SEASONS

Performance Review X Dancehouse

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Across 2024, Performance Review and Dancehouse co-commissioned and published critical responses to the Dancehouse program, for the purpose of celebrating and critically engaging with new works of contemporary dance.

Dancehouse and Performance Review are thrilled to present these six offerings, which feature extending reflections on this year’s Season 1 and Season 2 programs.

Wet Hard Long

by Elyse Goldfinch

“The defiance inherent in this dance feels like a warning. Cautioning audiences against a patriarchal vision of the female body, resisting a world where women and those who are ‘othered’ continue to be reduced to their parts. Large creates a world that embraces the masochistic pleasure of fantasy while celebrating the strength of female endurance. In doing so, this work troubles normative assumptions about gender identity and sexual difference…or indifference.”

Ānanda: Dance of Joy

by Hamish McIntosh

“As he dances, Gurusamy’s Achilles tendons reach into elastic infinity and with every bound I imagine their growing strain. I find myself waiting for an explosion of flesh and golden bells, but each deep flex of the ankle is met with ease. His mercurial face is alive with movement: eyes flirting and flickering as his lips purse and peck.”

Steeze-Aversary: Breaking Battle

by Sofia Sid Akhmed

“From the outset, it became apparent that this was not like any other dance event in Melbourne, but a rare opportunity to pull back the curtain on a particular dance community.”

Dream Cellscapes and Alter Edith

by Anador Walsh

“I cannot emphasise enough the importance of writing about dance. Amongst the many causes of the crisis presently facing dance in this city (which includes economic recession and risk aversion), dance’s ephemerality seems to me to be hindering its support. There seems to be some kind of psychological block—vis-à-vis how can you support what you cannot see and what does not endure—dissuading funding bodies from offering this medium the support it so desperately needs. It is my and Dancehouse’s hope, that through these writing commissions, we can provide this ephemeral and crucial medium with critical coverage and a mode of enduring documentation, whilst at the same time building dance literacy in a new generation of arts writers.”

On echoes, good dancing and earworms

by Isabella Hone-Saunders

“Though disparate works, with different aims, a commonality between Flesh Vessel and Echo is their relationship to anonymity (Thomas considered this a humorous tie between the works too). At times both look to simultaneously focus on the body and to disembody, to distort the relationality of the owner of the performing body and its viewer. They, the dancers, each work to obscure their bodies, or their identities, while focusing on one part of their body, or one particular intricacy of one movement.”