Opening on Wednesday 27 November in Melbourne, the Short+Sweet Dance Festival will feature more than 100 dance, cabaret and theatrical acts. The festival will take place at Chapel off Chapel in Prahran over two weeks, in the form of ten minute works, presented in hour-long programs.
Under the direction of new producer Danny Delahunty, this year’s festival includes new challenges for performers. These include the Dance Wildcard and Cabaret wildcard, which give the most left-of-centre shows the limelight. There’s also crash test theatre, in which actors audition in the morning, are cast in plays that don't yet exist, and perform them in the evening.
Short+Sweet organisers say that they predict some of the dance and cabaret highlights of the 100 works will include the festival’s youngest-ever choreographer, 13-year-old hip-hop dancer Gabriella Petkov; cabaret star Kate Allnutt in Imagine Nation, where music from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory provides a whimsical accompaniment to her story of being a child-like dreamer in an adult world; Rain Francis in Four Women And A Cut-Out, a dance-theatre-comedy-satire piece performed against a surreal backdrop of 1960s surf rock, Patsy Cline and Smells Like Teen Spirit; and French dancer Maud Léger in Illustration Of The Subjective Present, an abstract contemporary piece that experiments with the notions of ‘instant composition’ and ‘performance improvisation’.
Short+Sweet Melbourne 27 November – 8 December Chapel off Chapel, 12 Little Chapel St, Prahran Bookings: chapeloffchapel.com.au/ticket-sales
