Carriageworks, Bay 20
Reviewed December 4
Sydney Dance Company’s New Breed program provides much needed opportunities for up-and-coming choreographers to explore their craft and create new works on SDC’s company dancers. Supported by Carriageworks and the Balnaves Foundation, New Breed is now in its 11th year, and New Breed 2024 featured four brand new works – with two choreographed by current company members and two by independent artists from outside the company. Lighting designer Alexander Berlage and costume designer Aleisa Jelbart contributed to all four works.
The program opened with company dancer Piran Scott’s Breath. Taking inspiration from Tim Winton’s Breath and the centrality of the beach to the Australian lifestyle, this work for six dancers had a relatively fluid, unstructured feel to it – perhaps enhanced by Aleisa Jelbart’s loose fitting costume designs. There was a real sense of freedom and flow in the choreography, and the music (by guitarist John Butler) was at times combined with recordings of the ocean (edited by Travis Hair). The dancers seemed to be focused on their own internal experience while dancing this work, but that made it no less interesting to watch as we in the audience were drawn into what appeared to be an almost spiritual experience. Luke Hayward, Connor McMahon, Ryan Pearson, Coco Wood, Tayla Gartner and Naiara de Matos all danced sensitively and expressively, bringing Scott’s choreographic vision to life.
Company dancer Dean Elliott’s HALF IN/HALF OUT explores athleticism’s intersection with artistry in dance. This work for five dancers (choreographed by Dean Elliott in collaboration with the dancers) was reminiscent of gymnastics and physical culture in the way the dancers carefully presented their bodies in various poses and strutting walks high on demi pointe. Costumed in shiny, lycra unitards embellished with the kind of glitter laden swirls and patterns you might see at a gymnastics competition – these bodies looked like they were on display and competing/performing for approval. The high-level ballet training of the dancers cast in this work (Timmy Blankenship, Ngaere Jenkins, Chloe Young, Emily Seymour and Sophie Jones) was evident in their hyperextended lines, extensions and exquisitely pointed feet. Alongside company dancer Connor McMahon’s electronic score, Alexander Berlage’s red lighting dialed up the intensity and enhanced this work’s atmosphere of danger.
Siobhan McKenna’s Say It Again has a novel premise – taking the ebbs and flows, interruptions, repetitions and acts of listening that are part of a group conversation and making them visible through movement and dance. The opening scenes were particularly effective at mimicking a conversation as you could see individual dancers reacting and responding to their colleagues (after appropriate pauses to listen) in real time. In addition to recorded sounds, the dancers were also making their own sounds, first through the addition of rustling plastic to their costumes and then by the addition of their own voices – but none of this later sound made a great deal of sense. Say It Again is captivating in the beginning but seems to get lost somewhere in the middle, so that ultimately it does not end as strongly as it starts.
On a dark, shadowy stage, the costumes in Amber McCartney’s Leech (conceived by Amber McCartney and realized by Alisa Jelbart) obscure the dancers’ faces and their human form making it difficult – at least in the works early stages – to know how many dancers these moving "things" were comprised of. They certainly looked otherworldly and inhuman, especially when finally contrasted with the revealed human forms of dancers Luke Hayward and Emily Seymour. The ultimate kicker comes in the surprisingly unnatural way in which these recognizably human dancers moved (Hayward in a slowly twitching walk and Seymour in an urgent, fast-moving solo which was quite extraordinary). McCartney’s work blurs the boundary between alien and human in a work where her inspiration from the genres of science-fiction and horror is clearly evident. In their sound design for Leech, Alasdair Macindoe and Robert Downie have contrasted the recorded music of acclaimed violinist Robert Macindoe against the sounds of a violin bow being scraped against polystyrene, heightening the unnatural, disturbing feel of this work.
With four unique, diverse and experimental short works and the opportunity to see SDC dancers up close, New Breed 2024 will be showing at Carriageworks until December 14.
– GERALDINE HIGGINSON