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).