That familiar twist and turn of the road, pitted with holes and crumbling bitumen – I’d look up more at the arcing trees if the twists and turns and the potholes in the road didn’t keep my eyes wide, and darting about – Callan Park.

Callan Park. Previously a meeting site for the Eora Nation, looking over the harbour, now houses so many people, so much potential so many pursuits. Usually I find myself lost on this greenspace’n’ gravel headed to The NSW Writers Centre, or wandering into sandstone buildings with red wine and stained shoes looking at graduate art from Sydney College of the Arts, previously I had been helping a Canadian punk band find their way to The Laneway Festival. On this occasion, for Inner Garden, I was anticipating the new work by Bodyweather practitioner, aesthetic adventurer and performance maker Tess De Quincey. Read more

It is rare that I’ll venture from the word-heavy comfort of my true love (text-based theatre) and meander into the muscular flesh-fest of contemporary dance… but I do from time to time. This special occasion is a triptych presented by Sydney Dance Company in their 45th Anniversary Year – two new works and a remounted work from yesteryear.

Not practiced in the language of (nor the world of) dance, I feel fairly limited in my ability to articulate the specific thoughts and experience of watching phrase upon phrase of movement. I watch trying to form a sense of how to articulate a moment or an image – and so watching becomes in part an exercise in writerly craft -a previous example of trying to write about dance (Specifically a SDC show) can be found here: https://classic.augustasupple.com/2012/03/2-one-another-sydney-dance-company/ . To build my dance articulation muscle I’ll continue to exercise because I am not yet sophisticated in my viewing, nor in my language in responding or reviewing dance.

Lucky the Sydney Dance Company is so robust in it’s history and vision, that the likes of a reader and writer like myself could not possibly dint their reputation as I fumble about in the top drawer of my language skills to find something coherent to say. It’s taken me too long to pluck the courage up to say something… but now at least I have.
Just in time for the show to move on from Sydney to a bright horizon. Read more