Carriageworks, Sydney, March 13.

It’s often the case that alarm bells start ringing when an artist writes a highly detailed program note explaining precisely what their contemporary dance piece means. Frequently it’s just not possible to see in the work what the choreographer claims. There’s a big disconnect.

In the case of Angela Goh, though, the statement is an indispensable part of Sky Blue Mythic, a piece that deservedly won for her the $50,000 2020 Keir Choreographic Award. “Curtains open,” it starts. (There is no curtain.) “There is no dance being performed on the stage.” (This is true at the beginning.) “The dance that is not being performed is a ballet, Giselle.” (This is also true.) Magic.

At first there is a John Cage-like silence as the performer (Goh) places something that looks like a small sundial on the floor and retreats. Just as the audience starts to get a little restive Goh reappears, walks slowly across the complete bare stage, falls and spills a can of soft drink. This action is later repeated after some exquisitely slow searching by Goh, accompanied by a wonderfully strange score by Corin Ileto. And yes, there are fragmentary references in the choreography to Giselle.

It’s a work that would bear many more viewings and was a worthy winner of this significant prize.

The $10,000 Audience Choice Award went to Amrita Hepi for Rinse, a captivating, highly personal work that covered a lot of ground in 20 minutes – the required length for all participants. Speaking a text that became more absorbing as she continued, Hepi explored the effect of a dominant West on equally valid cultural aspiration. Like Goh she danced her own work superbly.

The Keir is an award for choreography, not the dancing of it, but it was hard not to be swept up by the performance of The Farm’s Hold Me Closer Tony Danza by Kate Harmon and Michael Smith. It starts with a mishearing of a Bernie Taupin lyric – and haven’t we all done something similar? – and develops into a sometimes tender, sometimes fierce depiction of togetherness and its opposite. It was the most accessible dance of the evening and nothing wrong with that.

The least appealing was Delimit by Alison Currie & David Cross, performed by Cazna Brass. It consisted of Brass putting up the set, a group of door-like rectangles with extrusions to which odd shapes were attached and inflated, and then taking stuff off and putting it away. The number of minutes for which this remained interesting was limited.