FOUR INDEPENDENT CONTEMPORARY DANCE WORKS
15 – 24 AUGUST
NEILSON STUDIO AT SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY
SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY
LOVE
LOCK
Choreography
Melanie Lane
Music
Clark
Costume
Akira Isogowa
IMPERMANENCE
Choreography
Rafael Bonachela
Music
Bryce Dessner
Costume
Aleisa Jelbart
SYDNEY DANCE COMPANY IS BASED IN WALSH BAY SYDNEY. OUR STUDIOS ARE ON THE LANDS AND OVER THE WATERS OF THE GADIGAL OF THE EORA NATION.
WE RECOGNISE THEIR CONTINUING CONNECTION TO THE LAND AND WATERS AND THANK THEM FOR PROTECTING THIS COASTLINE AND ITS ECOSYSTEMS SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL. WE PAY OUR RESPECTS TO ELDERS PAST AND PRESENT, AND EXTEND THAT RESPECT TO ALL FIRST NATIONS PEOPLE.
WELCOME TO INDANCE
We are thrilled to present our third season of INDance, connecting independent contemporary dancemakers to Sydney audiences.
It’s exciting to provide this opportunity to witness these innovative works from independent dance makers at the Neilson Studio in the Walsh Bay Arts Precinct. It’s a great way to show our commitment to promoting and supporting Australian artists, their collaborators and the works they produce.
This year’s program explores diverse and innovative concepts that push the boundaries of dance, reflecting the rich and vibrant contemporary Australian landscape.
Audiences will experience a breadth of creative expression through the choreographic voices of Sarah Aiken, Kristina Chan, Ashleigh Musk and Harrison Ritchie-Jones and their incredible teams of collaborators.
This season of INDance was curated by Rafael and an independent panel, who we would like to thank for their support in the curation process.
Over three nights each week, you will experience different styles, moods and themes, through four unique dance works.
In Week One, we are excited to present two powerful Melbourne-based artists. In Make Your Life Count, choreographer Sarah Aiken takes us through a dance work that moves from the microscopic to the universal, zooming in and out on how we both deeply matter and not matter at all. This is followed by Harrison Ritchie-Jones’
CUDDLE, where through a mix of artforms, partners in crime raise the stakes and go all out on a dance heist.
Week Two brings two very different works. In Brightness, Kristina Chan takes audiences on a compelling journey through ideas of change and hope, drawing attention to the multiple things that are happening at once in our planet. The final work, SUB, created by Ashleigh Musk invites audiences to escape the surface and burrow into soil and stone to seek shelter.
We trust this program full of incredible concepts, created and performed by cuttingedge independent Australian artists, will take audiences on a journey through exhilarating contemporary dance.
We thank The Neilson Foundation for their visionary investment in this initiative, fostering continuous development of a flourishing landscape for independent dance in Sydney.
Lou Oppenheim Rafael Bonachela Executive Director Artistic Director
Brightness.
Photo by: Lin Wei
WEEK ONE • PAGE 7
MAKE YOUR LIFE COUNT • PAGES 8 – 13
CUDDLE • PAGES 14 – 19
WEEK TWO • PAGE 21
BRIGHTNESS • PAGES 22 – 25
SUB • PAGES 26 – 29
WEEK ONE
THURSDAY 15 AUGUST TO SATURDAY 17 AUGUST
6.00PM - MAKE YOUR LIFE COUNT BY SARAH AIKEN 7.45PM - CUDDLE BY HARRISON RITCHIE-JONES
Make Your Life Count.
Photo by: Tiffany Garvie
MAKE YOUR LIFE COUNT
Make Your Life Count is an ambitious dance work that shifts scale in a heartbeat and moves from the microscopic to the universal and back again.
Choreographer and dancer Sarah Aiken encounters her own self – expanded to infinite proportions and shrunken to painful insignificance, stretched into new dimensions and flattened into mute landscapes. This powerful work of imagination is a serious attempt to grapple with the paradoxes of modern life in which the individual is swollen to grotesque importance while simultaneously reduced to ineffectual and invisible impotence.
