The serious play of [gameboy]
Review by Lillian Shaddick
Sydney Dance Company’s INDance 2025, 16 August, 2025
Choreographer: Amy Zhang
Performer/Collaborators: William “Billy” Keohavong & Ko Yamada
Two men in black underwear drop onto a dark stage through beams of light. Like avatars entering a virtual world they must now navigate, their knees bounce, and their arms and torso momentarily fail from the impact of the fall. What follows are the trials these men subject themselves to as they follow the rules of some game they instinctively seem to know and inevitably obey.
They put on absurd protective gear – one in sneakers and a motorbike helmet, the other in ski googles and gumboots – which become unusable or only serve to disadvantage them as they compete in a series of absurd games: carrying an apple without using their hands; walking barefoot over Lego scattered across the floor. At the end of each mini competition the loser walks to the back of the stage with obedient neutrality where a table draped in a white cloth holds two toothbrushes and a tube of what appears to be (judging by its bright green hue and the performers’ painful reaction) wasabi. The audience quickly learns that this is the loser’s punishment and we respond with grimacing laughter as William “Billy” Keohavong and Ko Yamada take turns at vigorously brushing their teeth with the bright green past. It is kind of funny as their neutral faces turn quickly into pained expressions and they desperately spit into a bucket and rinse out their mouths. Their suffering is silly and our reaction disturbingly familiar. We are a culture well-accustomed to watching pain turned into spectacle. As the tasks grow harder, Keohayong and Yamada’s pain becomes more apparent, but still we laugh. Without ceremony or tutelage, we adapt to the discomfort—normalise it, expect it, some even seem to revel in it.
[gameboy] is Amy Zhang’s first full length dance theatre work which premiered at Brisbane’s at DANCE24, presented by Metro Arts. The work was inspired by Japanese game shows, video games and internet culture where we can exist as avatars but are “put through the ringer and tested” as Zhang explained in the Sydney Dance Company InDance show notes.
In each scene the dancers move in different ways, produced in different worlds. In the opening they cycle through a sequence of controlled technical movements – bows, plies and lunges that slowly magnify with both performers working hard to maintain their carefully timed technical positions as the music shifts through various genres: stripped back syncopated percussion that turns to hip-hop then electronic beats. Later, near the end of the performance, Yamada and Keohavong become one. Their bodies entwine. They are indistinguishable from one another. They work together but also attempt to gain control over one another as their limbs wrap over and around and they use swift floor work to a minimal electronic soundtrack.
But it was the middle scene in this hour-long work that stayed with me.
Under dim light, the dancers sit on black metal chairs, expressionless. On a stage still strewn with multicoloured Lego bricks from the previous section, their hands hover in front of their stomachs, fingers gently splayed in a soft grip and twitch sporadically – they’re playing video games. With barely noticeable movement their bodies transform, shifting away from their neutral sitting positions. But I only notice this as my gaze drifts across from one dancer to the other. When I return after looking at one, I notice the other’s posture is different; each have moved to become just slightly more contorted. Then the choreographer Amy Zhang enters the stage like a casual stagehand and begins cleaning up the Lego. This mundane act draws my attention and distracts me from the gamers’ transformations. When I look back again, their bodies are bent in physically improbable positions – spines arched over the hard edge of the chairs, limbs extended to push the boundaries of what seems to be physiologically possible, and yet they continue to ‘play’, hands still gripped around imaginary controllers, eyes locked on the imagined monitor in front of them.
During this section I felt myself lose sight of their bodies. Each shift in posture was so minor and only slightly more extreme than the previous, but their final positions were dramatically distorted from how they began. We, the audience, had to accept their new distorted normal as it slowly crept up on us with each alteration only slightly more extreme than the previous.
Later that evening, I scrolled through my phone: scenes from the genocide in Gaza; an AI-generated deepfake of a street interview; an ad for sunglasses with a built-in camera; a clip of a man proclaiming women should not be in the workforce. I move between images—horrible, fake, promotional and shameful, in seconds—a parade of technological spectacle and social decline, terrible and absurd, all interwoven. While [gameboy] made no explicit reference to this kind of experience, the way Zhang explored different forms of gradual, imperceptible descension, distortion and alteration reminded me of how personal and societal change can occur; not necessarily through a sudden volcanic eruption but a kind of creeping lava spill. That middle scene of [gameboy] encapsulated this. When shifts are gradual and distractions sufficient, we struggle to see how far we have moved from where we began, normalising suffering, on stage and in life. It’s not sudden but steady, even when it’s happening to us or to others right in front of our eyes, it can be hard to recognise.
[gameboy] ends with what appears to be a light-hearted romp: a bouncy K-pop track plays, and Keohavong and Yamada perform a perky, tightly choreographed routine on loop under a nice warm, colourful, active light. But their neutral faces slowly morph into exaggerated smiles— mouths turned upwards, and teeth bared in a forced performance of joy. The audience laughs and cheers. I smiled too—you cannot help but respond to the layering of ‘happy’ signifiers. It feels like a fun, light way to end the performance. But there is something eerie about it too. [gameboy] reminds us of how easily we are distracted, how we are able to overlook and to turn away from disturbing truths often hidden behind fake smiles and one swipe away from a funny cat video.
[gameboy]
Sydney Dance Company’s INDance 2025, Week 1, August 14-16, 2025
Neilson Studio, Hickson Rd, Sydney
Choreographer: Amy Zhang
Performer/Collaborators: William “Billy” Keohavong & Ko Yamada
Sound Design: Jackson Garcia
Contributing Composer: Maxwell “The Flood” Douglas
Lighting Design: Theodore Carroll
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).