Banner Image: VALLEY
FORM Dance Projects based in Parramatta have announced shows for 2018. FORM had a runaway success this year with CHAMPIONS (https://sydneyartsguide.com.au/form-dance-projects-presents-champions-carriageworks/)
The company is heading into the new year with a program curated by Miranda Wheen and new Program Manager, Agnès Michelet. Some of the highlights include.
VALLEY (Omer Backley-Astrachan) Young Israeli choreographer Omer Backley-Astrachan’s new work VALLEY launches the 2018 Dance Bites season after premiering at the 2017 Summer Dance Festival in Tel Aviv. First created as a solo in 2016 Valley has developed into an ensemble work featuring performers Omer and his Australian wife, Sharon Backley-Astrachan, Allie Graham and Matthew Mizyed. Valley is set on a frozen and desolate Arctic island where a small society of four co-exist. Solitude, vulnerability and sensuality are touchingly drawn through Omer’s choreography in this exquisite Sisyphean cycle. “The embodiment of geographical collapse and rebirth through the human body is extraordinarily effective.” (Ana Harmon, 2017) Riverside Theatres, Parramatta 15-17 Feb 2018
ABOVE GROUND (featuring Legs on The Wall and Kathryn Puie & Lux Eterna) A Double Bill of dance exploring the subtleties of above ground movement with apparatus. CAT’S CRADLE In Cat’s Cradle, Australia’s celebrated physical theatre company Legs On The Wall, explores the depths of what is private and what is public. How do we navigate between what we desire to do and what we are expected to act like? This work delves into the intimacy between a couple who crave more from their newfound relationship. Cat’s Cradle hums with an underlying tension between the performers, sometimes playful sometimes painful. The performers expertly utilise simple but commanding apparatus that looms over the space like a curtain of tentacles, revealing the underbelly of the story. Cat’s Cradle tantalises us, as it coerces us to look at our own desires where reality and fantasy collide. But will any of us admit to it? “Risky, gutsy and sometimes wild” (The Sun Herald) Mature adult themes. Recommended age 16 plus. SOFT PROSTHETICS AND METAL GODS What is prosthetic to what? How repressed is the body? Existing in a highly ocularcentric culture have we lost touch with the haptic realm… As a species dependent on external devices/prosthetics to enhance, extend and expand our human experience, is it possible to breathe life and extend consciousness into these inanimate objects? Who is moving what, and what is moving who? Kathryn Puie brings her extraordinary versatile physicality to the stage in a new variation of her career-long foray into dance for stilts in collaboration with visual artist, Lux Eterna. “There’s an ambiguity in prosthesis, underpinned by labile space between replacement, augmentation and generation. Between, recovery,substitution and experimentation” (The Prosthetic Cosmos E. Grosz) Riverside Theatres, Parramatta 21-23 June 2018
PLENTY SERIOUS TALK TALK plenty serious TALK TALK is a new dance theatre work exploring the consultative process involved in indigenous art making. Vicki Van Hout (Director, Stolen, National Theatre of Parramatta) lays it bare for the audience to appreciate the full complexity of negotiating culture across disciplines, genres and eras. plenty serious TALK TALK is intended to ignite dialogue, placing the artist in provocative situations, sometimes seemingly nonsensical. Through stomping country in thongs on concrete and expressing the complexity of kinship protocols through the machinations of rugby league competitions, to conducting spirit dances in busy urban thoroughfares. Choreographer Vicki Van Hout is recognised for creating humorous narratives blended with an idiosyncratic indigenous movement language that celebrates and illuminates the sophistication of the world’s oldest living culture. Riverside Theatres, Parramatta 30 August-1 September 2018
For more information about FORM Dance Projects visit :