Make Your Life Count looks for ways to soften society’s focus on the individual – to lose oneself in the patterns of community, ecology and history. Whether monstrous and destructive or lost in the crushing scale of humanity, ecology, time and the universe, this perspectiveshifting work is a chance to lose yourself and maybe find something better.
Choreographer, Video, Visual Designer and Performer
Sarah Aiken
Sound Designer Andrew Wilson
Technical Designer, Creative Assistance and Outside Eye
Creative Support and Rehearsal Director
Text and Dramaturgy
Original Lighting Designer
Daniel Arnott
Claire Leske
Megan Payne with Sarah Aiken
Amelia Lever-Davidson
MAKE YOUR LIFE COUNT SARAH AIKEN
Choreographer, Video, Visual Designer and Performer
Sarah Aiken is a Melbourne-based performer, teacher and choreographer from Bellingen NSW. Her work investigates assemblage, authorship, scale and the self, looking at the roles of audience, performer, subject and object and connecting tangibly with audiences, to consider performance as a site for empathy and exchange.
Works include Body Corp (iteration #4) for CONTACT HIGH (Gertrude Contemporary 2024), Demake/Demaster for SITU8 City (Liberty Theatre STRUT/TURA 2022), Piece for pieces (PIECES Lucy Guerin Inc / The Substation 2019), What Am I Supposed To Do? (WAISTD) (Arts Centre Melbourne 2019) and SARAHAIKEN (Tools for Personal Expansion) (Keir Choreographic Award 2016).
Sarah is co-director of Deep Soulful Sweats, working with Rebecca Jensen to create work that engages rigorously with participation, waste and a reckless formalism, recycling content to consider materiality and how we come together. Their cult classic, zodiac themed participatory dance events have been running for ten years across the world, inviting audiences into cathartic and thoughtful performative experiences.
Sarah was artist in residence at Helsinki International Artists Program, Dancenorth and Centre for Projection Art. She is a grateful recipient of the Creators Fund, the Chloe Munro Fellowship and is developing new work Body Corp for premiere in 2025.
Make Your Life Count premiered at Arts House, Melbourne in 2022, with subsequent seasons at Platform Arts (2023), PICA Perth (2024) and video presentation at Federation Square, Gertrude Street Projection Festival, MCA and Frame Biennial of Dance. The work won Best Visual Design at the Australian Green Room Awards.
MAKE YOUR LIFE COUNT COLLABORATORS
ANDREW WILSON (Sound Designer)
Andrew is an Australian musician working in the space between dance and ambient music. Using a wide variety of aliases (including Andras, Wilson Tanner, Berko, Art Wilson) his releases are increasingly concerned with breaking and reassembling an Australian vernacular sound and identity. In addition to his studio practice, Andrew has hosted radio shows, composed soundtracks for contemporary dance and compiled reissues of Australian music for the cult label Efficient Space.
Andrew has toured extensively worldwide as a DJ and performer and was an Artist in Residence at MESS in 2019. Andrew has worked with Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen since 2013, creating original compositions for WAISTD (2019), OVERWORLD (2014, 2015), Underworld (2017) and Deep Soulful Sweats (2015, 2019). OVERWORLD was released on Growing Bin Records in 2014 with subsequent release in 2021 by Numero Group.
CLAIRE LESKE (Creative Support and Rehearsal Director)
Claire is a Melbourne-based performer and collaborator from Wagga Wagga NSW. Graduating from VCA in 2014, Claire has worked with Rebecca Jensen and Sarah Aiken in What Am I Supposed To Do? (WAISTD) and Underworld, Lucy Guerin Inc (NEW RETRO 2023, 2024), Siobhan McKenna, Geoffrey Watson, Jo Lloyd (CUTOUT and Garden Dance), among other works.
Claire was a collaborator for the Artist in Your Backyard Program (Sarah Aiken – Dancehouse) and is a recipient of the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and the NSW Young Regional Artist Scholarship. Claire is the initiator of Dance Is, a website that shows what’s on in the world of contemporary dance in Melbourne and is the founder and operator of Open Dance, classes for those with a background in dance.
