Street Dance Commissions
Sammy the Free
Photo by JNY Photography
About Street Dance Commissions
Dancehouse is thrilled to announce the three brilliant street dance commissions celebrating some of the innovative and exceptional talent of street-born artists in Australia.
Commissions include collaborations with: Raygun & Sammy the Free with The Mattmosphere; Efren Pamilacan & Pataphysics; and MaggZ & Aarti Jadu. Their projects traverse dance styles such as Breaking and Waacking, with the promise to create sonic and conceptual worlds celebrating diasporic identities, exploding gender binaries, and finding multilingual transmedia expressions.
Selected from a national call out by Sammie D, Jonathan Homsey and Ooshcon, the commissions called for collaborations between dance artists and musicians/ composers in acknowledgement that
Dancehouse’s street dance commissions provide producing support, cash, space, and a pathway to presentation from 2024. The commissions are part of Dancehouse’s New Voices program supported by the Sidney Myer Fund.
2023 Supported Projects
JUST B
Raygun & Sammy the Free
‘Breaking’ will be an Olympic event for the first time at the Paris 2024 Summer Games. The rigid structures imposed by the IOC and World DanceSport Federation means that these events reduce an inclusive, social and cultural practice to demonstrations of individual displays of athleticism. Participants are categorised into the false dichotomy of ‘Bboy’ or ‘Bgirl’, which re-situates their expression into a gender binary that the culture and community surrounding ‘Breaking’ has been working to free itself from.
In JUST B, Raygun and Sammy the Free, with sound composition from The Mattmosphere, work through the impacts of the ‘Olympic-isation’ of breaking upon the community and form. JUST B will traverse beyond enforced binaries and rubrics to lay bare breaking’s capacity for rich, expansive expression.
NEGENTROPIC
Efren Pamilacan & Pataphysics
Slide into a metaphysical plane, 12,000 years ago, at a time when South and South East Asia are geologically connected. Conjuring images of jamming nomads in constant spectral migration, Negentropic blends ancient sounds with the experimental, atmospheric and hip hop movement.
An immersive world of light, sonic, and materials influenced by their Sri Lankan and Filipino roots, Pamilacan and Pataphysics attempt to manifest new cycles and cultures liberated from Westernised conceptions of time, history, chord and shape.
SOUND ꝏ
MaggZ & Aarti Jadu
Sound ꝏ explores the intersection of bilingual (Kunming dialect and English) experimental sound, waacking and motion capture, CGI (computer-generated images) and 3D animation. MaggZ is curious to unpack the complexity of linguistic colonialism with bodily Sino-diasporic experiences in the form of waacking in the digital and transmedia landscape. By dissecting and deconstructing languages phonetically, MaggZ explores the notion of equity and diversity by recontextualising languages in virtual spaces in conjunction with intentional and / or intuitive bodily experiences.
Sound ꝏ extends curiosity to the future, working with technology to facilitate multi-lingual inputs and to generate novel yet-to-be-discovered lingual outputs to normalise and celebrate multi-lingual sino-diaspora experiences.
Street Dance Commissions are an initiative of Dancehouse made possible with support from the Sidney Myer Fund.