Presented as a part of Dance (Lens) Mini 2026.

IN FOCUS: Tender Bodies, Rigorous Work: Australian Dance in Documentary Film

6pm, Friday 4 December | Sylvia Staehli Theatre

In Conversation: Siobhan Murphy with Angus Kemp, Pippa Samaya

What does a documentary camera see when it watches dancers at work? 

Siobhan Murphy’s IN FOCUS opens with Australian dance documentaries from the 1980s and 1990s and then explores three recent long-form documentaries that follow Australian companies: Angus Kemp’s I’m in a Forest (Lucy Guerin), and the Samaya Wives’ Wide Horizons (Dancenorth). 

Beyond the choreography itself, these films show the extraordinary tenderness and finely tuned somatic attention with which dancers approach the world and their work. Unlike many films about artists, which hinge on the individualism of the maker, these films show dancers and dance companies as ecosystems of reciprocal exchange, as meeting points between self and other, and between self and world. 

>> Followed by SCRATCH NIGHT hosted by Cobie Orger