DANIEL ARNOTT (Technical Designer, Creative Assistance and Outside Eye)
Daniel is a technician, sound designer, musician and secondary school teacher. After completing his Bachelor of Music VCA, Daniel has collaborated with many independent dance makers, creating sound scores and technical designs through performance and live audio/video manipulation, as well as playing in bands around Melbourne. Notable design collaborations include SET (Sarah Aiken, Dancehouse, 2015, Dancemakers Toronto 2018), MAXIMUM (Natalie Abbott, Next Wave 2014, Dance Massive 2015), Three Short Dances (Sarah Aiken, KCA 2014, Les Plateaux de la Briqueterie. Paris 2015), PHYSICAL FRACTALS (Natalie Abbott, Next Wave 2012, Dance Massive 2013). Daniel toured with Sans Hotel Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster throughout Australia, Europe and America as technical operator and sound engineer.
AMELIA LEVER-DAVIDSON (Lighting Designer)
Amelia is a lighting designer based in Melbourne, whose practice encompasses theatre, dance, live art, television and events. In 2012 she completed a Postgraduate diploma at VCA, where she received the Orloff Family Charitable Scholarship for excellence in theatre. She is a graduate from WAAPA and completed Lighting Engineering and Design at RMIT.
Amelia’s work has been recognised with Green Room Awards for Contest, Looking Glass and her 2015 body of work. Amelia is an Australia Council ArtStart and JUMP Mentorship recipient, and a past participant in the Malthouse Besen Family Artist Program and the Melbourne Theatre Company’s inaugural Women in Theatre Program.
MAKE YOUR LIFE COUNT COLLABORATORS
MEGAN PAYNE (Text and Dramaturgy)
Megan works with dance, choreography and writing. After graduating from VCA in 2013, Megan danced for Russell Dumas in Australia and internationally, and regularly performs for dance artists Shelley Lasica, Ivey Wawn, Sarah Aiken and Rebecca Jensen. They have presented work at Testing Grounds, TCB art. inc, TBP-HQ, Bus Projects, 215 Albion Street (Neon Parc), PS Artspace, Gertrude Contemporary (Naarm) and Judson Memorial Church for Movement Research (NYC). Their writing has been published in ACCA’s Writing in the expanded field, Archer Magazine, Bus Project’s Island Island, Visible Ink and In Perpetuity (Ivey Wawn, Next Wave Festival). Megan also created and hosts the radio show Land Swimming, together with Oonagh Slater for Bus Radio (Bus Projects Gallery).
Make Your Life Count.
Photo by: Gregory Lorenzutti
CUDDLE.
Photo by: Jo Duck
CUDDLE
Partners in crime raise the stakes and go all out on a dance heist. The window is short and the road is dangerous — will they make it out alive?
In CUDDLE, two of Melbourne’s contemporary dance artists on the rise, Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Michaela Tancheff, engage in a difficult and dynamic duel filled with surreal sonic and visual surprises.
Weaving contemporary dance with elements from martial arts, figure skating, rodeo barnyard dance and a host of more abstract inspirations, CUDDLE ebbs and flows from the joyful and absurd to the inventive and technically brilliant.
With the audience gathered around the space as though at a wrestling match, CUDDLE is a unique and unpredictable press into a strange and wondrous intimacy.
Choreographer Harrison Ritchie-Jones
Performers Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Michaela Tancheff
Composers Nick Roder and Max Dowling
Videographer Alex Walton
Lighting Designer Ashley Buchanan
Dramaturg Michelle Heaven
Producer Michaela Coventry
CUDDLE HARRISON RITCHIE-JONES
Choreographer and Performer
Harrison Ritchie-Jones is an independent dancer, choreographer and filmmaker based in Naarm/Melbourne.
His choreographic practice celebrates dance and is fuelled by a curiosity in techniques from a range of physical practices. Upskilling and blending forms, he uses dance to carve out spaces for absurdity, humour and physical virtuosity to work together in surreal and expressive explorations of storytelling.
He has choreographed and offered movement direction for music videos, films and dance theatre works. His work has a sense of celebrating movement, authenticity, obsession, determination and risk.
