Touching Language
SUNCUT Chloe Chignell
Critical Path, Drill Hall, 24-25 January 2026
Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal Ivey Wawn & Rhiannon Newton
Critical Path, Drill Hall, 23-24 May 2026
Review by Joshua Di Mattina-Beven
I had the pleasure of diving into the worlds of SUNCUT by Chloe Chignell earlier this year, as well as Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal by Rhiannon Newton and Ivey Wawn in May. Both supported by Critical Path, and the latter by Performance Space, they share a common interest in language as a choreographic tool and movement as a speculative embodiment of past and future. Critical Path, housed in a former navy hall on Gadigal and Birrabirragal land, positions itself as a choreographic research centre for development, criticality and experimentation. Whilst these two works have had formal audience encounters, they nonetheless carry this process-centred-philosophy, each attesting to their own continual re-composition. SUNCUT is rearranged each time it is performed, inhabiting the un-finished materials of a lesbian dictionary, whilst Premonitions… is framed as a durational solo, composed of 20-minute cycles each pre-empting their next iteration. The not-quite-theatre space of the Drill Hall lends itself to these experimental forms, as audiences come and go to experience glimpses of Chloe, Rhiannon and Ivey’s speculative visions.
SUNCUT Chloe Chignell
SUNCUT by Brussels based, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) trained dancer Chloe Chignell made its Australian debut at Critical Path in January this year. Performed variously in theatres, gallery spaces and museums across Europe, I was curious how this edition would translate to the Drill Hall’s cavernous interior. 2.5 hours in length, Chloe reconstructs 33 of the 366 entries from Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, originally published in French by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig in 1976. The story goes that Wittig originally declined an invitation to write a ‘Lesbian Dictionary’ from her publisher, before accepting the challenge in bad faith. She concocted the materials for a dictionary with her partner Zeig over 2 weeks whilst on summer holiday in Greece. I imagine them writing together between swimming, eating, sleeping and loving. Despite the story’s possible embellishment, its power on my imagination holds strong. Materials for a Dictionary similarly fabricates myths and histories related to the Companion Lovers, a group of fictional Amazonian women who reject society to live in a world without work, possessions, men or death. To quote Chloe, Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary
I attended a Summer Reading Group with Chloe over January. Here we read Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary and practiced bibliomancy: a non-linear method for collective reading which emphasises what the book wants to give you, rather than what you want from the book. Attending this reading group every Tuesday evening, I was primed to read the dance as it wanted to be seen, interpreting fragments like divination: beyond the sphere of the knowable, suggesting a future yet to come.
It is 35 degrees Celsius the day SUNCUT is performed. The Drill Hall windows are open, illuminating the space on all sides while Cicadas sing loudly, mixing with an ambient score performed by Mara Schwerdtfeger on the viola. Chairs line the edges of the hall, with piles of words on individual A4 pieces of paper dotted around each cluster of seats. In front of me sit the words EAR, PERFUME and HARPALYCE. Chloe is stationed at the other end of the hall, looking off to the horizon. She slowly lifts her heel before landing it heavy on the Tarkett floor. Perhaps it is the heat, but her movements have the quality of a mirage – smooth, like a video buffering. This collective hallucination is sustained, drawing us deeper into the unspectacular, yet hypnotising, repetition.
HALLUCINATION
The companion lovers go on frequent retreats to develop their individual faculties such as the faculty of exchange. They become able, for example, to exchange their hallucinations. Or better yet, they combine them with those of their companion lovers. (Lesbian peoples: Material for a Dictionary by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig, 1979, p. 69).
Chloe moves to a pile of paper across the room, reciting each word to the small group closest to her. The direct address generates a private audience for the dance which proceeds. Without hearing the dance’s textual reference, I attempt to decode the thing as it is made – is this a kind of prayer? Or summoning ritual? Her fingers form a matrix, raising a diamond to the sky before turning the shape in on itself. The sequence is repeated to each cluster of audience, like a magician showing off their trick. The clarity of Chloe’s movement is breathtaking. Like an alchemic reaction, simple movements are transfigured into fabulating, imaginative images. Their dense simplicity prompts my own interpretations: she is on horseback, hair blowing across her nape with landscape rolling beyond. Or tongue out, sprung like a gargoyle warding off bad spirits. These layered interpretations generate increasing disorientation. “I felt like I was missing something” my friend remarks after the performance is over. To what extent this ‘missing’ generates a desire to know more, or look closer, depends on the viewer. I wonder how the same dance performs in the gallery. Perhaps the expectation for narrative and coherence holds stronger in theatre spaces, in which case SUNCUT’s refusal to cohere may generate friction for the viewer (in the form of confusion, boredom or frustration).
SCIENCE
“In truth I tell you, chaos, all has been systematic chaos, obscurantism, falsification, mystification, since the beginning of writing. My beloved friends, do not say that there have been chaotic periods. As if we have known other times … My beloved friends, what is science? What are history, psychology, sociology, theology, archaeology, biology, ethnology, etiology, zoology, philosophy, botany, physics, geography, medicine, numerology, economy, mythology, semiology? I tell you, all is a lie” (Marie Isar, Invectives, delivered during a large assembly of companion lovers at the end of the Concrete Age in Flanders). (Lesbian peoples: Material for a Dictionary by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig, 1979, p. 138).
