New Dance Works from Emerging Makers
Producer: Catapult
Presented in collaboration with PACT Centre for Emerging Artists
Performances by
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.