MICHAELA TANCHEFF (Performer)
Michaela is a Naarm/Melbourne based dance artist. She has performed in works created by Chunky Move (Token Armies), Stephanie Lake (Colossus), Harrison Ritchie-Jones (CUDDLE), Kady Mansour (Two Women Enter The Toilet Cubicle) and Kayla Douglas (A Study Of Being). In 2023 Michaela performed in the world premiere of 4/4, a new work by Chunky Move. Michaela collaborates closely with Kady Mansour as the duo Hot Glue Buns performing at music festivals and facilitating workshops to share dance with the wider community. Michaela graduated from Transit Dance in 2018 where she received the award for most outstanding dancer.
CUDDLE COLLABORATORS
ALEX WALTON (Videographer)
Alex is a documentary filmmaker primarily working as a freelance editor and camera person. Her work focuses on stories with a social conscience. Having a background in psychology, she is concerned with making sense of the world through human experience. Alex is a graduate from the European Film College in Denmark and a Masters graduate of the Documentary course in Film and Television at VCA in Melbourne.
Alex’s experience spans a wide array of formats, including short narrative films, music videos, artist profiles, event coverage, feature-length documentaries and some commercial content. She has worked closely with Harrison RitchieJones on multiple projects including his most recent Banshee Cried Silver and CUDDLE.
NICK RODER (Composer)
Nick is a composer, arranger and performer with a passion for beautiful and moving music that can be heard throughout all of his work. Nick works on a range of projects including creating solo work, music for screen and video games, music for dance, arranging and orchestration.
Nick has worked alongside contemporary dancer/director Harrison Ritchie-Jones on several projects that explore an intersection between movement, music and film. These include short film Banshee Cried Silver and live show CUDDLE, both of which premiered at the 2023 Frame Biennial in Melbourne, and Big Wig Small Gig presented as a part of Stephanie Lake’s ESCALATOR series.
MAX DOWLING (Composer)
Max is a producer, composer, performer and mastering engineer originally from Melbourne and currently based in London. He is active across a wide array of musical outlets. From performing, composing and producing with a broad range of popular and alternative music acts, performing internationally as an improviser, collaborating within the contemporary dance discipline, mastering audio, as well as crafting his own eclectic solo music under the alias Yelderbert. His unique musical pathway combined with his incessant investigation of his own craft, results in his ability to create music that is simultaneously divergent, authentic and nuanced.
Some of Max’s career highlights include multiple ARIA nominations (Client Liaison, Parvyn), prime-time performances at many of Australia and the UK’s largest music festivals, widespread airplay and acclaim for much of the music he has created and worked on, and an artist endorsement from Yamaha Music in 2020.
CUDDLE COLLABORATORS
ASHLEY BUCHANAN (Lighting Designer)
Ashley is an arts worker with extensive experience in community engaged practice and contemporary dance. With over 15 years’ experience working in the arts, they bring an operational-level policy focus to building cultural safety for community members whether that be through production management, or lighting and production design.
As a lighting designer, Ashley brings a considered lens which elevates contemporary dance works through accessibility, and the incorporation of lighting design in all production and design elements.
Recent major works lit by Ashley include CUDDLE by Harrison Ritchie-Jones (Arts House season), You, Beauty by Antony Hamilton (Chunky Move), and Derelict in Unchartered Space by Dr. Fayen D’evie (Melbourne Fringe) awarded with both “Innovation in Dance” and “technical excellence” by Melbourne Fringe 2023.
MICHAELA COVENTRY (Producer)
Michaela has been working in the arts for the past 25 years. She is currently the Director of Sage Arts working with artists and companies including Jo Lloyd, Matthias Schack-Arnott, Harrison Ritchie-Jones, Lee Serle and Musica Viva Australia.
In recent years she has been the Executive Producer of The Substation (2020-2022), Lucy Guerin Inc (2018-2019 & 2005-2012), Speak Percussion (2015-2017) and Megafun (20122014) and Producer of Marrugeku and Stalker (2004-2005) and of Performance Space in Sydney (2000-2003).
Michaela currently sits on the Board of Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS) and Aphids and has been a regular panellist and peer assessor for the Australia Council for the Arts (now Creative Australia), Creative Victoria and City of Yarra.
CUDDLE.
Photo by: Prue Stent
Photo by: Ivan Trigo Miras
WEEK TWO
THURSDAY 22 AUGUST TO SATURDAY 24 AUGUST
6.00PM - BRIGHTNESS BY KRISTINA CHAN
7.45PM - SUB BY ASHLEIGH MUSK
Brightness.
