Tra Mi Dinh’s ‘Somewhere between ten and fourteen’

In just a few short years, choreographer Tra Mi Dinh has carved an unmistakable path through Australia’s contemporary dance landscape. From the Keir Choreographic Award in 2022, to Sydney Dance Company’s New Breed in 2023, to presenting with Lucy Guerin Inc’s Pieces, her trajectory has been one of momentum, curiosity, and unflinching craft. Now, in 2025, she returns to Sydney Dance Company with a main season commission for Continuum — only the third independent artist in over a decade to be invited back in this way.

In a conversation with Dance Informa, Dinh reflects on the rare privilege of institutional support, the challenge of scaling her work to double the dancers, and the delicate balance between instinct, intimacy, and the heightened stakes of the mainstage.

Your trajectory with Sydney Dance Company began with New Breed 2023, and now you return with a main season commission for Continuum. After years of presenting work in independent settings, could you reflect on how this progression reshapes your relationship with the company, and what Rafael Bonachela’s invitation signifies for you?

“A version of this is like an award, say a Green Room Award. Because otherwise, it’s just reviews, it’s critical dialogue, and discussions with your peers. No major institution gives you another push of a work unless you’re going for a grant remount of that work, and you’re having to push for that as well. To have a company, and Rafael (Bonachela) asking you to do more, it’s super encouraging. Quite simply, it’s really lovely because I think so much of the freelance independent life is grinding, pushing, and advocating for yourself. I was lucky to be invited to be part of New Breed in the first place. It came at a really good time for me. Keir (Choreographic Award) was in 2022 and then New Breed was in 2023. The year after that, I did Pieces (Lucy Guerin Inc). And now in ’25, I’m coming back and doing a reshaping of the ’23 piece.

There’s a sense of guidance from Rafael and Sydney Dance Company through this experience, which feels very rare, and special. I think it speaks volumes for giving an artist a bit of a leg up. I don’t have regular access to the production value that this company, that the Wharf provides, I mean, I’m working on the Wharf right now, I’m looking at the Harbour Bridge! It’s not lost on me how rare this is. I feel very fortunate that I’m being given the time of day. It’s only happened three times over 12 years – Melanie Lane, Gabrielle Nankivell, and now myself.”

Somewhere between ten and fourteen, your work for the New Breed 2023 season, distilled a complex meditation on time into a short form. With a commission to the main 2025 season, how do you plan to expand or deepen that inquiry?

“It’s not like New Breed at all…the cast I had last time – out of the six dancers I originally worked with, only two of them remain. It’s a remount, reshare, rework, redo. The similarity I would say is needing to trust and prioritize my gut instinct. This does feel like more pressure this time – it’s the mainstage season, my work is up with Rafael and Stephen – but in a good way.

I want to create an elevated version of the work. I’m updating some of the movement, and things that I wasn’t so sure about the first time, so it feels like we’re keeping the essence of the things that I was originally interested in, but imbuing them with more of my own physicality. It’s like the bones exist, but with double the amount of dancers it changes everything, in terms of what we’re seeing spatially. It’s exciting and awesome, but it’s certainly different.”

Wow… I’ve seen a lot of your work, and it’s usually a very small group.

“In my independent life, I am pushing towards a bit more of working with bigger groups. Just recently, I made a duet for Pieces at the end of ‘24, and Creative Australia are funding to expand that into a full-length work for seven dancers. I already have an interest in how I can push towards more bodies, so it feels like this is coming at the right time for me. It’s been challenging to try to balance out what worked in the original, how I can elevate it with more people, and not just stick more people in.”

How do/will you balance your artistic instincts with the expectations and scale of a major company season? And how will you preserve the intimacy and idiosyncrasy of your independent work?

“It’s interesting. Someone said to me once, it’s always hard to expand a work. You do the 20-minute version, then you do the hour or the 40 minutes, and especially because people have obviously seen the 20-minute version, it’s so hard to get the full-length right, because people have something to compare it to.”

Can I ask if you are going to keep that stunning canon?

