to have missed the wheel spinning, tire squealing, smoky display of rev-head action on the 2nd and 3rd nights of this characteristically short contemporary dance season. But when we entered the foyer our compensation was the sound of formula one racing commentary playing over a loudspeaker, setting up the world of High Octane before we even got to the performance space, a fun detail.

As we enter the black box theatre the stage is doused in smoke. The dancers are amping themselves up. Models, drivers, rock-stars and wrestlers, they shift hazily between modes of competition, celebrity and stardom. Dressed in Eliza Cooper’s fitting mix of Lycra and leather, the three performers—Emma Harrison, Emma Riches and Frances Orlina—look great in cropped racing jackets over form fitting body suits, with motorbike helmets which they use as head coverings, podiums, shields and trophies throughout the work.

Emma Harrison’s choreography alternates between big, jazzy, rhythmic sequences, and oozy, curling slow-motion sections. There are major unison sections which are interjected with each of the dancers, at different moments, taking the lead or trailing the pack, keeping the cycle of ‘leader’ or ‘winner’ rotating between the three. This piqued my interest over and over again as I was always wondering who would rise to the top next.

With High Octane, as with her solo work Wolverine in 2024 (Sydney Festival), Emma Harrison has created seamless transitions between movement and text, crafting stories that complement the movement without being overly explanatory. With High Octane we hear monologues from Frances Orlina about her lust for stardom delivered while balancing precariously atop her racing helmet. From Harrison we get a frenzied take on a regional dance Eisteddfod, a call-back to her childhood. And in a section steeped in early 2000s nostalgia, Emma Riches excitedly recites a series of numbers, the numerical patterns of texts delivered via an early mobile keypad to a high-school boyfriend. Her quick, neat, detailed movement transforms into a series of proud poses. She has it all: mobile phone, love, and the promise of a bright future. She’s the top of the high-school food chain. Riches is impressive with in her precise mix of voice and movement, expertly toeing a line between the earnest and the satirical.

The props and other production elements of High Octane are impressive as well. A leaf blower becomes a wind machine that’s so forceful it distorts the dancers’ faces; motorbike helmets are symbols of strength, success and power, paraded around the stage, held high as if a conqueror is offering up enemy heads. A pile of ash rests in the back corner for the duration of the work, a fourth, vanquished competitor.

The neon greens, pinks and reds, with the re-occurring use of spotlights in Benjamin Brockman’s lighting design both expose the dancers and transform them into icons. The electronic sound design by Amy Flannery drives the dancers forward, inspiring and matching their persistence. The cleverly integrated sounds of a racetrack or a dial tone help build the world of the show.

Sound is a rich element in all aspects of this work. After a helmet clad headbutting battle, Riches is left defeated. She begins to wail. Harrison then Orlina join, their cries unexpectedly transforming into the sound of cars revving—an inspired moment. The performers’ voices become tires screeching, sirens blaring, a harrowing soundscape. The dancers disappear and reappear, in and out of smoke, as they struggle to press towards the front corner of the stage, making ground and then being pulled back into the fog. Harrison delivers a balletic yet very rock-and-roll solo. There are victory laps, purposeful posing from the others, first place eisteddfod solos and those earlier wrestlers and rock-stars return. Through intense strobing light the movement echoes the start of the work, this time with more attack and clarity, the dancers now mid-competition.

Finally, Emma, Emma and Frances collapse into their separate spotlights, alongside the pile of ashes. A sense of aftershock settles across the stage. Emma Harrison begins to sing, rallying herself and the others. They begin a broken resurrection. Their bodies rising and collapsing. A jagged and broken roll begins over to the pile of ashes. Grabbing, hoarding, and pulling the ash with their arms, legs and bellies, they spread it out across the white stage. The ash becomes asphalt as the dancers mark out a large oval, a racetrack; their bodies struggling to pave the track and out of the ashes a new start line emerges.

Emma Harrison, Emma Riches and Frances Orlina are a well-oiled machine in High Octane, a work that never quite breaks down or reaches its limit. At times we see exhaustion built into the movement, but we never fear that they will fail or push past the point of no return. The work never becomes so high octane that the movement itself is unsustainable, but it does point to a relentless need for all of us to be ‘on’. The competition is not a fight to the death, but a fight to stay in motion—to do it all and ‘have it all’.  

The team behind High Octane have created a work with access points for all audiences.  Harrison, Riches, Orlina, Brockman, Flannery, and Cooper have produced a great example of how production and performance can work together to create an engaging piece of contemporary dance—a form often accused of being inaccessible. As Harrison explains, High Octane “is garish and loud, it moves fast and doesn’t wait for you to catch up”, but I never felt left behind. In a work that required model-like poise, gritty floorwork and nuanced characterisation, the versatility and staying power of all the performers is to be applauded; as are the team at Campbelltown Arts Centre who continue to champion and present high-quality, independent, contemporary dance work in Sydney.