Photo by: Lin Wei
BRIGHTNESS
New possibilities and uplifting transformations. Brightness looks forward with optimism, concluding choreographer Kristina Chan’s acclaimed trilogy (A Faint Existence 2016; MOUNTAIN 2018). It takes audiences on a compelling journey, examining fragile new ideas of change to bring hope in times of uncertainty.
A captivating delicate duet (Jasmin Luna, Tiana Lung), Brightness powerfully addresses ecological timelines, dissolution and emergence through transformation. Creating space for audiences to reflect on their own connection to our environment, it draws our attention to the micro life-forces that support our existence. With stark choreography, a nuanced minimal setting, costumes dynamically cut to emphasise movement and change; a haunting psychedelic soundscore; and striking lighting, Brightness lives up to its name.
Choreographer Kristina Chan
Performers Jasmin Luna Tiana Lung
Lighting Designer and Production Manager Karen Norris
Set Designer Clare Britton
Sound Designer James Brown
Costume Designer Donna Sgro
Producer Fenn Gordon for Tandem
Dramaturg / Mentor for development
Lighting Designer for early development
Victoria Hunt
Amber Silk
BRIGHTNESS KRISTINA CHAN
Choreographer
Kristina Chan is an award-winning choreographer, dancer and teacher based on Biripi Country in New South Wales.
Her career has seen her perform in Australia, Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom, United States and throughout Europe and Asia. She has been a key collaborator with companies and independent artists across Australia.
Her acclaimed choreographic practice explores our relationship to nature. Kristina has been awarded a Helpmann Award (2011) and two Australian Dance Awards (2006 and 2009); 2017 Peggy Van Praagh Choreographic Fellowship; Regional Arts Australia Fellowship 2020 and 2023 Critical Path Research Action Group Fellowship.
JASMIN LUNA (Performer)
An Australian based, freelance, movement artist, Jasmin has performed in Meryl Tankard’s Kairos (Sydney Festival), Opera Australia’s Carmen, Eliza Cooper’s Bat Lake, Kate Dunn’s Habitat (Manly Gallery’s Seaweed Festival), Lewis Major’s Platypus (State Theatre Centre of WA), Austinmer Dance Theatre’s But Why (Sydney/ Melbourne Fringe Festival), The Royal Opera House of Muscat’s Lakme, Opera Australia’s Attila, Anna Bolena and Aida at Sydney Opera House, and The Dream Dance Company’s Enter The Vortex. Jasmin trained at Ev & Bow Full time Dance Training Centre and at Sydney Dance Company Pre-Professional Year, graduating 2016.
TIANA LUNG (Performer)
Tiana worked as an independent freelancer across Australia and New Zealand before joining DanceNorth in 2022. In New Zealand she worked with Taki Rua Productions (Tiki Taane Mahuta), Okareka Dance Company (Mana Wahine), Discotheque Dance Company (Missing Lids and SUPER, NATURAL), Muscle Mouth (As It Stands), and Footnote NZ Dance’s 2020 Choreco Season (New Dance Group). For DanceNorth she has performed/toured in Kyle Page and Amber Haines Wayfinder and NOISE; and in DanceNorth’s Tomorrow Makers 5 & 6, where she choreographed and performed her own works: a duo with Issy Estrella (roach.) and a solo (To be honest.)
BRIGHTNESS COLLABORATORS
KAREN NORRIS (Lighting Designer and Production Manager)
Karen is a lighting designer from Aotearoa (Moriori Māori) who designs for theatre, music, dance and installations throughout Australia and Europe. Recent Australian designs include: Barbara and the Camp Dogs (Belvoir); Sugar Land (ATYP); 宿 - Stay S Shakhidharan (Sydney Festival); Action Star (Adelaide Festival); Broken Glass, The Weekend, Rainbows End, The Last Shot, Cutter & Coota, (Moogahlin Performing Arts); The Dreaming, Skin, Terrain, LORE, Dance Clan 2023, Yuldea (Bangarra Dance Theatre, Frances Rings NAISDA); plenty serious TALK TALK (Vicki Van Hout); Silence (Karul Dance Projects); Sunshine Supergirl (Andrea James); The Visitors (STC/Moogahlin Performing Arts).
