Carriageworks, Sydney, December 6 The mysteries of dance and dancemaking are great. What drives the need to watch this person closely and not that one? Why does a work speak to something deep within while another is superficially entertaining? How is it that one is engaged intellectually and emotionally with one piece of dance while…
Tag: Carriageworks
Sydney Festival dance 2017
A wrap of dance seen at the 2017 Sydney Festival … Spectra, Dancenorth, Seymour Centre, Sydney, January 11 The flick of a long rope sends energy snaking through it. It passes a man standing uneasily in the centre of the stage and his head recoils in response. Later, all seven performers in Spectra link arms…
New Breed, Sydney Dance Company
Carriageworks, Sydney, November 29. Who knew gloom could come in so many shades? This year’s New Breed program must have tested the ingenuity of Benjamin Cisterne, Sydney Dance Company’s go-to man for lighting design, but he came up trumps, magnificently meeting the challenge of finding four different ways of illuminating darkness. The program is curated…
Liveworks: Chan, Gunn & Lloyd, Choy
Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art. The Performance Space at Carriageworks, Sydney, October 27, November 2. A pulsating, unforgiving light picks out Kristina Chan’s forehead and underscores her cheekbones, sculpting her face into an eerie mask. A lone figure in the gloom, she rises to the balls of her feet then drives her heels into the…
Off the Record: Force Majeure with Dance Integrated Australia
Carriageworks, Sydney, August 17. Marnie Palomares has Alex Jones pinned against a wall and is trying to put words into his mouth. Literally. This would be a resonant image under any circumstances but as Jones is deaf it seems an even more intrusive and futile act than usual. Except it’s a moment that also feels…
Self Unfinished, Xavier Le Roy
Carriageworks, Sydney, November 17. As the audience entered the large Carriageworks auditorium Xavier Le Roy was already in attendance, looking about in mildly interested fashion. Dressed in nondescript casual wear, he sat at a small table in an otherwise featureless white space, his chin resting in his hand. The lights were up and so, as…
François Chaignaud, Ken Unsworth and Australian Dance Artists
Dumy Moyi, Carriageworks, Sydney, September 30; Departures, Ken Unsworth Studio, Sydney, October 1. In the recent exhibition of dance and the moving image 24 Frames per Second, staged beautifully and expansively at Sydney’s Carriageworks, I kept returning to one work. It was François Chaignaud’s The Sweetest Choice, a suite of five films, each eight or nine…
On View: Live Portraits
Performance Space at Carriageworks, Sydney, July 17 HOW can we know the dancer from the dance, asked W.B. Yeats. It’s a question embedded in Sue Healey’s absorbing On View: Live Portraits, a piece that incorporates the moving image, live performance and, for 10 minutes at the beginning, the dancer as museum object. When the doors to…
The sweetest choice
CARRIAGEWORKS is Sydney’s other great secular cathedral. This vast late-19th century industrial space, originally built as railway workshops to make train carriages for the growing city, is less than a decade old as a centre for contemporary arts and doesn’t have the instant-recognition factor of the Sydney Opera House, but it, too, is awe-inspiring in…
Nothing to Lose
Force Majeure, Carriageworks, January 22. IN her 10 years at Force Majeure, the company she founded and which she now leaves, Kate Champion’s material has included the ageing process, near-death experiences, the pitfalls of child-raising and obsessive behaviour, tantalising subjects one and all. Her brand of dance-theatre has always been stimulating but with Nothing to…
deborah jones: FollowSpot 