Sydney Dance Company: New Breed

Sydney Dance Company & Carriageworks: New Breed
Bay 20, Carriageworks, 30 November

With support from Carriageworks and the Balnaves Foundation, Sydney Dance Company’s "New Breed" season gives emerging choreographers the opportunity to choreograph new works on the company's finely honed dancers. This year the chosen choreographers were Jesse Scales and Richard Cilli (both currently dancing with SDC); Rachel Arianne Ogle and Shian Law.

The program opens with Jesse Scales’ What You See, a work for three dancers that explores the personal despair that can lie behind a social mask. Set to emotionally expressive music by Max Richter, Scales shows considerable talent for choreography in this work, especially in the musicality and phrasing of three solos which were danced by Cass Mortimer Eipper, Nelson Earl and Latisha Sparks. All three dancers gave strong, dramatic performances and it was good to see some of SDC’s dancers in a work that stressed their expressiveness and their acting ability rather than their physical athleticism. What You See has an air of intimacy that is well suited to the small scale theatre space it was performed in and this particular work may not translate so well to a bigger venue, but Scales deserves to be given further choreographic opportunities.

Richard Cilli’s Hinterland is broad in its scope and intent, but highly personal and idiosyncratic in the methods utilised to explore the works underlying themes of collective influence versus individual idiosyncrasies. Highlights included the cast’s collective use of their own vocal range to accompany the movements of each individual dancer as they broke away from the group; and the magnification and distortion of gesture that echoed out through the bodies of other dancers as two stood centre-stage - locked in a verbal discussion with opposing points of view on a seemingly trivial matter. It was capably performed by nine dancers.

There was something quite mysterious and strangely beautiful about Rachel Arianne Ogle’s Of Dust. According to the programme notes, this work “examines the parallels of stellar evolution, the structural formation of the universe, and the cycles of life and death.” Set to a commissioned score by Ned Beckley, the dancers draw closely together in tightly held formations and then spin outwards in a display of centrifugal force, still linked by their hands but showing the forces pulling them apart, and increasing the relative distance between each dancer (particle, or celestial body) in a display of the physics of movement. The cast of five dancers (Juliette Barton, Richard Cilli, Nelson Earl, Cass Mortimer Eipper and Charmene Yap) all performed well and Benjamin Cisterne’s lighting contributed significantly to the visual impact of Ogle’s work. Any of these first three dance works could be added to SDC’s mainstage programming in the future.

The final work, Shian Law’s Epic Theatre, subverts the established rituals and expectations of theatre by using the cast of eleven dancers (along with a number of non-dancer volunteers) to physically obstruct (in stages) the audience’s return to their seats from interval by intermittently forming a line. Meanwhile, select dancers break away to perform initially antagonistic duets. When all audience members are eventually seated, a new section begins in which the cast move from the front to the back of the stage, circling back around to the front outside the performance space and out of view of the audience so that the cycle continues seamlessly.

I have never thought highly of performance art that subverts the conventions of performance to this extent and Epic Theatre did not change my mind. But, as far as this genre goes, it was far from the worst I have seen and quite appropriate for both the venue (Carriageworks is a cavernous, former industrial space that has been converted into a venue with multiple spaces for the display of contemporary performance and installations) and the context of “New Breed”.

On the whole this program was well worth seeing.

- GERALDINE HIGGINSON