Critical Path are partnering with PYT | Fairfield, to bring together five female and non-binary identifying peer artists working with choreography in Sydney, to engage with the company of PYT | Fairfield’s new project, Playlist. The selected five artists are Raynen O’Keefe, Ivey Wawn, Cleo Mees, Anna Kuroda and Angela Goh, along with Critical Path artist board representative Patricia Wood. These peer artists will be working at PYT | Fairfield on Friday 13 April, as well as here at The Drill Hall on Friday 20 April, providing creative and professional development to the company, in relation to both to the content of the work and their broader practices. Playlist will explore the state of feminism in pop culture and music, from the perspectives of five young female-identifying performers from Western Sydney: Ebube Uba, Neda Taha, Tasha O’Brien, May Tran and Mara Knezevic. The final piece will be performed 1-12 August at PYT | Fairfield.
Image by Alex Wisser
Angela Goh is a dancer and choreographer. She is working with dance in theatres, galleries, and telepathetic spaces. Her work often deals with tropes of femininity; the supernatural; and dance as both a form and as a force. Her most recent work Scum Ballet was created with Cambelltown Arts Centre.
Anna Kuroda is a dancer and choreographer. She is a new resident of Sydney, Australia having been previously based in Kamakura, Japan. From 2010 she began collaborating with David Kirkpatrick (sound and multimedia artist). Their work crosses cultures as well as the boundaries of dance, sound art, video art, electronics, design and large scale installation, with a focus on interactivity and live performance.
Cleo Mees is a creative practice researcher who works across filmmaking and writing. She has a keen interest in improvisation and interdisciplinarity, and explored these in a recently completed PhD that engaged with improvised dance practices and drew substantially on her own training in BodyWeather and Contact Improvisation. Her video work has led her to collaborate on video and writing projects with musicians, dancers and visual artists.
Ivey Wawn is an independent artist studying Political Economy at the University of Sydney. Her choreographic work is centered on deep considerations of political systems and resource distribution. Using observations on micro and macro scales, Ivey develops complex systems of transformation, through choreography, toward modes of care that hope to better fit contemporary conditions.
Raynen O’Keefe is an emerging interdisciplinary artist based in Sydney. They are a writer, mover, performance-maker, visual and sound artist. Their personal practice traces concentrically – cause, affect and freefall – of trauma subjectivities, somatic relations, cognition and states of inter- as well as intra-personal tautness. Raynen’s work produces spheres and excavations of conflict, forebodance, and sculptural and embodied relief. The artist takes leave from lived experiences of deviant bodiedness (trans departures), and acquisitions of cognitive and neuro-topographical adaptations to impact and confinement.
Critical Path Representative – Patricia Wood is a performer and choreographer. She has worked with dance companies and independent artists performing in Australia, Asia and Europe. Patricia has received support from the Australia Council for the Arts, Ausdance, Critical Path and Frontyard. In 2014, Patricia worked for Ausdance NSW and Sydney Dance Company to produce the large-scale community event, Big Dance. Last year Patricia completed a Masters in Research (Dance) at Macquarie University and became a Teaching Artist with Sydney Dance Company.