Works by Thomas E.S. Kelly, ADC and Circa selected for Brisbane Festival 2020
After announcing early this month that it would go ahead in September, the Brisbane Festival has begun to reveal its dance performances.
Silence, created by choreographer, Thomas E.S. Kelly is one of the top performances included. The new work by Kelly, a Bunjalung-Yugambeh, Wiradjuri and Ni-Vanuata man, combines contemporary dance and live percussion to explore important issues for the Indigenous community.
The work is explained in its blurb: “Silence is about the space in between. The conversations not being heard and the responses that are muted. Through the beating of a drum, bodies thrash through frequencies to uncover what lies in the silence. Silence can give stories and strength, yet silence can wound. There’s silence between the stars as the emu travels across the night sky, or the dancer’s energy when they hit the cut between rhythms. It’s also the deafening silence under white noise. The same questions echoed through generations.”
Kelly also performs in Throttle, by Helpmann Award-winning Gold Coast dance dheatre company, The Farm. This innovative performance is a B-grade thriller, which the audience views from within the safety of their own cars, a live drive-in show featuring a 360-degree dance performance. It is lit by their headlights, heard through their car radios and seen through their windscreen.
On the event calendar too is Arc, a work by the Australasian Dance Collective created especially for the Brisbane Festival, that explores what people are experiencing right now, the journey from isolation to reconnection.
Another dance experience, Leviathan, will be performed by the ensemble of Circa and a cast of Brisbane-based acrobats and dancers. Under the direction of Yaron Lifschitz, this performance explores the massive and unpredictable energies that are unleashed in a civilisation careening towards an unknown fate.