INDance 2024 – Contemporary Dance Program

From 15-24 August, INDance will feature four independent dance works created and performed by independent Australian artists.

Make Your Life Count – Sarah Aiken
CUDDLE – Harrison Ritchie-Jones
Brightness – Kristina Chan – SOLD OUT
SUB – Ashleigh Musk

Taking place in the Neilson Studio at Sydney Dance Company, this is a unique opportunity for you to witness diverse and innovative concepts that push the boundaries of dance and reflect the contemporary Australian landscape.

Supported by the Neilson Foundation, this short program has been curated by an independent panel lead by Sydney Dance Company’s Artistic Director Rafael Bonachela to provide independent artists the opportunity to reach new audiences.

Support Australian contemporary dance in this exciting program!

WEEK ONE
Thursday 15 – Saturday 17 August

Make Your Life Count – 6pm
CUDDLE – 7.45pm

WEEK TWO
Thursday 22 – Saturday 24 August

Brightness – 6pm – SOLD OUT
SUB – 7.45pm

Save when you buy tickets to 2 or more performances!

You can mix and match performances across both Week One (15-17 August) and/or Week Two (22-24 August).

The more performances you see, the more you’ll save per ticket!

Join us on Friday evenings throughout the INDance program for exclusive Artist Talks with INDance choreographers and performers from 9:00pm.

Set in Sydney Dance Company’s main foyer with a pop-up bar, these free talks are a unique opportunity to further engage with diverse ideas and concepts from leading independent choreographers.

Friday 16 August
Sarah Aiken and Harrison Ritchie-Jones

Friday 23 August
Kristina Chan and Ashleigh Musk

Make Your Life Count
Running Time: 55 mins
Age Recommendation: Ages 14 +
Warnings: None

CUDDLE
Running Time: 45 mins
Age Recommendation: Ages 10+
Warnings:
Partial nudity, haze effects, quick flashing and strobing lights, changes in colour and intensity, voice manipulation, live videography and projection. CUDDLE will be presented in the round, with limited seating available. Audience members will be required to stand or sit on the floor for the duration of the performance. If you require a physical seat please contact [email protected].

Brightness
Running Time: 45 mins
Age Recommendation: Ages 15+
Warnings: Haze, nudity and low level lighting.

SUB 
Running Time: 65 mins
Age Recommendation: Ages 8+
Warnings: Extremely loud noises, including a potentially distressing siren sound during one specific section, some sexual references and haze effects. Audiences are provided with earplugs.

Choregraphed by Sarah Aiken

Make Your Life Count is an ambitious dance work that shifts scale in a heartbeat and moves from the microscopic to the universal and back again. Choreographer and dancer Sarah Aiken encounters her own self – expanded to infinite proportions and shrunken to painful insignificance, stretched into new dimensions and flattened into mute landscapes. This powerful work of imagination is a serious attempt to grapple with the paradoxes of modern life in which the individual is swollen to grotesque importance while simultaneously reduced to ineffectual and invisible impotence.

Make Your Life Count looks for ways to soften society’s focus on the individual – to lose oneself in the patterns of community, ecology and history. Whether monstrous and destructive or lost in the crushing scale of humanity, ecology, time and the universe, this perspective-shifting work is a chance to lose yourself and maybe find something better.

Choreography, Video, Visual Design and Performance: Sarah Aiken
Sound Design: Andrew Wilson
Technical Designer, Creative Assistance and Outside Eye: Daniel Arnott
Creative Support and Rehearsal Direction: Claire Leske
Text: Megan Payne with Sarah Aiken
Original Lighting Design: Amelia Lever-Davidson

Performer: Sarah Aiken

This project has been assisted by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and Arts House. Development supported by Lucy Guerin Inc/WXYZ space residency.

Choreographed by Harrison Ritchie-Jones

Partners in crime raise the stakes and go all out on a dance heist. The window is short and the road is dangerous — will they make it out alive?

In CUDDLE, two of Melbourne’s contemporary dance artists on the rise, Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Michaela Tancheff, engage in a difficult and dynamic duel filled with surreal sonic and visual surprises.

Weaving contemporary dance with elements from martial arts, figure skating, rodeo barnyard dance and a host of more abstract inspirations, CUDDLE ebbs and flows from the joyful and absurd to the inventive and technically brilliant.

With the audience gathered around the space as though at a wrestling match, CUDDLE is a unique and unpredictable press into a strange and wondrous intimacy.

Choreographer: Harrison Ritchie-Jones
Composers: Nick Roder and Max Dowling
Videographer: Alex Walton
Lighting Designer: Ashley Buchanan
Dramaturge: Michelle Heaven
Producer: Michaela Coventry

Performers: Harrison Ritchie-Jones and Michaela Tancheff

PLEASE NOTE: CUDDLE will be presented in the round, with limited seating available. Audience members will be required to stand or sit on the floor for the duration of the performance. If you require a physical seat please contact [email protected].

