What is GUTS Dance?

“We joined collective 2nd Toe, with Adam Wheeler, now artistic director of Tasdance, Benjamin Hancock, James Andrews, and Tyler Hawkins,” tells co-artistic director Snowdon of the days of that sowed the seeds of GUTS. “We banded together to make work, did a lot of teaching, and ran dance programs. As soon as I graduated I just started applying for grants and started making independent work.”

After years based in Melbourne, the pair spent time exploring dance making and performing overseas. “There were a couple of places that offered residencies outside the big cities where I could go and just intensely work, but the place that really allowed me to be a bit freer and more inspired in my dance making was a place called PAF, the Performing Arts Forum. It’s an old convent in a tiny village in rural France, about two hours from Paris. Mads and I went together in 2014. We were the only dancers there at the time - we were there with all these philosophers and musicians, experimenting with shared economies and decentralised knowledge sharing. I got a lot out of being there.”

After returning home the two were faced with their next move. “We had already been working a bit in Alice Springs, because of Alice Can Dance, a dance education program run by Mads, Adam Wheeler, and myself, where we work with kids from rural schools, from youth detention centres, from community, and from school of the air, to produce a contemporary dance film. And so being in Alice Springs, Mads and I thought, ok, maybe we can start making professional work here too.”

In 2017, Snowdon and Krenek found success with their first collaborative dance work, The Perception Experiment, which was picked for national and international tours to the likes of Dance Massive and Darwin Festival. “We started to feel really committed to being out in Alice. Even though it can be hard to be so isolated, all the opportunities to make and connect were so beautiful. So, we thought, why don’t we make some sort of organisation? And GUTS was born.”

That was in 2018. Since the organisation’s establishment, Snowdon and Krezek have become studio residents at the Alice Springs Araluen Art Centre, and have spent time with different dance organisations around the country to inform GUTS own model of operation. Currently, the organisation acts as an umbrella, encompassing diverse projects and programs that facilitate engagement with dance in remote Central Australia.

“We endeavour to nurture a new generation of voice that has been silent for too long, making sure that First Nations and queer stories are told, and bodies of all shapes and sizes are seen and celebrated,” expresses Snowdon. “We’re fiercely committed to being in regional Australia. Dance is not just made in cities. Anywhere is a worthwhile place to be making art – communities deserve those things to happen for them. Being in a community like Mparntwe, has taught us that. There are incredibly brave audiences there, but they’re looking to get something completely different out of a show compared to a dance audience. We’re trying to see where there can be more possibility for people to not feel so alienated by dance as a form. More opportunity for exchange.”

GUTS's first Sydney premiere, Value For Money, is a collaboration between choreographers Sara Black and Jasmin Sheppard, and has been a long time in the making. The work, featuring dance collaborators Tara Robertson, Chandler Connell, Samakshi Sidhu, Gabriel Comerford, and Frankie Snowdon for its touring, was first conceived by Black 13 years ago while touring in the Middle East. Having Jewish heritage, Black was confronted by the diversity of interactions she experienced in different contexts as a result of her identity and began piecing together ideas for a work. When Black and Snowdon linked up in London years later, Snowdon performed in an early-stage version of VFM: 20 minutes, with just three dancers. After GUTS was formed, Snowdon & Krenek’s first choreographic commission was to Black, for a full-length version of Value for Money.

“Value for Money is an interrogation of worth, relationships, and of how our experiences of being in relationship to one another change our worth. It’s a work that’s shifted a lot over its 13 years of creation. After we eventually got funding for the work, we did a development in 2019. Then Covid happened.”

“It was in the second development process that Sara expressed ‘I don’t think I can hold this. In the context of Australia, especially. I need to flesh this out with somebody else.’ So, Sarah brought in Jasmin [Sheppard] in as a co-chorographer. The work finally premiered in 2021 in Alice Springs, during the height of lockdowns – and it was an absolute miracle that we performed it because immediately after, everything started to shut down. During all that time, it’s become something quite different from what we originally perceived. But the themes of the work have stayed present. These conversations about care, vulnerability, power, about systems that reduce people to numbers or expand them to deities – these conversations are shaped by global circumstances and are ever-present.

The work presented audiences with a tender and energetic exploration of what it means to be human. Throughout the journey of the work, the individual personalities of the artists shone through, as they performed the nitty-gritty extremities of human relations ­– care, frustration, liberation, control, love, and hate. It was a poignant and provocative work, challenging audiences to consider their relations to one another, to the system, and to themselves. The powerful GUTS of Snowdon and Krezek’s venture was made manifest in Value For Money – unifying expertly-executed movement with sensibilities of bravery, openness, exploration, and commitment to exchange.

Learn more about GUTS and their various professional works and community projects at: https://www.gutsdance.org.au/about-guts