“There’s something in me that feels a bit of stress about this because I’m like, yes, what was beautiful about that image is that it is only six bodies on stage, but because I have 13, do I send people off? Do I prioritize that image? Or do I create anew with the extra bodies? I just have to come back to trusting my gut, because I think being invited to come back and do this is huge, and particularly because remounts don’t happen very often for independents.  It’s like a vote of confidence, and such a tangible offer from Rafael.  To me, that says that I did well in New Breed, and what I was doing in the New Breed process was trusting my gut.”

What is going to be different this time around in the way you will work with the company?

“The challenge is, how do I share and imbue this sense of my choreographic aesthetic, and the way that my body approaches movement, and the way that I’d like their bodies to then approach my movement, and how do I share that the quickest? I learned a little bit of that during New Breed, and I’m reminded of it now. It’s definitely teaching me a lot about my own dynamic, my own movement pathways, and the way that I like to approach rhythm. That it is distinct in some way, and is what I need to share first. Setting up scores and improvised structures that we play with first seems important, also which I haven’t really had heaps of time to do this time around, because I was just like, ‘Let’s get the piece back!’”

What do you hope audiences carry with them after experiencing this new work?

“The feeling that I’m hoping audiences come away with is a sense of calmness, and noticing their own experience of being in their body. The work is about this changing time of day, and it’s a brief moment, where after a busy day, I can take a moment to just watch the sun setting, to watch this change of colour across the sky. I feel grounded in that moment. I’m hoping that through the work people will feel grounded as well.

The structure of my work kind of goes like this…Really bright, big energy, purposefully intense, into a soft, subtle, nuanced pulling away. A lull that becomes a hypnotizing, waving cannon that happens in the last section, that I hope draws people in towards a real sense of calm. I’m an Energizer bunny type of person, always on the go, but I was brought up in a Buddhist household, and I learnt that the best way to come home, to slow down, the saying is ‘to come back to your breath, and to come back to the present moment.’ My work is a celebration of a moment of pause, which I am learning to do in my own life. It’s when I see this time of day that I feel like I’m in that. I just feel very human in that moment. I hope the work encourages people to stop in that moment in the day. It’s such a stunning, beautiful time of day. It’s a reassurance that the sun will set, and it will rise again. The only thing that we can be sure of, is change, and at that time of day, this changing hour is like watching a flower bloom in fast motion, or seeing time pass, the environment change around us, and that’s okay and normal.

I also hope that this work is attractive to people that know nothing about dance. Especially for those people, that it encourages and invites them to take a slow moment the next day.”

Being programmed between Rafael Bonachela and Stephen Page places your work in dialogue with two very different legacies of Australian choreography. How do you situate your voice in that lineage?

“Stephen and Rafael are so solid in their line of inquiry – what they’re interested in choreographically, and their aesthetic. They’ve developed that over many years, and I think that I am in the emerging stages of what that is. I’m still figuring out exactly what my choreographic aesthetic is, and that process is digging deeper into things that are interesting for me, are exciting in my own body, and how to put that onto others. Rafael’s lineage is strong in him, Stephen’s is strong in him, and mine is also strong. All of us are a representation or amalgamation of all the dance that has come before us, and that we’ve had the opportunity to get into contact with. I am still finding my essence. I think what makes me different is that I’m still maybe a bit of a looser cannon that is whipping towards what my core is. They’ve refined what their thing is. And my diamond has still got rough edges.”

What excites you most about the next phase of your choreographic journey?

“You know, the reason why I like dance so much is a selfish reason – because I enjoy it. I’m a sensation seeker. I’m driven by the pleasure of moving my body, and living through different qualities, like experiencing what it is imagine floating at the top of the ocean floor on a sunny day, versus carrying the weight of the world.

Imagination and sensation driven experience will continue to be a driving factor for me choreographically, and how that can hopefully be felt in a visceral way by the audience. What I look forward to in my journey is, refracting a little bit of that energy and interest onto the set, and into the sound. I very much think about the atmosphere of the work and how it does look, sound, and feel. I’m wanting to encourage myself to really invest more time into building the world that is outside of the body. I’m really trying to see how the architecture of the space can influence the dance, and vice versa. I think what I’m trying to say is that dance is a practice, and it requires the doing. I’m excited to just keep doing, and that that doing will keep unveiling and unfolding other things that I’m interested in.”