This year marked the 10th anniversary of New Breed, the annual choreographic platform hosted and curated by Sydney Dance Company. The event has nurtured many new and now established dance makers over the years. As Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela says in the program for the 2023 season: “One of the things that really excites me about New Breed is how diverse, year after year, the choreographers are in their background, their experience and their inspiration, often choosing to explore really thought-provoking, challenging and stimulating themes for their works. This has become the essence of New Breed and the audiences really love that; they love the bravery in the next generation of Australian choreographers.”
Opening at Carriageworks in Sydney on December 6, this year’s program features four choreographers.
Everybody’s Got a Bomb, by Riley Fitzgerald, is inspired by events that unfolded at the disastrous 1999 Woodstock Festival in New York, and explores the concept of “collective effervescence” coined by Emile Durkheim.
Revenge Tales and Romance, by Eliza Cooper, features five female performers, who investigate patriotism in Western feminism and reveal "a hellscape where dark histories are trivialised, bodies sexualised and artists utilised . . .”
Somewhere between Ten and Fourteen, by Tra Mi Dinh, is described as “choreography propelled by the movement of light. An ode to change.”
The fourth work on the program is by Beau Dean Riley Smith, called Gubba, which explores the “demolition of the First Nations people through Jeff Waynes’s 1978 musical score of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds”.
The program continues until December 16.