Choreographed by Kristina Chan

An enchanting duet, Brightness is an invocation to our universal ties with nature.

Concluding choreographer Kristina Chan’s trilogy (A Faint Existence 2016; MOUNTAIN 2018), Brightness moves through ecological timelines contemplating microorganisms, decomposition, transformation and emergence.

With striking choreography, a haunting psychedelic soundscore and nuanced conceptual design elements, Brightness draws us into a deep state of listening, into our inherent connection with nature.

★★★★★ “Kristina Chan blows audience away…turn(s) a vast and challenging subject into a thought-provoking theatrical experience.”  – Jill Sykes, SMH (A Faint Existence)

Choreography: Kristina Chan in collaboration with original cast Tiana Lung and Georgia Van Gils
Lighting Design & Production Manager: Karen Norris
Production Design: Clare Britton
Sound Design: James Brown
Costume Design: Donna Sgro
Producer: Fenn Gordon for Tandem
Early development Dramaturg & Mentor: Victoria Hunt

Performers: Jasmin Luna and Tiana Lung

Thanks to previous work on developments from colleagues: Emily Moffat (Production management) & Amber Silk (Lighting)

This project has been in development since 2018 and assisted by funding from the Australian government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body; Create NS; Critical Path, & ReadyMade Works. With thanks to Creative Practice Lab (UNSW) for support and Bangarra Dance Theatre for studio use.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

Choreographed by Ashleigh Musk

Traversing fractured earth.

Escaping a surface world littered with crises, we burrow into soil and stone to seek shelter within layers of debris, tunneling and surrendering to its contradictions.

Deepening towards the tectonic pulse of the earth, time shifts and defies what we know about living in relationship with the underground. Digging closer to the polyrhythms of the core, SUB entangles natural symphonies with industrialised extraction processes, cracking through our resistance to hope.

A soft defiance is portrayed through the endurance of SUB’s inhabitants as they come into confluence with precious materials below the surface.

In this place that both attracts and scares us – this wet, restless and difficult place – we engage with the terror and volatility of the living natural world.

Concept & Choreography: Ashleigh Musk, in collaboration with the entire team.
Sound Design: Anna Whitaker
Lighting & Spatial Design: Jen Hector
Dramaturgy & Concept Development: P Eldridge & Léuli Eshrāghi
Costume Design: Elliat Rich
Costume Manufacturer: Lizzie Verstappen
Choreographic Intern: Toni Lord
Tour Manager: Frankie Snowdon
Past Performers: Frankie Snowdon, Jenni Large.

Performers: Madeleine Krenek, Georgia Rudd, Ashleigh Musk and Samakshi Sidhu.

SUB is created in partnership with Tasdance and proudly sponsored by the Northern Territory Government through Arts NT. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through RISE and Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, the Regional Arts Fund, Darwin Festival through the Spotlight Creative Development Fund and the Araluen Arts Centre.

The development of SUB was supported through residencies at Red Hot Arts Central Australia, The Makers Program with Supercell Festival of Contemporary Dance (QLD) and The Unconformity Festival (TAS).

Produced by GUTS Dance Central Australia.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

Proudly sponsored by the Northern Territory Government.

Sarah Aiken is a Melbourne-based performer, teacher and choreographer from Bellingen NSW. Her work investigates assemblage, authorship, scale and the self, looking at the roles of audience, performer, subject and object and connecting tangibly with audiences, to consider performance as a site for empathy & exchange.

Works include Body Corp (iteration #4) for CONTACT HIGH (Gertrude Contemporary 2024), Demake/Demaster for SITU8 City (Liberty Theatre STRUT/TURA 2022), Piece for pieces (PIECES LGI/The Substation 2019), What Am I Supposed To Do? (WAISTD) (Arts Centre Melbourne 2019) and SARAHAIKEN (Tools for Personal Expansion) (Keir Choreographic Award 2016).

Sarah is co-director of Deep Soulful Sweats, working with Rebecca Jensen to create work that engages rigorously with participation, waste and a reckless formalism, recycling content to consider materiality and how we come together. Their cult classic, zodiac themed participatory dance events have been running for 10 years across the world, inviting audiences into cathartic and thoughtful performative experiences.
Sarah was artist in residence at Helsinki International Artists Program, Dancenorth, and Centre for Projection Art. She is a grateful recipient of the Creators Fund, the Chloe Munro Fellowship and is developing new work Body Corp for premiere in 2025.

Make Your Life Count premiered at Arts House, Melbourne in 2022, with subsequent seasons at Platform Arts (2023), PICA Perth (2024) and video presentation at Federation Square, Gertrude Street Projection Festival, MCA, and Frame Biennial of Dance. The work won Best Visual Design at the Australian Greenroom Awards.