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HIGH OCTANE

Campbelltown Arts Centre, March 27-29, 2025

Director and Performer: Emma Harrison

Performer and Collaborator: Emma Riches

Performer and Collaborator: Frances Orlina

Lighting Designer: Benjamin Brockman

Sound Designer: Amy Flannery

Costume Designer: Eliza Cooper

Dramaturg: Adriane Daff

Outside Eye: Martin del Amo and Miranda Wheen

Understudy: Cassidy McDermott Smith

Production Manager: Jessica Pizzinga

Operator: Darcy Catto-Pitkin

Creative Producer: Anthea Doropoulos

Assistant Creative Producer: Anne Cutajar

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Phaedra Brown is an independent dancer, choreographer, and producer. Her current practice draws on a collage of elements from movement, choreography, writing, and curation.

Lexy Panetta on Love Arena

LOVE ARENA a captivating exploration of rhythm and organic forms

Remy Rochester & Jasmin Luna: concept, choreography and performers

Sydney Fringe Festival, Sydney Dance Company Neilson Studio, 28th September, 2024.

review by Lexy Panetta

Sydney based artists Jasmin Luna and Remy Rochester offered a fascinating exploration of rhythm and nature in their new contemporary dance duet Love Arena. The work left me hypnotised with its continual outpouring of energy, textured synchronicity and intricate detail.

Love Arena reflects the cyclical nature of our inner and outer worlds through an exploration of tension and resolve. The program notes declare the works exploration of ecological themes, specifically addressing “human symmetry with the natural environments”, which evidently reflected on the performers' (re)connection to organic harmony and rhythm. From the outset, Love Arena explores these themes through organic movement and attention to the embodiment of the subtle, harmonious rhythms of the Alyx Denison score, with which the dancers resonate and predict, preempt and follow. The symmetry of the score is also reflected in the choreography with its attention to dual patterns, not only in the fact that this is a duet, but also through the compositional choices that blur the lines between who is affecting who—the body of the other, one’s own body or the ‘body’ of the environment.

The work is called Love Arena because it refers to the proximity of two beings and their interdependence of energy, resonance, and rhythm within a shared space. The choreography reflects this through a variety of movement and spatial choices that evidence a call and affect resonance and symmetry, demonstrating a captivating exploration of rhythm and organic forms.

Love Arena’s design is minimalist. The stage is firstly set in a dull glow, making the dancers only just visible as they make small actions lying on the floor.  They nestle on their backs with their knees bent upwards to fit within the base of a cylindrical, draping net structure that cascades from the ceiling. The structure recalled a tree for me, a soft pillar in the centre of the stage with a texture of veins, evoking the softness of many organic forms.

The dancers unfurl, imitating the roots of this tree. The pulsating overhead lighting changes the design from dark low lighting to a warm glow, accompanied by a surging synth Dennison’s score, which signals to the dancers’ to evolve into their next state.

Here their movements synchronise, they are intricate, unfurling actions that move the dancers out from within their tree trunk into a pulsating light and soundscape. This alert   section felt like watching an organism change within a time-lapse of day and night.

Costumes in Love Arena were minimal, with warm and earthy toned trousers and a net textured fabric providing transparent coverage for the dancers’ upper bodies, it reminded me of moss. As the sleeves draped their arms, the costumes offered an organic continuation of their movements throughout the work, providing another visual element that complicated and obscured the silhouette of their human-organic forms.

The performers seemed engrossed by one another and began to expand out from the central prop, working as one unit, filling the voids of each other’s negative space. They moved with a combination of rippling energy and staccato pauses, shifting the physical reactions as they interplayed with one another’s positioning; either being affected by the other or relocating to replace the others shape in the space. The choreography tessellates through space, the dancers still engrossed in one another’s forms, shifting and collecting each other’s energy – again… it was difficult to discern who or what was being affected or doing the affecting.

After exploring the stage, tracing the rhythms of one another’s movements, they trailed off into individual explorations of those rhythms, interspersed with subtle synchronised sections. They minimise their movements, reduce their speed, retract back towards the netted trunk. They vibrate and surge back to their starting position, reflecting the completion of the cycle of their organic, rhythmic journey.

Whilst I think it would have been effective to see a more purposeful incorporation of the prop suspended from the ceiling, Remy Rochester & Jasmin Luna have created a strong work that encompasses an organic build using mirroring, rhythmical shifts and moments of unison. It would be great to see Love Arena offered the chance for further development, expanding on its founding concepts and extending it from its current short running time of 25 minutes. There was obviously a clear commitment in Love Arena from both performer/choreographers to maintain a steady intention in the work: the interplay of rhythm through which they sought to explore the cadences of each other, echoing from one body to another body, and from each to their environment and back again. It was a captivating work and demonstrated the potential of these two young choreographers. I hope they get other chances to show us what they can do.

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LOVE ARENA

Sydney Fringe Festival, Dance Hub, Sydney Dance Company Neilson Studio, 26-28 September 2024

Remy Rochester & Jasmin Luna: concept, choreography and performers

Composer: Alyx Dennison

Costumes and Set Design: Jasmin Luna

Lighting Designer: Saint Clair

Mentor: Kristina Chan

Supported by: Catapult Choreographic Hub, Legs on the Wall, Create NSW, Critical Path, Dance Makers Collective, Sydney Fringe Festival, and Sydney Dance Company.

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Alexandria (Lexy) Panetta is a Sydney-based independent artist, choreographer, and academic with interest in dance performance, improvisation, choreography, and film. Lexy also works part-time as a tutor at the Australian College of Physical Education (ACPE), is the Learning Associate for the Sydney Dance Company (SDC), and tours as a Teaching Artist for SDC.