Announcing our RECHARGE Space Grant recipients for June-August 2025
RECHARGE Space Grants give artists an opportunity to use The Drill Hall without any predetermined outcomes.
We are excited to announce our recipients: Eric Avery, Nasim Patel, Sue Healey, Sabrina Muszynksi, Louie Wisby, Skye Gellman, Shelley Lasica and Ashleigh Veitch. Each artist will receive a 1-week residency in the Drill Hall.
We are also delighted to offer two additional residencies in partnership with MARCS ArtScience Lab for Avalon Ormiston with Bianca Yeung and Lee-Anne Litton, and a further residency for Annalouise Paul in partnership with the Sydney Jewish Museum.
NASIM PATEL
Nasim Patel, non-paradise, 2023, film, commissioned by the Sydney Opera House through Shortwave.
🐪 Moving 🐪 the 🐪 Desert 🐪
In this residency I will be taking an embodied approach to my artistic focus over the last few years – exploring how desert spaces are perceived with an emphasis on the role of the Cameleers in Australian history. This will be considered through the embodied experience of living in desert temperaments, and the experience of living in the ‘void’, an expansive horizon of absence so large that it reminds the self of a grand scale of existence. I’ll also be translating the motion of camels to the human body, who have established unique methods of traversal across sands.
NASIM PATEL
SUE HEALEY
Sue Healey LIVE ACTION RELAY, 2020, Performers: Raghav Handa & Allie Graham; photo: Wendell Teodoro
Mountain of Truth
I will begin a new work ‘Mountain of Truth’ with performers Siobhan Lynch and Ben Hancock and composer Ben Walsh. We will spend a week beginning our research into what will be an ambitious, live performance installation that spans both an urban industrial space and a wild mountain environment. At its core ‘Mountain of Truth’ is a dialogue between nature and technology responding to the destabilising forces of our time — political distortion, technological disembodiment, environmental crisis. It looks back to the early 20th century and the radical artists, anarchists, and importantly, dancers (Laban, Mary Wigman, Isadora Duncan to name a few) who gathered at Monte Verità (Mountain of Truth) in Switzerland to imagine new ways of being. They sought simplicity, connection to nature, communal creativity, and spiritual renewal — offering a powerful counterpoint to the chaos of their era. This project reactivates their vision, and is utterly relevant to the forces we are faced with now, asking: What is truth? What is real? Can we still create sanctuary, connection, and meaning in a disordered world?
SUE HEALEY
SABRINA MUSZYNSKI
Sabrina Muszynski, 2nd Skin, 2023, solo dance performance; Performance Space LIVE DREAMS: MARRIAGES; photo: Matthew Miceli.
2nd Skin (in development)
How does Highland dancing fit in the past, present and future? Sabrina will embark on a two-week residency to develop 2nd Skin into a full-length work. She will explore the piece’s universal themes, delving into questions such as: What is Highland dancing? How does her past material contribute to this inquiry, and what personal significance does it hold? During the residency, Sabrina will reimagine the opening of the work—using the resonant drone of bagpipes to evoke the Scottish landscape—and consider weaving her grandmother’s story throughout, drawing on lived experience through movement and text.
SABRINA MUSZYNSKI
LOUIE WISBY
Louie, Sybylla, 2024, still from a film featured in live performance at Temerance Hall Fringe program, Temperance Hall (Naarm); Temperance Hall and Lucy Guerin Inc (Out of Bounds); photo: Jeff Busby.
Translated Anatomies
This research is an inquiry into how our concepts of the body inform the way that we move them. Using techniques from and drawing on physical histories of kinesiology and embodied anatomy, Chinese Medicine frameworks of the body will be integrated into the existing dancing kinesphere of myself and others.
I am curious about how diversifying the imagined and theoretical frameworks we use to think about our bodies can expand our physical practices and our experiences of our bodies. This may have implications for how we move through the world and experience pain and pleasure, inevitably influencing the dances we may make.
LOUIE WISBY
SKYE GELLMAN
Skye Gellmann and Lee Wilson, How Not To Climb a Mountain, 2023, Performance; Adhocracy, Port Adelaide; Commissioned by Vitalstatistix and Produced by Branch Nebula; photo: Heath Britton.
How Not To Climb a Mountain
An experiment in anarchic resourcefulness exploring physical failure as a choreographic action.
Through the process of attempting impossible tasks – that may remain unattainable and the idea of the task as an outrageous proposition – the mountain is made of mistakes and unintentional outcomes.
How Not to Climb a Mountain tests what it is to be ill-equipped. Skye and Lee collect materials, challenging their accepted uses by playing against the narratives held within them. Mountaineering ice spike shoes scale a cardboard wall then delicately yet frighteningly caress a human body. Sonic interventions arise when instruments are tormented by power tools. The movements of highly physical performers are disrupted by stage dollies awkwardly strapped to their bodies.
How Not to Climb a Mountain is commissioned by Vitalstatistix and produced by Branch Nebula.
