The arts industry has a funny need to categorise every artist: Australian painter, Spanish choreographer, Aboriginal playwright, Asian-Australian novelist. Of course, there are plenty of people who we now consider “slashies” – actor-slash-director, dancer-slash-artist, curator-slash-filmmaker – but the label is still paramount.
To try to encapsulate Amrita Hepi’s fast-evolving, still relatively young career – which has dance at its core – with one of these neat labels feels reductive. She’s performed as a dancer around the world, created performance art, taught empowering and joyous Beyoncé-inspired dance classes at Goodgod nightclub (RIP), given an insightful Ted Talk about the politics of dance, and created a series of dance films for ASOS. And this week she’s at Arts Centre Melbourne staging a unique series of collaborative one-on-one dance classes.
But last week, Hepi opened an exhibition at Paddington gallery Cement Fondu as part of Sydney Festival. It’s called The Ropes, and features a brand new video installation at its centre by Hepi, weaving together archival footage of movement and skipping with her own footage, creating a rhythmic, whirring visual effect. It’s showing alongside video works by the hugely influential American conceptual artist Adrian Piper.
Not only has Piper been a widely lauded artist since the 1970s (in 2015 she won the Golden Lion for best artist at the Venice Biennale, and in 2018 became the first living artist to have an exhibition take over a full floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art) she’s explored all variety of subjects in her work, including racism and sexism in the United States. And much like Hepi, her career has refused to follow any expected trajectory or stay within preordained boundaries, crossing into performance, video and writing.
“I was very surprised she said yes,” Hepi says of Piper’s involvement. “It’s a huge deal to sit next to people that you’ve admired for a long time.”
There are plenty of connections between Piper and Hepi’s work, which is inevitably shaped by Hepi’s own cultural background; she hails from the Ngāpuhi tribe in northern New Zealand and the Bundjalung people in northern New South Wales.
“Obviously the African-American community has a very different connection to dance, compared to the Indigenous community here,” Hepi says. “But I like that [Piper] uses dance as an ‘in’ to talk about things as an artist, which is something that I do. And I think she’s just impressive and bold, and there’s a real human element to all of her performance where you can still see her working it out as she’s doing it. It’s not a polished, finished thing; it’s almost continuous work.”
The three videos from Piper come from the 1980s through to the 2000s, and can be watched around the gallery with wireless headphones pumping music from Aretha Franklin and Billie Holiday. One particular video, ‘Please God’ (1990), features a group of young black girls dancing joyfully in front of a window and contemplates the place they’ll find as black women in American society.
The most significant political element in Hepi’s work mightn’t be as immediately obvious, but it’s embedded into the very fabric of the video: not only is she looking at how skipping is used in different cultural settings, Hepi sees the rhythmic editing style and the pace of the video as a contemporary version of the virtuosic weaving practices that have been employed by Bundjalung women for thousands of years. Weaving practices which plenty of young Indigenous women like Hepi have missed out on because of the ongoing effects of colonisation in Australia.
“I like the mythology around weaving, but I like that it’s got a community and history,” she says. “Weaving is so meticulous and it requires this focus and intention. A lot of things that people were weaving were practical objects, like ‘I need to carry my baby’, or ‘I need to store things’. I love that in its form, but there’s also all of this weaving that’s done like a way to show off. Just women’s work, with women trying to one-up each other with these fancy baskets, and I like that too.”
To create the fabric for her own weave, Hepi shot footage on an iPhone 8. This was partly because she had her phone readily available but also part of a mission to democratise, demystify and deconstruct our dance culture.
Hepi has a long and fractious relationship with dance. She fell in love with dancing when she was three years old, but things became strained when she entered adolescence.
“I guess there was a shift in how we were talking about movement, and it just irked the shit out of me,” she says. “All of a sudden it was like I couldn’t do the same things I was doing, and it shifted how I thought I was being desired and what I was desiring. I didn’t have the language for it as a 17 year old, but I didn’t want to be seen, I didn’t want to be looked at, and it sort of shut me down. I just stopped.”
Hepi’s path back into the dance world was a little unusual; she came in through art and it wasn’t until she started teaching dance that she understood that she’d wanted to be taught in a way that doesn’t dictate politically-loaded expectations; that doesn't place this weight on a young woman’s body as she learns to dance. And although she still loves the kind of virtuosic dance that’s packaged with more traditional dance, she’s more interested in stripping movement back and interrogating the cultural ramifications of dance.
In The Ropes, she’s building a new way of using dance to tap into important conversations: using rhythm, pace and the most basic elements of movement.
“Maybe that’s one of the greatest things that a dancer knows: the volume of a body. How to turn it up, how to turn it down, and how it’s being heard and received.”
The Ropes: Amrita Hepi x Adrian Piper is at Cement Fondu until February 24.
Check out our highlights of Sydney Festival and the best art exhibitions in Sydney this month.