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.