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.