An inaugural program, and an extension of our 9-year partnership with Performance Space, the 2024 EXPERIMENTAL CHOREOGRAPHIC LAB will see five selected movement-artists come together over a week-long process to explore shared themes of grief, ritual, submerged histories, and modalities of the more-than-human.
The selected artists are:
Lucy Doherty
Lian Loke
Rhiannon Newton
Lorcan Power
Natalie Quan Yau Tso
Facilitated by choreographer and artist Victoria Hunt, they will address the topic of ‘grief’ from both the individual and the overarching socio-political and environmental perspective. The LAB will follow the 2024 Experimental Choreographic Residency with Jessie Rose McCall who will work with the shredding processes to explore what we need to let go of (and therefore grieve), individually and collectively, in order to create space for the new.
The LAB will culminate in an informal showing (Saturday 6 July, 4-6pm) where peers and audiences are invited to connect with the artists’ process and work-in-development.
BOOK TICKETSLUCY DOHERTY
Lucy is a dance artist, choreographer, director & producer. Trained in multiple dance styles, she has left her mark on both stage and screen. Through mediums of choreography, film, and live performance, Lucy’s artistic practice centres on the exploration of the body and subtle energy. She is interested in the intricate interplay between physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the human experience. Driven by personal experiences, including the loss of her mother as a young adult, Lucy’s creative practice delves into themes such as grief, mortality, sexuality, and divinity. In 2015, she self-produced and toured her first full-length production titled “One”, which gained immense support within the dance community. This experience led her to establish the community-focused arts organisation “One Dance Collective,” empowering and inspiring emerging dance artists through professional and creative development initiatives.
Image credit: Lucy Doherty by Kishka Jensen.
LIAN LOKE
Lian is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator and researcher, working across dance, durational and site-specific performance installation, costume, and interactive kinetic media and robotics. Her practice questions the role of the body in contemporary society, and how our notions of self are open to transformation through inter-cultural, inter-species and inter-media relations and rituals. Research interests include new movement languages and metamorphic embodiment practices informed by tactile, kinaesthetic interactions and imaginings with body extensions, objects, structures and spaces, and how to choreograph heterogeneous systems combining software, kinetic materials, and space for audience interaction.
Image Credit: Lian Loke, photographer: Alex Wisser.
RHIANNON NEWTON
Rhiannon is an Australian dancer and choreographer who grew up on Dunghutti Land on the Mid-North Coast of NSW. Her creative work draws attention to the interconnection of the body and the more- than-human world. Working from Gadigal Land (Sydney), Rhiannon makes contributions to community and culture through choreography, performance, teaching, research and curation. Rhiannon’s recent projects include Earthbound (Volume, AGNSW); Explicit Contents (Sydney Festival; Dancehouse; INDance; QL2 Dance); A Strange Place (Dance Nucleus); The Gift of a Warning (New Breed); and We Make Each Other Up (Dancehouse).
Image credit: Rhiannon Newton, Earthbound for MOVES, Art Gallery of NSW. Photographer: Felicity Jenkins.
LORCAN POWER
Lorcan Power is a queer and trans artist focusing on embodiment, choosing to see life as movement. Deeply passionate about storytelling, sound and movement based sharing, they xplore ways to create meaning through feeling into and out of their body, offering audiences a space to be in touch with and connect to their own body. They have had an array of opportunities including working for & at: The Bearded Tit, MCA, AGNSW, Carriageworks, Dark Mofo, Sydney Opera House, Unassigned gallery, Vivid Sydney, Performance Space, Sydney World Pride, at En Dance Showcase in Tokyo, Japan & performer in immersive theatre show ‘Does It Matter in The Dark’ directed by Alice Robinson in London, UK.
Image credit: Lorcan Power by Joseph Mayers
NATALIE QUAN YAU TSO
Natalie is a performance and visual artist whose practice investigates bodily boundaries as political boundaries to make sculptures, installations and performances. She performs acts such as cleansing, eating and peeling that activate bodily dispersions; then collects these bodily materials, including saliva, sweat, hair and skin, to form sculptures that reveal slippages between the material and the corporeal. She is invested in transparent, almost invisible, materials as a mask that both protects and erases her in the post-colonial contexts of Australia and Hong Kong. In 2023 she was a finalist for the NSW Emerging Artist Fellowship by Artspace and Create NSW.
Image credit: Natalie Quan Yau Tso in a 3rd year of her 10-year durational performance ‘dear, from’. Image taken by Sineenart Meena.
LEAD-MENTOR: Victoria Hunt
Born on Kombumerri Country (Surfers Paradise), Victoria Hunt currently lives on Bidjigal Country, Eora (Sydney, Australia). Her ancestral affiliations are Te Arawa, Rongowhaakata, Kahungunu Māori, Irish, English, Finnish. She works across the visual and performing arts as a dancer, director, choreographer, dramaturg, photographer, and filmmaker. Victoria delves into Indigenous epistemologies within diasporic concepts of identity formation and belonging. Her work is liminal, inter-cultural, inter-disciplinary and reinstates the power of Indigenous creativity within the politics of Rematriation – inserting the body into frameworks of power, for future ancestors. Her work is a gradual binding of intimate collaboration between artists, Elders and communities. In 2000 Victoria became a founding member of Australia’s leading Body Weather dance company De Quincey Co. and has performed in over 50 productions. She is co-founder of the Weather Beings a 2Spirit performance collaborative established with Métis artist Moe Clark, based in tio’tia:ke / Montréal, Canada.
This program is supported through Create NSW.