Harrison Ritchie-Jones is an independent dancer, choreographer and filmmaker based in Naarm, Melbourne. His choreographic practice celebrates dance and is fuelled by a curiosity in techniques from a range of physical practices. Upskilling and blending forms, he uses dance to carve out spaces for absurdity, humour and physical virtuosity to work together in surreal and expressive explorations of storytelling.

He has choreographed and offered movement direction for music videos, films, and dance theatre works. His work has a sense of celebrating movement, authenticity, obsession, determination and risk.

Kristina Chan is an award-winning choreographer, dancer and teacher based on Biripi Country in New South Wales. Her career has seen her perform in Australia, Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States and throughout Europe and Asia. She has been a key collaborator with companies and independent artists across Australia.

Her acclaimed choreographic practice explores our relationship to nature. Kristina has been awarded a Helpmann Award (2011) and two Australian Dance Awards (2006 and 2009); 2017 Peggy Van Praagh Choreographic Fellowship; Regional Arts Australia Fellowship 2020; 2023 Critical Path Research Action Group Fellowship.

Ashleigh Musk
Ashleigh Musk (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer, dramaturg and community arts facilitator based in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) in so-called Australia. Her practice engages in sensitive interactions with place and landscape, unearthing physicalities which re-imagine the body in relation to the ecological crises of our time. She generates art which invites audiences to acknowledge a co-existence with the more-than-human world. Radical care is expressed through experiments in time, participation and experimental use of objects, each work acquiring and growing into a unique sensorial ecosystem.

GUTS Dance
Mparntwe based GUTS Dance is a hub for high calibre artistic engagement and the only platform for contemporary dance within a 1500km radius. Founded in 2018 by dance artists Frankie Snowdon and Madeleine Krenek, GUTS is recognised as a centre for artistic growth and excellence, championing courage, community and collaboration as tools to create genuinely transformative art. At GUTS we build resilience and recognition & grow dance practices within a regional and remote context while maintaining dialogue and collaborating with other metropolitan and regional practitioners. We believe fiercely in the decentralisation of our artistic economies and elevation of art created throughout this country.

★★★★ “Fujimura’s work is frankly more thoughtful, accessible, and downright enjoyable than a lot of the modern dance that makes it to the Opera House. The finale, featuring Fujimura twirling joyously with a disco ball, has the audience loudly cheering him on.” — Sydney Morning Herald (INDance 2023 – HERE NOW by Ryuichi Fujimura)

★★★★ “Sheppard introduces a sense of intimacy by projecting family photos onto the set. We also hear voiceovers from the dancers explaining their own family or mob, in a way that makes kinship feel relatable. The poignancy is offset by Sheppard’s humour.” — Sydney Morning Herald (INDance 2023 – The Complication of Lyrebirds by Jasmin Sheppard)

“Fujimura’s work is very funny and poignant… A big shout-out to SDC for facilitating such an important program” — ABC Radio Sydney (INDance 2023)

“The dancers – all splendid – are like well-oiled machines… The set of walking and running patterns near the end of precipice (are) very finely constructed and elegant.” — Deborah Jones (INDance 2023 – precipice by Rachel Arianne Ogle)

“… a rare and vital opportunity for an independent dance maker to focus solely on the art of choreographing… Sydney’s dance culture benefits greatly from bringing fresh voices into the mix: exposing new styles, approaches, and ideas to foster a vibrant creative culture.” — Dance Australia (INDance 2023)

The Neilson Studio is Sydney Dance Company’s newest performance and theatre space located at our refurbished Wharf Studios at the Walsh Bay Arts Precinct.

There are many options for getting to Sydney Dance Company’s Wharf Studios:

Sydney Dance Company
Wharf 4/5, Walsh Bay Arts Precinct
15 Hickson Rd, Dawes Point
NSW 2000

Public Transport
Public transport is the best way to get to the Wharf. You can arrive by train, bus or ferry.

Train
Sydney Dance Company is a 15 minute walk from Circular Quay train station and a 20 minute walk from Wynyard train station.

Bus services
Buses 324 and 325 run from the CBD to Dawes Point, with stops on Hickson Rd just outside Sydney Dance Company. For details please visit Transport NSW or telephone 131 500.

Parking at The Wharf
While on-street metered parking is available, we recommend parking at the following parking stations located nearby:
● Bond One​, 26 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay
● Barangaroo Point, entry via Hickson Road
● Barangaroo Reserve, 5 Towns Place, Barangaroo

More Information

For more information about the Neilson Studio or Sydney Dance Company, please contact our Box Office via phone +61 2 9221 4811 or email at [email protected].