SKYE GELLMAN
After graduating NICA in 2006, they created several full-length performance works including critically acclaimed Body Fiction and Scattered Tacks. Their work has won 2 Greenroom Awards, 5 Melbourne Fringe awards, and awards at Adelaide Fringe and Sydney Fringe. Skye’s work has played at major festivals and venues around Australia, Asia and Europe including: Noorderzon Performing Arts, Stockholm Fringe, Artshouse, Brisbane Powerhouse, La Boite, Junction Arts Festival, Metro Arts, Darwin Festival, Sidesault Festival, The Judith Wright Centre, PACT, Next Wave Festival, MCA, & North Melbourne Meat Market – to name a few.
Collaboratively they have worked alongside companies and individuals such as Branch Nebula, Erth Theatre/Visual, Daniel Santangeli, Gareth Hart, Circa and Circus Oz.
SHELLEY LASICA
Shelley Lasica, RENDER, Nicholas Building 2024, video still: Kate Meakin.
Align
This project proposes choreography as a medium for thinking about the organisation, selection and exposition of types of knowledge and information. Through choreographic methodologies of distribution of information as a generative practice in the making of a work and its reception; the enquiry activates knowledges inside and outside the skin. Thematically the structure and the subject are intimately related as we find ourselves in a situation of questioning social and political organisation and dissemination of knowledge and information. With an eye to hierarchies and ideologies, the how of communication becomes the what that is communicated: intimacy, orientation, responsibility, choice-making strategies become the conduit between the working process and the subject matter.
www.instagram.com/shelleylasica
SHELLEY LASICA
ASHLEIGH VEITCH
Ashleigh Veitch, Longing, 2024, Sydney Fringe Festival, photo: Bianca Yeung.
Vessel
This will be a second development/movement research for a new solo work titled “Vessel. Building on discoveries from the first development, where I explored long improvisations, guided by internal cues. These improvisations revealed shifts between human, pedestrian movement and something “other-worldly,” pointing to a link between the subconscious and conscious. This phase will focus on refining material, experimenting with transitions between set movement and improvised scores, and further refining movement to explore the interplay of human and non-human qualities.
ASHLEIGH VEITCH
AVALON ORMISTON WITH BIANCA YEUNG
Bianca Yeung, BiPolar Express, 2025, photo: Jonathan Adrian.
BiPolar Express
Space Grant in partnership with MARCS Artscience Lab & Research Room Residency 2025.
BiPolar Express is a cross-medium collaboration between writer Bianca Yeung, dancer/choreographer Avalon Ormiston, and director Isabella Milkovitsch, blending dance and theatre to explore the lived experience of bipolar disorder. During our Critical Path residency, we will develop our work’s choreographic language via focused research with a small ensemble, refining the work’s physical vocabulary and deepening our psychological inquiry. Collaborating with producer Phaedra Brown and performers Grace White, Layla Meadows, Tom Evans, and Lisa Davidson, we’ll bring this work to life in preparation for its premiere at Sydney Fringe Festival this September.
This project is supported by the Australian Cultural Fund and is being presented in partnership with Flight Path Theatre and Sydney Fringe Festival.
AVALON ORMISTON & BIANCA YEUNG
Bianca Yeung (she/her) is an emerging multidisciplinary artist and published writer. She is an alumnus of Dance Makers Collective’s Future Makers program and holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and Neuroscience from the University of Sydney. She currently works as a notetaker in Writers Rooms at renowned film and television companies across Sydney.
LEE-ANNE LITTON
Desencuentro by Lee-Anne Litton and Alejandro Rolandi with Sydney Dance Company PPY cohort 2023, photo: Wendell Teodoro
A Series of Experiments
A Series of Experiments is a five-part movement class and choreographic research project led by Lee-Anne Litton. This project offers a space to explore compatible practices through embodied inquiry. Guided physical explorations rooted in Contact Improvisation, somatic awareness, and ensemble thinking, the project will investigate how resonance and coherence arise through contrast, and how divergence can become a source of connection and composition. Framing the practice of attuning across difference, this class asks: how does choreography emerge when we lead with listening?
LEE-ANNE LITTON
ANNALOUISE PAUL
Annalouise Paul, photo: Tristan Baker.
Self Portrait
Annalouise Paul’s residency is in partnership with the Sydney Jewish Museum.
This new solo work explores convivencia, the co-existence of multiple cultural affinities in the single self. The work is grounded in Annalouise’s Sephardi (Spanish-Jewish) ancestry and contemporary-flamenco arts practice. Artistic research at Critical Path begins a long-term phase to uncover the ancestry and spirituality of Sephardi culture and its deep connection embedded in flamenco, through Jewish liturgy, music, rituals, wisdom and lore. Judeo-Spanish and flamenco cultures are inextricably linked and share a history from time of the expulsion of Jews in 1492. The Sydney Jewish Museum will co-host a sharing of the work-in-progress.
https://www.annalouisepaul.com
ANNALOUISE PAUL
FEATURED IMAGE CREDIT: Skye Gellmann and Lee Wilson, How Not To Climb a Mountain, 2023, Performance; Adhocracy, Port Adelaide; Commissioned by Vitalstatistix and Produced by Branch Nebula; Photo credit Heath Britton. IMAGE ID: Photograph of two persons on a concrete floor in black shorts with dollies sticky taped to their backs falling over in an ungraceful way.