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.
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.