CLARE BRITTON (Set Designer)
Clare is an artist interested in how artworks, people and landscapes hold stories. Informed by her work in live performance and production design, Clare’s practice includes sculpture, installation, site-specific art and writing. Her work has attracted awards for sculpture, performance, design and research and toured in Australia and internationally. Clare facilitates Magnetic Topographies with artists Therese Keogh and Kenzee Patterson and is an active member of the Mullet. A Sidney Myer Creative Fellow (2014), Clare holds a Masters of Studio Art (2016) and a Doctor of Philosophy (2020) from Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney.
DONNA SGRO (Costume Designer)
Donna is a fashion and textile practitioner and academic at UTS School of Design. Her practice-based research uses creative pattern cutting methodologies developed from fashion contexts to explore new textile forms for the body. Her fashion and textile works
have exhibited internationally, including USA, Japan, France, UK and South-East Asia. She is internationally recognised for the Morphotex Dress, a world-first in biomimicry for structural textile colour. Donna has collaborated with Kristina Chan since 2018, developing textiles that dynamically relate to the performative body in novel ways. One of these, Colour-Morph was selected for the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award in 2023.
JAMES BROWN (Sound Designer)
James is a composer, sound designer and theatre maker known for his evocative and diverse music scores. His practice investigates emotive experiences that explore character and aid storytelling. He has worked across a range of forms, from mainstage theatre and contemporary dance to film, documentary, animation, video games and virtual reality. His processes often involve creating music and sound simultaneously with the development of a project, building connections between performance material and sound. He holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts and a Master of Acoustic Physics from University of Sydney.
FENN GORDON (Producer for Tandem)
Fenn moved from New Zealand to Australia in 2007 to join Performing Lines. In late 2017 she returned to independent practice with her company, Tandem, working between Australia and New Zealand. She has written and taught extensively, including developing market development workshops in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Taiwan; is a founding member of the Performing Arts Network New Zealand (PANNZ) and of the Asian Producers Platform (APP). She is the author of The Touring Manual (CNZ 2003; revised 2007).
Photo by: Ivan Trigo Miras
SUB
Traversing fractured earth.
Escaping a surface world littered with crises, we burrow into soil and stone to seek shelter within layers of debris, tunnelling and surrendering to its contradictions.
Deepening towards the tectonic pulse of the earth, time shifts and defies what we know about living in relationship with the underground. Digging closer to the polyrhythms of the core, SUB entangles natural symphonies with industrialised extraction processes, cracking through our resistance to hope.
A soft defiance is portrayed through the endurance of SUB’s inhabitants as they come into confluence with precious materials below the surface.
In this place that both attracts and scares usthis wet, restless and difficult place - we engage with the terror and volatility of the living natural world.
Concept, Choreographer and Performer Ashleigh Musk, in collaboration with the entire team
Collaborating Performers
Madeleine Krenek, Georgia Rudd and Samakshi Sidhu
Sound Designer Anna Whitaker
Lighting and Spatial Designer Jenny Hector
Dramaturgy and Concept Development P Eldridge & Léuli Eshrāghi
Costume Designer Elliat Rich
Costume Manufacturer Lizzie Verstappen
Choreographic Intern Toni Lord
Tour Manager Frankie Snowdon
Original Collaborating Artists Frankie Snowdon, Jenni Large
SUB ASHLEIGH MUSK
Concept, Choreographer and Performer
Ashleigh Musk (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, dramaturg and community arts facilitator based in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) in so-called Australia.
Her practice engages in sensitive interactions with place and landscape, unearthing physicalities which re-imagine the body in relation to the ecological crises of our time. She generates art which invites audiences to acknowledge a co-existence with the more-than-human world. Radical care is expressed through experiments in time, participation and experimental use of objects, each work acquiring and growing into a unique sensorial ecosystem.
