Neilson Studio, Sydney Dance Company, Sydney.
21 August 2025.
The second instalment in the fourth year of Sydney Dance company’s INDance program – supported by the Neilson Foundation and curated by Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela – continued this week to carve out that rare space where dance can risk, unravel, and reimagine itself. Staged in the intimate Neilson Studio, INDance invites artists to test the boundaries of form, content, and audience expectation. If Week 1 signalled the breadth of potentialities in unbiased dance, Week 2 confirmed the depth – two distinct works that dared to confront, unsettle, and reframe how efficiency can embody the pressing questions of our time.
The primary work, Progress Report, by Alison Currie and Alisdair Macindoe, carried out by the commanding Rachel Coulson (to be carried out by Geoffrey Watson on closing night time) and with lighting, set and costume design by Meg Wilson, was removed from simply “one other” work in regards to the setting. Fairly, it was a piece of startling freshness – directly cerebral and visceral, absurd and deeply sobering. From the opening second, Coulson drew the viewers right into a world the place Styrofoam was now not merely a disposable object, however a fabric charged with historical past, consequence, and uncanny theatricality.
A big industrial fan within the downstage nook set the stage in movement. Coulson entered with a single sheet of Styrofoam, experimenting with its buoyancy towards the present of air. At first, the impact was virtually comedian, even unsettling – Styrofoam being maybe one of the vital recognisable symbols of unsustainability. But, in a short time it turned clear that this was not a piece searching for ethical simplicity. As a substitute, Progress Report dissected consumerism, waste, and complicity, turning on a regular basis detritus into each prop and antagonist.
Because the efficiency unfolded, Coulson manipulated an increasing assortment of polystyrene varieties: rolls, half-pipes, thick crescents, a big determine 8. She stacked, balanced, and hurled them, then mirrored their shapes together with her personal physique. Her motion high quality was as articulate because it was forceful – technical precision assembly uncooked physicality. Every gesture was sharply outlined, every sequence imbued with readability. Her skill to remodel inert matter into extensions of the physique, or at instances in oppressive forces to withstand, was magnetic to observe.
Voice punctuated the work in shocking methods. At first, Coulson’s mutterings appeared just like the frenzied babbling of somebody overwhelmed by noise and extra. Later, fragments of textual content surfaced with readability, tracing the invention and evolution of polystyrene throughout its close to 90-year historical past; from industrial marvel to ecological disaster, from packaging materials to micro and nano particles now infiltrating oceans and human tissue. What started as absurd humour edged into one thing a lot darker. The voice grew more and more determined, pressing, virtually uncontainable – a reminder that the environmental disaster shouldn’t be summary however embodied, quick, and inescapable.
The dramaturgy of the piece was refined but relentless. Followers positioned across the stage gathered the damaged Styrofoam fragments into swirls of white confetti, a fragile blizzard of particles. A plastic bag suspended from fishing line drifted throughout the house, directly inconsequential and totally haunting – later attaching itself to Coulson as if to counsel that no physique escapes entanglement with waste. Ultimately, she dragged a mountain of polystyrene blocks to the upstage nook, trying to climb it as items toppled away. This accumulation of fabric – directly absurd and tragic – felt like a devastating metaphor for the persistence of waste, and the futility of attempting to easily “discard” what can not disappear.
The ultimate picture was placing: Coulson, now wearing a makeshift swimsuit of plastic and tape, scrambling upward because the stage light to black. It was a imaginative and prescient of each resistance and entrapment, suggesting that at the same time as we attempt to management the supplies that outline trendy life, they’re already remaking us of their picture.
Developed over years (starting in 2017, premiering in Adelaide in 2021, later Melbourne in 2023, and now Sydney), Progress Report is testomony to the sluggish burn of an thought given house to evolve. In Coulson’s efficiency, it discovered an interpreter of immense drive and readability – one who might embody each the absurd humour and the crushing weight of the subject material. This was not didactic theatre, however dance that insisted on complexity, contradiction, and confrontation.
If Progress Report was a tightly honed work of readability and drive, the second presentation of the night, FM Air by Jo Lloyd, sat on the reverse finish of the spectrum. This system notes promised a piece that might “seem and disappear like a scent,” inspecting gendered behaviour via a “limitless, steady loop.” What emerged on stage, nevertheless, felt far much less expansive.
Three performers – Jo Lloyd, Louie Wisby, and Thomas Woodman – inhabited a shaky, vibrating physicality from starting to finish. Their our bodies quivered, tapped, and jerked via a slender vocabulary of gestures: crossing arms, tapping the pinnacle, pausing briefly earlier than persevering with. Typically they met, largely they didn’t. The relentlessness of this single mode of motion created a sameness that quickly turned wearying, regardless of the performers’ dedication. It felt extra akin to a efficiency artwork set up than to choreographed dance, its curiosity waning underneath the load of its personal repetition.
There have been moments of intrigue. Early on, the three dancers entered the work encased inside an enormous tulle garment (costume design by Andrew Treloar and constructed by Treloar and Hailey Scott), transferring as a single, trembling organism. The sheer material rippled and ballooned round them, creating fleeting photographs of magnificence and disorientation. But, these textures weren’t developed, and shortly dissolved again into the monotony of the shaky motif.
This system’s suggestion that the work interrogated gendered roles was troublesome to find in efficiency. Other than the costuming – Lloyd and Wisby in pale blue and white, Woodman in orange – the work supplied little engagement with the complexities of gender. What remained was a way of an thought stretched skinny: repetition with out transformation, length with out dramaturgy.
The place Progress Report carved out a contemporary and unsettling lens on consumerism, FM Air risked changing into self-referential, circling itself with out providing new entry factors. It was not with out moments of invention, however over time it felt underdeveloped, extra like a sketch than a whole thought.
Week 2 of INDance, then, supplied a placing juxtaposition. On one hand, a rigorously crafted work in Progress Report, that translated pressing ecological themes into an embodied and haunting expertise. However, a chunk that appeared to withstand choreographic construction in FM Air, its opacity finally limiting its affect. But, this distinction is exactly what makes INDance important: it’s a house the place experiments can succeed or falter, the place concepts might be examined within the presence of an viewers. On this means, Week 2 reaffirmed this system’s significance – not solely as a platform for polished excellence, however as a crucible the place threat itself is valued.
By Linda Badger of Dance Informa.