After a particularly jaunty prance across the room, Chloe quietly adjusts her Velcro pants before giving it another go. I am drawn back to reality, to the formality of the task and its quotidian execution. Owing to lineages of post-modern dance where everyday gestures are incorporated into formally experimental compositions, I read these small moments as signifiers themselves. A de-spectacular gesture. Use of juxtaposition and collage hint at these histories too. Chloe remixes dance’s lexicon into new sentences – sampling ballet, folk and punk styles. A rodeo two step hoedown is performed for the word Work, and I am endeared to the dance’s colloquiality. As someone who did not study dance formally, I assume there are conversations I am missing. Like a language I cannot speak, the dancing nevertheless works itself on me. I think about how communities use language to communicate amongst themselves. Or how I might use signs, words and gestures to signal my affinity with another when I can’t speak outright. The tenderness of a body in secret communion is untranslatable. It is the impossibility of this task which gives SUNCUT its drive: the right to opacity, the agency of a gesture to sidestep immediate comprehension.
COMPANION LOVERS
The companion lovers are those who, violently desiring one another, live/love in peoples, following the verses of Sappho, “in beauty I will sing my companions.” The companion lovers gather from lesbians all of the culture, the past, the inventions, the songs and the ways of life. (Lesbian peoples: Material for a Dictionary by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig, 1979, p. 35).
The touch of a translator is registered in the material itself, the way it is delivered, the additions and variations of its second life. Over 2 hours of watching SUNCUT, this touch surfaces: articulate and playful, taut between declaration and whisper. Playing with the negative space within and without the archive, Chloe traces the desire to know and the surrender of never being able to. She lays on the floor and closes her eyes, holding her own body. Mara’s music swells in layered echoes and I am drawn into this two-fold space: the materiality of skin and the memory of its touch. Perhaps this gives meaning to the CUT: a singularity split in two – a half dancing its other. Or rather, the CUT as a rearrangement, a tool for editing and reordering of source material, allowing for its continual transformation.
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Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal Ivey Wawn & Rhiannon Newton
Watching a dancer improvise can sometimes feel like being on the outside of an imaginative inner world. This can be an unknowable, internal place, a void for the watcher, as movement and energy appear like apparitions without provenance. Dancer’s Rhiannon Newton and Ivey Wawn are each firmly established in the Sydney-based field of solo improvisation. Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal is their first collaborative public presentation which took place at Critical Path in association with Performance Space. In a durational performance that cycled in 20-minute intervals “between premonitions and their fulfilment”, Rhiannon and Ivey were:
With Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal, Rhiannon and Ivey have cross-pollinated their choreographic histories to explore the ‘cave’ as an internal world of imaginative potential. Past dances become re-animated, blurring the line between life and death. But premonition goes a step further here, asking: what if the improvised form appeared not only as an accumulation of sources past and present, but also as a prediction for the future? A premonition can have a feeling of foreboding – a sense of what is to come. Amid climate anxiety and a ticking doomsday clock, the future haunts our present in endless perpetuity. The cave becomes the place where secrets are buried, shadows are cast and strange forms of life begin to take shape. If this is the cave at its most subterranean, we start this performance at its mouth – looking from the outside.
Small groups of familiar faces are gathering outside the Drill Hall in Rushcutters Bay. The tide is rising, and clouds threaten rain on the horizon. After a few minutes of waiting, the Drill Hall doors crack open. Walking inside, I let my eyes adjust to the darkened space. I take a seat on the floor amongst cushions in front of make-shift rows of chairs. Ivey and Rhiannon are seated on the floor too, flanking the audience on either side. Objects and mirrors dot the void – a smooth rock, limp plastic polymer fabric, a piece of coral (or is it a model of the inner ear canal?) Before I can decipher this exhibition-cum-set design, Rhiannon rises from her seated position. Entering the space, her body begins moving with matter-of-fact precision. She jumps up and down, testing her buoyancy against the stable ground. Arcing and diving into the Tarkett, she slithers across the floor, as if trying to burrow into the earth. These impossible tasks, while striking my imagination, ultimately emphasise the materiality of the space. While Rhiannon performs, Ivey sits to my left writing in her notebook. I imagine this is what they do in the studio, watching each other and writing down what they see. It positions the dance as in-the-making – more than a rehearsal, not-quite rehearsed. I have the sense that anything may appear before me – that we are on the edge of a story unfolding itself.
When Rhiannon concludes she walks back to her cushion on my left. Ivey, to the right, reads her writing aloud into a microphone.