MADELEINE KRENEK (Collaborating Performer)
Originally from New Zealand, Madeleine is an Mparntwe based dance artist who works broadly across dance in performance, choreography, teaching and community engagement. She is the co-founder and director of GUTS Dance, an Mparntwe based organisation and platform for contemporary dance investigation, creation, training, and performance. Prior to GUTS, Madeleine worked for a variety of companies and independent choreographers in Australia, New Zealand and the USA. Madeleine believes that dance is for EVERY body and is an important driver of human connection and experience. She is passionate about and dedicated to supporting and celebrating the discovery of the body’s endless potential.
GEORGIA RUDD (Collaborating Performer)
Originally from New Plymouth, Aotearoa, Georgia trained at the New Zealand School of Dance. Currently freelancing in Naarm, Georgia is driven by an ongoing fascination with sensation and imagination and dance is a means to connect with her aliveness, people and her experience of the world. Prior to this she worked for Dancenorth Australia for six years with Kyle Page and Amber Haines, touring works nationally and internationally by many distinguished Australian artists. She has choreographed three short works for Dancenorth’s annual Tomorrow Maker’s seasons.
SUB COLLABORATORS
SAMAKSHI SIDHU (Collaborating Performer)
Samakshi is a dance artist working in Naarm/ Melbourne. Their practice is centred around the sensitivity and intelligence of the body in relation to ecological, political and social systems. Shapeshifting, creature recognition and energy play are key elements to their current movement practice. A few choreographers and companies they have worked with are Chunky Move, Jo Lloyd, GUTS Dance and Joel Bray Dance.Frankie has a passion for dance education and opportunities for young people, creating locally based programs for marginalised young people. She believes fiercely in bravery, risk, community and collaboration as tools for the development of great art and empowered societies, the importance of regionally based practice, and advocacy and representation in the arts and beyond.
ANNA WHITAKER (Sound Designer)
Anna is a multi-award-winning Meanjin/ Brisbane based sound designer and composer with a palate for experimental, acousmatic works and surround sound composition. She graduated from Queensland Conservatorium of Music with a Bachelor of Music Technology, and has since designed and composed for productions including MONA FOMA, Sydney Dance Company, Australasian Dance Company, The Farm, Tasdance, Stompin’, Aha Ensemble, La Boite Theatre Company, Brisbane Festival, Bleach* Festival, HOTA Gold Coast, Festival 2018, Vulcana Circus and Playlab. Anna received the 2020/2021 and 2019 Matilda Award for Best Sound Design for her work on Michael Smith’s Cowboy and The Farm’s Throttle respectively.
JENNY HECTOR (Lighting and Spatial Designer)
Jenny’s designs are driven by strong collaborations and the spaces they find themselves in. Her work with GUTS Dance includes Desert Hothouse, The Perception Experiment and The Lost Dance Party
She is the recipient of two Green Room awards and the 2016 Technical Achievement Award. She has been nominated for lighting for Dee, Cornelius and Wilks’ RUNT, Fraught Outfit’s Exodus II, Prue Lang’s Stellar, Sandra Parker’s Out of Light, while Jo Lloyd’s Overture and Jodee Mundy’s Imagined Touch received Green Room Awards for Best Production, both of which Jenny realised the lighting and set designs for.
ELLIAT RICH (Costume Designer)
For Elliat, the design process is a creative translation between materials and culture, alive to a broader context of power and social value, led by curiosity, enriched through wonder and always calling on the possibilities of the imagination. Elliat is based in Alice Springs, Central Australia. She works across a broadspectrum of design for a diverse client base, remotely, locally and nationally. Her practice covers cross-cultural resources, exhibition design, public art and furniture, product development, one-off exhibition and editioned objects. All projects align with an ethical imperative to increase equality between people and across species, now and into the future.
P ELDRIDGE (Dramaturgy and Concept Development)
P is a curator, dramaturg and writer based in London, originally from Meanjin (Brisbane) of so-called Australia. She has been involved in various projects for Camden Art Centre, El Warcha, Studio Scilicet with artist Sougwen Chung, Studio Wayne McGregor, Victoria and Albert Museum, Darwin Festival, Bleach Festival, NextDoor ARI, Modern Times, Worms Magazine, MAP Magazine, Fortified Journal, Gillian Jason Gallery, Antiuniversity Now, and Pop Up North Queensland Festival. They are a Distinction graduate of MA Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London.
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Photo by Wendell Teodoro
