New Breed – the sixth annual Sydney Dance Company event commissioning emerging and largely unknown Australian choreographers for a night of short works created on the company’s dancers – feels like a welcome party.
In the opening night audience, there was palpable warmth and support. The other performances are likely to feel the same, because there’s a sense of two-way generosity, openness and willingness to go along for the ride at the core of New Breed: every year the dance world, from powerbroker to enthusiast, opens it arms and expands it reach. And it’s no empty gesture – New Breed alumni have been programmed into SDC seasons both local and international.
This year’s program features four short pieces: two that don’t exceed 15 minutes and two that run for under half an hour. Two are by SDC dancers – Ariella Casu and Davide Di Giovanni – and the other two by independent choreographers Josh Mu and Lauren Langlois. Lighting designer Alexander Berlage, who has a craving for innovation, lit all four works, and in each there’s a sense of broader performance vision; the interplay between light and music and movement is front and centre.
Di Giovanni’s In Walked Bud sets the tone here; its symbiotic relationship between movement, music and lights recalls old Hollywood cinematography. Dancers move between a series of spotlights; with each new angle, the dance becomes something new. Dancer Chloe Leong begins the piece with a light-hearted solo – and begins her standout performance across the evening – her movement bright and pleasingly nostalgic for movie musical jazz. The lights shift, and she’s joined by Holly Doyle as her shadow; later, Luke Hayward enters the piece, and even when the track stops, or applause starts to play, the dance merely morphs; it isn’t over yet. Di Giovanni’s dancers are playful, but it soon becomes clear that he’s playing with us, too – challenging our expectations of a dance performance, of theatre conventions, and what beginnings and endings can look like onstage.
Arise, Casu’s work, is the next on the bill – and this is a piece in search of transcendence. Casu created the work with the limitations we place on our bodies in mind: social conformity, beauty standards and general uniformity. Her dancers’ upper halves are covered and restricted, and the narrative here is clear, and perhaps what you expect – they pull and push against each other, outliers against the crowd denied a hand from their fellow dancer, until finally humanity breaks through. While the ideas aren’t new, there’s an image – a dancer finally free of boundaries, she stands and sways, pushing her hands through her hair. It’s that liberating freshness, like the smell in the air after rain, and it lingers. When the company finds that freedom too, you can feel it.
Creeper by Lauren Langlois, in a case of great programming, seems to build on the angular disconnects that Casu introduces in Arise. In a world where we’ve lost the ability to communicate, her dancers are trying to find ways to relate to each other. How do we discover a shared language post-technology, when bodily intimacy could have been lost? Her company of four converges and scatters, reaches out and avoids, distrusts interaction and cautiously accepts gestures of connection. This, too, is familiar ground, but Casu, Holly Doyle, Chloe Leong and Jesse Scales are stars that cannot help but orbit each other, and that inevitability is at once reassuring and surprising.
Josh Mu’s Zero closes the show, and it’s a showstopper: a kaleidoscope of anxiety, a hurtling towards the end. Mu’s dancers – Juliette Barton, Alex Borg, Dean Elliott, Riley Fitzgerald, Di Giovanni, Jacopo Grabar, Hayward, Dimitri Kleioris, Emily Seymour, Mia Thompson and Young – are in freefall, and so is the piece. As soon as it begins, the music by Huey Benjamin heavy and electrifying, there’s a sense of danger and recklessness. Berlage’s lights feed on this energy, and so do we in the audience – you might find yourself leaning forward in your seat. The company ducks their heads low, move from their core, let their hair and shoulders and hips respond like a dancefloor, like a last call in this body before the end. And no dancer is alone; rather, each individual dancer’s movement directly affects the dancers closest to them in a wave of cause and effect. It’s thrilling.
The programs ends on a buzzing high; the world is on fire, but we still make art, and maybe that makes the art even more urgent, even more beautiful.