Award-winning choreographer Trà Mi Dinh will premiere a new full-length work in Melbourne this September, turning a long-held fascination with the number seven into an intricate study of rhythm, repetition and the dancing body.
7 Dances for 7 People brings together seven dancers for a work that Dinh describes through ideas of ritual, precision, endurance and devotion. Presented by Darebin Arts Speakeasy as part of Darebin FUSE Festival’s Open Access program, it will run at Northcote Town Hall Arts Centre from 9 to 19 September.
The number is embedded throughout the work rather than simply supplying its title. Composer and sound designer Tilman Robinson has experimented with a 7/8 time signature, giving Dinh an asymmetrical rhythmic structure around which to build the choreography. Patterns accumulate and repeat, with complex movement gradually intensifying as seven bodies move between tightly controlled formations and more frenetic states.
It is fertile territory for Dinh, whose choreography frequently plays with time, rhythm and audience expectation. Her first major commission, The ___, won the Keir Choreographic Award in 2022, and she has since received commissions from Sydney Dance Company and Lucy Guerin Inc. She currently performs with Stephanie Lake Company and is an artist in residence at Lucy Guerin Inc.
For Dinh, however, seven is also personal. It has long been her favourite number, and she grew up in a Buddhist household where it carried particular significance. In developing the work, she has drawn on the wider mythology that has gathered around seven across cultures and history, including ideas of perfection and totality, and the symbolic joining of the spiritual and physical.
Rather than attempting to illustrate those ideas literally, 7 Dances for 7 People uses them as a framework for physical exploration. The work moves through repetition, numerical patterning and shifts in rhythm, building what the creative team describes as a ritual-like atmosphere in which the dancers move between majestic imagery, machine-like precision and bursts of high energy.
Dinh will perform in the work alongside Rachel Coulson, Deanne Butterworth, Emma Riches, Marni Green, Arabella Frahn-Starkie and Melissa Pham. The creative team also includes costume and set designer Geoffrey Watson, lighting designer Rachel Lee and dramaturg Samara Hersch, with Anna Nalpantidis producing.
The visual design is closely tied to the work’s interest in bodies appearing, disappearing and transforming. Lee’s lighting reveals and conceals the dancers as it interacts with Watson’s costumes, while Robinson’s electro-acoustic score provides an insistent rhythmic world beneath them. The result is intended to be experienced physically as much as intellectually, with Dinh resisting the idea that an audience needs to decode the work in order to enter it.
That approach seems fitting for a choreographer increasingly interested in how structure can generate sensation. In 7 Dances for 7 People, a simple numerical fixation becomes the starting point for something considerably less orderly: seven dancers testing repetition, rhythm and endurance until pattern begins to tip into something closer to ritual.