The dance will possess her with a flight of the pelvis …
Horrified by the dead weight of its frozen body …
Luck placed between big and middle toe …
Her words surprise me. They shimmer between speculative fabulation and anatomical description. The density of signs and symbols eschews any singular reading. Much of the writing is framed in future tense, ‘she will’, ‘the dance will’, become the site of premonition. This speaking generates a resolution to the short dance which preceded it, an interpretive comma which reorientates the audience toward the future. The loop, of dance becoming premonition becoming dance, is deeply satisfying. Staying for the full 2 hours, I recognise some recurring archetypes: the Dolphin Carcass, the Scorpion King, the Maggot Passengers, the Jewel and the Diamond. I am reminded of Eco-Philosopher Elizabeth Povenelli’s figures of ‘Geontology’: the Virus, the Desert, the Animist. Povinelli uses these figures, an extrapolation of Michelle Foucault’s four figures of Biopower, to question the governance of life under late-liberal capitalism. What has the right to life, and how can our cultural and political imaginaries gesture toward other ways of living/non-living? I think of the diamond, crystalising over 1 billion years. I think of the maggot, the body within a body, turning death into life again. It takes an hour for me to realise I may not be watching a series of individual solos, but the same dance again and again. Not that any material is explicitly repeated, but something singular is accumulating. This is the same world along variating axes, the same gesture refracted through a jewel. We are deep in this dance together, watching movement resurface and plunge back into the collective imagination, like a dolphin coming up for air. It is such a generous invitation: to watch dance not from the outside but from within.
Ivey and Rhiannon’s collaborator Del Lumanta is performing alongside the cyclical solos, building their ambient score through textural guitar looping across the 2 hours. As Del’s soundscape ominously thickens, Ivey and Rhiannon’s gestures border on ecological horror. Gouging out eyes, mouths and bellybuttons, I imagine a gutted fish spewing out its insides. Their shirts, Ivey’s ribbed down the middle and Rhiannon’s restitched along the diagonal, gently remind me of Frankenstein’s composite body. While Ivey and Rhiannon are capable of incredible virtuosity, nothing beautiful remains uncomplicated in Premonition… by an unstable or grotesque subversion. I recall a recurring image of Ivey and Rhiannon strung up into a stretched arabesque (I’m thinking of the “Scorpion King”), as their ungrounded foot lifts further toward the sky. The words ‘catch’ and ‘lure’ crystalise in my mind. As I am drawn deeper into the dance, hypnotised by Del’s looping electric guitar, I begin to wonder if I am the fish ensnared in their trap. Their premonition is not only speculative but sinister, and I am not sure if I should trust my interpretive guides.
During another cycle, Ivey uses her finger to trace the distance between her ear and her eye socket. Extending her arms out, she triangulates her limbs from one corner of the room to the other. This gesture catches and doubles in the mirror hanging from the rafters. Ivey and Rhiannon both draw attention to their bodies as measuring devices, using arms to scale space, tongues to taste edges and feet to stay balanced. I think about the processes of measurement, navigation and observation which foreground western knowledge-making regimes. The magic and witchery implied in the predictive power of the ‘premonition’ moves beyond what is easily measurable. The objective tools used to fix the world in place are destabilised in Premonitions…, which lends the process of improvisation another quality. Rather than an expression of an individual’s inner world, Ivey and Rhiannon harness their bodies as devices for understanding their own shifting orientation. While being framed as a ‘solo’, these individual bodies are sites of enmeshed relation – between the viewer and their watcher, the body and its environment, a dancer and the possibility of their movement.
Ivey and Rhiannon finish the last cycle of their two-hour descent dancing together. They do not acknowledge one another, instead allowing their individual offerings to overlap and contradict. Del’s score has built to breaking point – a pressure of sound and language echoing in an incoherent pool of symbolism, archetypes and premonitions. Rhiannon exposes her armpit and gives it a lick, salt crystals meeting tongue with a glint of humour in her eye while Ivey spins like a tornado in the upper right corner. The beauty of Premonition is its simple structure, able to contain the many wild offsprings of its untimely collaborators. I look forward to the next dance Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal anticipates.
SUNCUT
Choreographer and Performer: Chloe Chignell
Sound and Performance: Mara Schwerdtfeger
Sound Collaborators: Steph Holl-Trieu, Amina Szecsödy
Presented by Critical Path, 24-25 January 2026
The Drill Hall, Critical Path, Rushcutters Bay, Gadigal and Birrabirragal Country
Supported by Critical Path, Artspace, Dancehouse, GC De Maalbeek, n22 Brussels, Kunstendecreet, Cité des arts, Paris.
Premonition: At the end of a dream of a cave, a portal
Choreographers and Performers: Ivey Wawn & Rhiannon Newton
Sound and Performance: Del Lumanta
Presented by Performance Space, 23-24 May 2026
The Drill Hall, Critical Path, Rushcutters Bay, Gadigal and Birrabirragal Country
Supported by Performance Space, Art Gallery NSW, Artspace, Critical Path and ReadyMade Works
Joshua Di Mattina-Beven (they/them) is a performance artist and writer currently working on unceded Bunurong/Boonwurrung lands. Joshua graduated from UNSW Art and Design in 2024 with a double degree in Fine Arts/Arts (Sculpture/Performance Studies), winning the Ross Steele Fine Art Prize. They have written alongside the filming of Deborah May’s Breakthroughs series in 2025 and published with Memo Magazine for MASS Memo in 2024.